Paddy Woodworth- The Spanish-Basque Peace Process: How to Get Things Wrong

© 2007 World Policy Institute 1

The Basque terrorist group ETA has oftensought to imitate the Irish RepublicanArmy (IRA) in recent years, both in its pur-suit of a peace process, and in the militarytactics it has used parallel to its politicalinitiatives. The Madrid airport bombingthat vividly ruptured the group’s nine-month ceasefire on December 30, 2006, wasalmost certainly modeled on the IRA’s Feb-ruary 1996 Canary Wharf attack in London,where, with a massive explosion, Irish re-publicans dramatically ended an 18-month“cessation of hostilities” with the British af-ter peace talks in Northern Ireland faltered.

The Canary Wharf bomb raises trou-bling issues for democrats, because it sug-gests that, in certain circumstances, violencecan be an effective political weapon in ademocracy. The IRA’s renewed campaign in1996, which focused on causing maximumdamage to British business interests, ar-guably accelerated progress towards prisonerreleases and the historic Belfast peace agree-ment in 1998. That, at least, is the opinionof such well-placed observers as the formerIrish prime minister Albert Reynolds, a keyfigure in the Irish peace process, thoughthey would also stress that this progress wascontingent on a new and permanent IRA

ceasefire in July 1997.ETA , which stands for Euskadi Ta

Askatasuna (Basque Homeland and Free-dom) would dearly love to exercise similarleverage on the Spanish government. But allindications are that they have neither themilitary capacity to sustain a major bomb-ing campaign, nor do they enjoy the kind of

political conjuncture that favored the IRA’soverall strategy in the 1990s. There is, how-ever, one further macabre similarity betweenthe two bombing attacks, a similarity thathas done nothing to help ETA’s cause. It isfairly clear both bombings were aimed atcreating maximum economic damage, with-out causing any casualties. But there weretwo unintended civilian victims of the hugeexplosion in the Barajas airport carpark. Thedead were Latin American immigrants seek-ing a better life in Europe. There were alsotwo unintended victims of the CanaryWharf bombing, one of them an immigrantfrom Bangladesh. The tragic consequencesof wielding the blunt weapon of terror couldhardly be more starkly illustrated.

The IRA’s supporters were willing towrite off the Canary Wharf deaths as collat-eral damage and the organization was ableto continue hitting key economic targets of-ten enough and hard enough to convince theBritish establishment that a peace processwith major concessions was in its own inter-ests. In contrast, many of ETA’s demoralizedpolitical supporters are no longer comfort-able with civilian casualties under any cir-cumstances; meanwhile, the group draws ona much smaller group of armed activiststhan the IRA did, and has been brought closeto collapse by a decade of effective policing.

A sustained and focused “economic”bombing campaign on the Irish republicanmodel is beyond its capabilities. Tacticallyspeaking, ETA needed to get the Barajasbombing absolutely right—massive dam-age, no deaths—and it failed. The disarray

Paddy Woodworth is the author of Dirty War, Clean Hands: ETA, the GAL and Spanish Democracy (Yale UniversityPress, 2002) and of The Basque Country, forthcoming from Signal and Oxford University Press.

The Spanish-Basque Peace ProcessHow to Get Things WrongPaddy Woodworth

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in the Basque camp is underscored by subse-quent statements from both its military andpolitical wings which insist that, despite thebombing, the ceasefire is somehow still inplace.

Spain and Ireland: The DifferencesIt is the political circumstances, however,that most clearly differentiate these twostruggles for, as their protagonists see it, theindependence of small nations. The Londongovernment was able to state, in the 1993Downing Street Declaration, that it had “noselfish, strategic, or economic interest” inNorthern Ireland. The British no longerconsidered a few relatively impoverished andvery troublesome counties on another islanda contributor to their wellbeing or a corepart of their identity.

The Basque Country, on the other hand,is one of Spain’s most powerful economicdynamos. And many Spaniards—includinga substantial minority of Basques—regardthe region as an integral part of Spain’s an-cient heartland. Thus, the big Spanish con-servative party, the Partido Popular (PP),currently in opposition, is fiercely opposedto any peace process with ETA. Even Spanishcitizens who do not share the PP’s stridentnationalism fear that, if ETA’s claim to self-determination were conceded, fissiparoustendencies could balkanise Spain. In sharpcontrast, the Irish process was launched by aConservative Party prime minister, JohnMajor, and has enjoyed consistent cross-par-ty support in the House of Commons, andfrom the British public, ever since.

The current Basque peace process beganwhen the Spanish center-left prime minister,José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, made an un-precedented offer of talks with ETA (condi-tional on a complete end to violence) in May2005. Zapatero had come to power mostunexpectedly 14 months earlier, winning anelection that fell three days after Islamistsstruck the Spanish capital, killing 198 traincommuters in multiple synchronized bomb-ings, the biggest terrorist attack in recent

western European history. The Partido Pop-ular, then in government and poised tocomfortably return to office according to allopinion polls, insisted on blaming ETA forthe bombings.

But there was overwhelming evidence,already in the public domain, that the at-tacks were the work of an al Qaeda-linkedMoroccan group, hostile to the PP leadershipfor its enthusiastic support for the Iraq war.On this front, the PP had been massively outof step with Spanish public opinion. Theelectorate evidently judged, with good rea-son, that the PP was lying about ETA’s in-volvement, in the hope of deflecting freshattention from the Iraq issue. The conserva-tives were found nakedly guilty of playingpolitics with a terrorist massacre, and thecenter ground shifted against them and pro-pelled the inexperienced Zapatero and hisSpanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) intogovernment.

Over the next few months, senior fig-ures in ETA, and in its political wing, Bata-suna, radically reassessed their traditionalpositions in the new political environmentcreated by the Madrid bombings. On theone hand, the Islamists’ willingness to in-flict massive civilian casualties made ETA’ssmall-scale attacks, which generally soughtto avoid killing civilians altogether, lose agreat deal of their political impact. On theother, Zapatero seemed like an imaginativeand flexible politician, who might be happyto negotiate a new dispensation for theBasque Country in exchange for an end toBasque terrorism.

But no Spanish government—not evenZapatero’s socialists—would negotiate con-stitutional changes with ETA, which hadhitherto insisted on its right to participatedirectly in political negotiations. In a land-mark declaration in San Sebastián’s Anoetastadium in November 2004, the Batasunaleader, Arnaldo Otegi, set out a new divi-sion of labor: under a ceasefire, Batasuna, to-gether with all the other Basque parties,would negotiate political issues with Madrid


and accept the normal rules of democracy.ETA, meanwhile, would limit its participa-tion to a separate strand of talks on “techni-cal” matters, understood to mean prisonerrelease, return of exiles, and disposal ofweapons.

Surrendering to Terror,Breaking Up Spain?Zapatero’s offer to talk to ETA was a responseto this new ETA/Batasuna strategy. But helacked bipartisan support. The PP leadershiphad never accepted its 2004 electoral defeat,and concocted a bizarre conspiracy theory inwhich ETA, the PSOE, and even elements ofthe Spanish security forces were supposed tohave colluded with the Islamists in theMadrid bombings. The conservatives sawZapatero’s peace initiative as an opportuni-ty to accuse the PSOE of being soft on ETA

and undermining the sacred unity of theSpanish nation. The PP leader, Mariano Ra-joy, denounced the prime minister’s offer inmost intemperate language as a surrender toterrorism and a “betrayal of the dead.” Zap-atero weathered that storm and, initially,the Spanish public gave him the benefit ofthe doubt. But the foundations of a peaceprocess had not been well prepared, and thegovernment soon realized that the Basqueradicals were either deeply divided on thedesirability of peace, or had somehow failedto understand that time was not on theirside in this situation.

Ominously, ETA took 10 months to re-spond with a ceasefire, and now, in every-one’s eyes except its own, it has violatedthat ceasefire only nine months later withthe Barajas airport bombing. Zapatero findshimself increasingly isolated on this front,and there are many signs of unease with hisBasque policy within his own Socialist Par-ty. Since the March 2004 elections, therehas always been a big question mark as towhether Zapatero is a visionary or just avery lucky and rather callow politician. Thelatter judgment seems increasingly plausi-ble, as it becomes apparent that he ap-proached the peace process without any clear

timetable of his own and, instead of draw-ing on the experience of experts with previ-ous contacts with ETA, set about reinventingthe wheel with a neophyte team of like-minded politicians and public servants.

It is now clear that no pillar of thispeace process was on firm ground. It seemsquite extraordinary that ETA and Batasunadid not appreciate the delicacy and fragilityof Zapatero’s position: if they failed to seizethis opportunity quickly, it could recede foryears, and quite possibly forever. This bringsinto sharp contrast ETA’s position and that ofSinn Féin and the IRA in the 1990s. Supportfor Sinn Féin, the political wing of the IRA,has grown with every year of the Irish peaceprocess, and was not dented even duringthose dark 18 months when the Irish terror-ists renewed their “war on Britain” in1996–7.

But ETA’s political front, Batasuna, sawits share of the vote in Basque electionsplummet from 19 percent to 9 percent afterthe Basque terrorists ended a previous (andvery popular) 1998–9 ceasefire. While therecent ceasefire revived Batasuna’s populari-ty, the December 2006 bombing has severe-ly damaged the group’s credibility. TheMadrid airport attack appears to have comeas a complete surprise to the Batasunaleader, Arnaldo Otegi. He was cloistered ina Basque farmhouse with a PSOE interlocutordiscussing further peace moves when thebomb went off. The evident disjuncture be-tween the ETA and Batasuna leadership alsocontrasts with the perfect synchronicity ofthe IRA and Sinn Féin, and is a major prob-lem for the Basque peace process.

Half Alive or Half Dead?But can we speak of a Basque peace processat all, after the December bombing? It de-pends who you listen to. ETA and Batasunainsist that the process somehow remains in-tact. Complicating matters, the ruling PSOE

first declared that the bombing meant thepeace process was “broken,” but was am-biguous in the weeks that followed, using

The Spanish-Basque Peace Process 3


terms like “suspended.” ETA has not carriedout another attack, by the time of writing,and it seems likely that some definitivestatement of an end to violence by ETA couldstill resuscitate the process. What remainsunclear is the balance of power betweenthose ETA leaders who genuinely want tohang up their guns for good, and those whosee the ceasefire as a short-term tactic.Whether the Basque peace process is half-alive or half-dead, it is unquestionably indeep crisis, and this was evident for monthsbefore the bombing.

I attended a conference in Bilbao in No-vember 2006 with the optimistic title of“Conditions for Making the Peace ProcessIrreversible.” It was organised by the SabinoArana Foundation, a think tank associatedwith the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV),the democratic party that has dominated thepowerful Basque autonomous governmentsfor the last 25 years, and which has becomeincreasingly inclined towards Basque inde-pendence over the last decade. Despite theupbeat theme, the event was permeated bypessimism.

During the very week of the conference,French police confirmed that ETA memberswere the only suspects for the theft of 300pistols from a factory in France on October23, 2006.. This heist was hardly the actionof an organization not contemplating a re-turn to violence. Likewise, weapons hadbeen brandished publicly and aggressively at a demonstration on Mount Aritxulegi amonth earlier.. There were also reports thatETA had launched a new campaign of extor-tion against Basque business people, de-manding payment of a “revolutionary tax.”Sources close to ETA could not confirm theleadership’s responsibility for these opera-tions, nor could they explain or defendthem. Fears grew, therefore, that a new generation might be using the ceasefire to retrench, rearm, and retrain for a fresh offensive, as had happened in 1998–9, regardless of the intentions of ETA’s seniornegotiators.

What’s more, it had become patentlyclear in the preceding months that ETA

was dictating an increasingly unrealistic political agenda to Batasuna. In particular, a harder Batasuna line was emerging on thethorny issue of Navarre, a province claimedby Basque nationalists, but where pro-Spanish parties have a comfortable majority.Meanwhile, ETA seemed curiously uninter-ested in pushing the “technical” issues—prisoner release, disarmament, etc.— whereit might legitimately have expected somerapid progress. Instead, the group insistedthat it preferred to discuss issues of ideolog-ical substance. All of this contradicted Ote-gi’s Anoeta declaration, which had acceptedthat political matters should be decided bypolitical parties.

The other pillars of the peace processwere also decidedly unstable. From thepoint of view of Batasuna, and indeed of theBasque nationalist world in general, the ag-gressive approach of the Spanish judiciaryduring the ceasefire period seemed to runcounter to any spirit of détente. The legalcontext in Spain is very different to that ofNorthern Ireland, where Sinn Féin, thoughclearly the political wing of the IRA, was al-ways allowed to operate openly and partici-pate in elections. In 2002 and 2003, whilethe Partido Popular was still in power, andwith the full support of the Socialist Party,the Spanish parliament and judiciary tookthe radical step of declaring Batasuna ille-gal, unless the party formally condemnedETA’s acts of violence, which it refused to do.

During this period, ETA was involved in a particularly vicious terrorist campaign,picking off soft targets like journalists, localpoliticians, and judges, especially but notonly in the Basque Country. Meanwhile, its youthful supporters made life hell forBasques critical of ETA and Basque national-ism, through a form of political vandalismand intimidation known as kale borroka,street struggle, a sort of imitation intifada.

The February 2003 ban on Batasuna had disenfranchised a significant portion of



the Basque electorate, though supporters of the ban pointed out that ETA’s disenfran-chisement of PP and PSOE local councillors—with a bullet to the back of the head—called for a very firm response. Yet a democ-racy surely has to take some account of agroup that can attract up to one in fiveBasque voters; instead the ban created akind of Alice in Wonderland atmosphere in Basque politics. Many small and medi-um-sized towns, where Batasuna had governed efficiently for decades, were handed over to councils representing a minority of voters. Worse, the ban was implemented in a confusing manner, andOtegi and his colleagues jumped throughevery available loophole, making an ass ofthe law.

Though some Batasuna offices wereclosed, new ones opened, and the party,which remains illegal today, still gives public press conferences. Some of its at-tempts to put forward candidates under alternative labels were ruled illegal by Spanish judges but, in 2004, a surrogategroup, the Communist Party of the BasqueLands, actually improved Batasuna’s repre-sentation in the Basque parliament fromseven to nine seats (out of 75). Yet chargesof complicity with terrorism, carrying heavysentences, were pursued against several lev-els of Batasuna leadership, including Otegi.And senior members of the PNV (the BasqueNationalist Party), including the first min-ister, Juan José Ibarretxe, faces charges forcontinuing to maintain relations with thebanned party.

At a time when ETA had declared a “permanent” ceasefire—and indeed had not killed anyone for the preceding threeyears—one might have expected the judici-ary to relax its stance, and for parliament tomove swiftly to bring Batasuna back into legitimate politics. On the contrary, old cases were pursued with more zeal than ever,and new ones were initiated. Most absurdly,the PP even brought charges against mem-bers of the PSOE for engaging in talks with

Batasuna as part of the peace process initi-ated with the blessing of parliament.

The Assassin’s Hunger StrikeMost saliently, the courts played a highlypoliticized game with the case of Iñaki deJuana Chaos. De Juana is one of ETA’s mostbloody assassins, convicted in 1987 for hisrole in 25 killings, for which he has shownno remorse whatsoever. Nevertheless, in2005, he had served his full sentence andwas due for release. On the dubious basis oftwo articles he had written from prison forthe radical Basque press, Spanish judges—right in the middle of the ceasefire—foundcause to keep him locked up for a furthertwelve years, later reduced to three by theSupreme Court.

De Juana went on hunger strike. Theprospect of his death was clearly a majorthreat to the peace process. Yet the govern-ment prevaricated for months (while de Jua-na was force-fed) and only implementedclemency measures—a transfer to a Basquehospital, followed by house arrest—as deathseemed imminent, two months after the air-port bombings. But, by this stage, de Juanahad become a symbol of the evil of terrorismin the Spanish public mind. The PP sensedan issue which could unseat Zapatero, andorganized mass demonstrations in March2006, that mobilized hundreds of thousandsof supporters.

Zapatero’s mishandling of the peaceprocess, which now looks close to terminal,long predates this denouement. From theoutset of the ceasefire, the approach fromMadrid appeared hardly more consistentthan Batasuna’s. Having incurred the PP’swrath by offering talks in the first place, the prime minister appeared determined toshow that his government was even tougherthan the PP had been during ETA’s previousceasefire in 1998–9.

During that period, the conservativeprime minister, José María Aznar, relaxedtension by moving ETA prisoners closer totheir families to jails in the Basque Country.



(ETA prisoners are generally dispersed toprisons far from their homeland, a policywhich is regarded as abusive and punitive totheir families by human rights groups likeAmnesty International. Zapatero refused torelocate a single prisoner, and in yielding inthe sole case of de Juana early last March, hesimply looked weak after having tried to ap-pear strong.

Since the PP’s opposition to the peaceprocess had been unrelenting and unquali-fied from the outset, he should have hadnothing to lose by, entirely on his own ini-tiative, moving the prisoners closer to homeshortly after the ceasefire began and longbefore the de Juana hunger strike put himunder extreme pressure. Had he preemptive-ly made this goodwill gesture it would havehad a positive impact on ETA supporters, formany of whom the prisoners issue is of ut-most concern. This, in turn, would have im-pelled the Batasuna leadership to negotiatemore actively with the government, loosen-ing it, at least to a degree, from the tutelageof ETA.

Meanwhile, throughout this period, theBasque government, dominated by the PNV

and supposedly deeply committed to thepeace process, showed little ability to movethe process forward. At the November 2006conference in Bilbao, First Minister JuanJosé Ibarretxe stated that he intended tomobilize Basque public opinion, “village byvillage,” in favor of peace, through a seriesof rallies over the coming few months. Butone had to ask why this initiative—whichnever gathered momentum anyway—hadnot been launched many months ago, andwonder whether it was not too little, toolate, to revive the peace process. The BasqueNationalist’s inertia contrasts starkly withthe energetic commitment exercised againstthe process by the PP: again and again, theconservatives have mobilized hundreds ofthousands of demonstrators who share theparty’s view that the peace process is a “sur-render to terrorism.” Where are the citizens,one may ask, in the Basque Country and

elsewhere, who see the process as the bestand most democratic method of resolving adeeply rooted conflict?

The Eight-Point PlanIn this depressing context, it is worth re-flecting on some of the contributions madeto the November conference by internation-al experts. Roelf Meyer, who played an historic role in negotiating South Africa’stransition to democracy as the apartheidregime’s interlocutor with the African National Congress, listed eight points to-ward a successful peace process.

Among them, he stressed that theBasque-Spanish process operates only with-in a “very specific window of opportunity.”This was a sobering perspective. If this win-dow is allowed to close, Meyer remarked, itmay not reopen within our lifetime. Yet ETA

and Batasuna were unpardonably compla-cent in delaying their ceasefire response toZapatero’s offer of talks for 10 months. Theonly possible excuse was that long and diffi-cult internal discussions were necessary toensure a united response. But, as the Madridairport bombing so dramatically illustrated,reports of renewed divisions within themovement suggested that this unity was atbest superficial, and achieving it temporari-ly did not justify the delay.

A point raised at the conference by Father Matteo Zuppi, a Catholic peace ac-tivist from the Community of Sant’ Edigio,who was instrumental in the peace accordbetween Frelimo and Renamo in Mozam-bique, is relevant here. A peace process, hesaid, requires at least two rhythms. On theone hand, it is necessary to act fast and seizeopportunities. On the other, it is necessaryto allow a much slower rhythm to allow certain difficult matters to be digested.Achieving the right balance between theserhythms is a key to success, and that balancewill differ in each specific case. The Basquesituation now requires, it seems, a tilting ofthat balance in the direction of fast, decisiveaction if it is to stand any chance of success.



This need for urgency is largely due to the Partido Popular’s vitriolic insistence(completely unjustified, in my view) thatthis window of opportunity should neverhave been opened in the first place, and itsdetermination to slam it shut when (and if)the party returns to power. This lack of bi-partisanship between the big Spanish partiesputs an almost unbearable strain on theprocess. The PP strategy virtually dictatesthat any settlement must be copper-fastenedbefore the next Spanish general election, duein March 2008, or at least before the nextelection that the conservatives are likely towin. Even should a resolution be reachedbefore the conservatives form another gov-ernment, a risk remains that they might,once in power, tear it up in any case.

It is clear that the PP’s strategy of im-placable and inflexible opposition makes applying almost any of Meyer’s points to the Basque process extraordinarily difficult,either directly or indirectly. How can inclu-sive conditions be created for all parties toparticipate, if one political party insists onexcluding itself? How can one ensure thatall parties are committed to the process ingood faith, or promote joint ownership ofthe negotiations, when one major player has an absolutely negative attitude towardsany peace process whatsoever? Likewise,what hope is there of ensuring a sustain-able outcome, or even a commitment to implement agreed matters, in the hostilecontext created by Mariano Rajoy and hisideologues?

Perhaps, however, Meyer’s sixth point—that the process must offer a “win-win” sce-nario to all participants—offers a potentialsolution to this conundrum, at least in prin-ciple. Is there some way, even today, inwhich the PP could be persuaded to see ad-vantages in changing its position? How canthe other parties help the conservatives tosee that they also stand to gain from a last-ing and just peace in Basque Country? It iscertainly difficult, but not impossible, to seehow this might be achieved.

For a start, many rank-and-file BasquePP members and local councillors are pleasedthat the immediate threat of violence to-wards them has receded dramatically in re-cent years, and especially since the Marchceasefire. How can they be gently encour-aged to raise their voices in support of aprocess which has already eased daily ten-sions? Could they, for example, be givenguarantees by Batasuna, endorsed by theother parties, that “annexation” of Navarre,against the will of its citizens, is not on theagenda?

The Difficult Issue of NavarreThe fate of Navarre is a difficult issue forBasque radical nationalists, who have alwaysinsisted that not only Navarre, but threesmall Basque provinces currently adminis-tered by France, must all form part of a final settlement. But recognition thatNavarrans themselves have a right to self-determination must come at some stage in the process, and a visionary Batasunaleadership might see it advantageous tomake that clear sooner rather than later. By way of example, Arnaldo Otegi and his colleagues must know that it was alsovery difficult for the IRA and Sinn Féin toaccept that there could be no change in the status of Northern Ireland without theconsent of a majority within its borders.

But the nationalists Gerry Adams andMartin McGuinness agreed to this condition. They thus jettisoned a centralprinciple of the Republican Movement,which stated that only a majority on thewhole of Ireland had a legitimate right todetermine the island’s future. (Adams andMcGuinness would not accept this analysis,but it is what they did). A key element inthe Northern Irish peace process has beenthis new—and very agreeably surprising—ideological flexibility on the part of the once dogmatic and rigid IRA leadership. LastMarch, Otegi did indeed begin to indicatethat Batasuna would be more flexible thanpreviously on the Navarre issue, but if the



Basque radicals really do want to imitate theIrish peace process they are showing them-selves to be very slow learners.

Assuming, for the moment, the goodfaith of all parties, there would seem to beno more urgent task in the peace processthan assisting the PP in revising its strategyor moderating its approach. This should notmean, however, that the process should be-come the PP’s prisoner. If the process is tomove forward at all, the other actors—Zapatero and Otegi, principally—must feelfree to take initiatives at which the presentPP leadership will kick and scream.

How then to proceed? Clearly, the PSOE

must make the first move. But the SocialistParty has also been guilty of insensitivity,tending to treat Basque nationalism as afolkloric sentiment rather than a deeply feltnational identity. Zapatero should be com-mended for launching a peace process ofwhich many in his own party are highly sus-picious, and in the face of the incendiary re-vival of the PP’s Spanish nationalist rhetoric.What has been disturbing throughout, how-ever, is Zapatero’s apparent failure to followthrough, which risks allowing the peaceprocess to stagnate.

There may now be a temptation in thesocialist camp to stonewall completely, afterETA’s outrageous attack on the Madrid air-port and a statement that followed in earlyApril which contained threats of further violence. The short-term consequences ofstone-walling could seem quite attractive tothe governing party. Consider this scenario:Madrid makes no further concessions, justi-fying this stance in light of continued kaleborroka and armed activity by ETA. Thismight drive ETA back to a full-scale terroristcampaign, but Batasuna would then face acollapse in support, as most of its votershave no stomach for further violence. Bata-suna and ETA would become increasinglymarginalized, as did the German and Italianfar left terrorists of the 1970s and 1980s.Zapatero could then call the PP’s bluff, andtell the Spanish electorate that he had been

more generous than the PP in launching the peace process, and yet firmer even thanAznar had been during the 1998–9 truce.

He would probably retain power inSpain for another two elections. In theBasque Country, he could afford to watchthe remains of ETA bleed itself into slowoblivion, at the cost of a level of violencethat the Spanish State could quite easily absorb.

Such a scenario, however, would be anightmare for the Basque Country, furtherpoisoning the roots of civil society andpeaceful co-existence among Basques ofsharply differing political loyalties. A mar-ginalized ETA might prove to be even morelethal, at least in the short-term, than earliergenerations of terrorists. Worst of all, a his-toric opportunity to resolve the question ofthe relationship of the Basques with theSpanish state might be lost for decades. It isvital that Zapatero takes full ownership ofthe process, retakes the initiative, and showsthat he is the kind of visionary leader whocan really make a difference.

Who, Finally, Is Responsible? In the last analysis, however, the greatest responsibility lies with ETA and Batasuna.As Father Zuppi warned at the Novemberconference in Bilbao, ceasefires can be likeantibiotics, losing their power every timethey are repeated. There has never been amoment as promising as Zapatero’s recentoffer of talks with Batasuna end a futilestruggle which has wasted the energies andlives of several generations. The use of vio-lence under democratic conditions has weak-ened the Basque case for self-determination,not strengthened it. And, needless to say,but worth saying every time, it has causeduntold suffering to the victims and theirfamilies.

Like Sinn Féin and the IRA, Batasunasold the ceasefire to its supporters as a “victory.” Indeed, both ETA and Batasunaseem in danger of believing their own propaganda. The best that the radical



Basque movement can—or should—hopefor is the release of its prisoners, and theright to participate, like every other groupof citizens, in the debate about the presentand the future of the place where they live.

Roelf Meyer raised a vital question atthe conference. The key question in dealingwith a political-military movement, he said,is who is in command. For far too long,Batasuna has delegated all its authority toan armed group. It is time for the radicalBasque political leaders to assert their au-thority, once and for all, and tell ETA the waris over. True, members of ETA might defythem, and even threaten them. But withoutthe support of Batasuna and its politicalconstituency, ETA is just a bunch of gunmenand gunwomen, and will fade away when itceases to have the backing of significantnumbers of Basque citizens—the scenarioonce envisaged as a nightmare, with consid-erable clarity by the veteran ETA leader Eu-genio Etxebeste.

Arnaldo Otegi and his colleagues have ahistoric opportunity to walk tall into thelight of Basque civil and political society,and to bring their comrades in ETA out ofthe shadows, if they have the courage tomake that journey. But it is not clear if Ote-gi and his colleagues have the stature tocommand their own movement. For far toolong, Batasuna, and on occasion Basque na-tionalism as a whole, has treated ETA as auniquely privileged actor on the Basquestage. The consequences have been tragic, inthe truest sense of that overused word. Onceand for all, it is time to dump the pistols,

and put politics in charge of the Basque independence movement.

There is a great irony, however, in thefact that, at a moment of chronic logisticaland political weakness, ETA has become theissue that opens a fissure through the wholeof Spanish society, the like of which has notbeen seen since the country’s transition todemocracy from General Francisco Franco’sdictatorship in the late 1970s. If Spain wereto go to a psychiatrist, the country wouldsurely be told that ETA is the “presentingproblem,” and not the underlying source ofits current malaise, which lies in other partsof its political psyche.

In the extraordinarily bitter parliamen-tary debate that followed the release of the ailing assassin, de Juana, the PSOE

spokesperson accused the PP of “desperatelyseeking ETA,” paraphrasing a Madonnamovie with a similar title. This was not an edifying discussion between democrats,but the PSOE accusation contained a grain of truth. The potential disappearance ofBasque terrorism sends Spanish conserva-tives into an irrational hysteria. They seemto need an internal enemy—“Reds and Sep-aratists” in the 1930s, Basque terrorists to-day—in order to mobilize their supportersaround old and dangerous emotive slogansabout the “break-up of Spain,” when ratherthe issue is a democratic process of federal-ization. In calling up the phantoms thatpreceded the 1930s civil war, they are doinga very poor service to Spanish democracy.But that is material for another article.•



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Paddy Woodworth- The Spanish-Basque Peace Process: How to Get Things Wrong