The ETA: Spain Fights Europe's Last Active Terrorist Group

The ETA: Spain Fights Europe’s Last Active Terrorist Group William S. Shepard One week after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pen- tagon on 11 September 2001, President George W. Bush marshaled the American people and allies of good will everywhere to a new course through his speech to Congress. In it, he resolutely condemned the attacks and promised sustained retribution. “It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated,” he announced. The world knows that he was speaking of Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network, but shortly thereafter, media commentators posed the ques- tion whether all nations on the list that the United States says sponsor terrorism, including Iraq, Iran, Sudan, and Syria, were potential targets. Others wondered whether all organizations that the United States has officially condemned as terrorist, including Shining Path in Peru and the Basque Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) in Spain and France, were included in the president’s announcement.1 The ETA had again been designated a foreign terrorist organization by the secretary of state on 5 October 2001. One way to move away from the terrorist label is to negotiate. It may be coincidental, but it struck me that on 26 September, just two weeks after the attacks, Palestinian chairman Yasser Arafat sat down for preliminary talks with Israeli foreign minister Shimon Peres. Furthermore, at least one well- known group took quick pains to disassociate itself from America’s potential 1. Sally Buzbee, “Nations Debate Who Terrorists Are,” Associated Press, 23 September 2001. William S. Shepard, an attorney and retired U.S. Foreign Service officer, served as national security adviser to Senator Robert Dole from 1982 to 1983. From 1983 to 1985, he was U.S. consul general in Bordeaux. Shepard: The ETA: Spain Fights Europe’s Last Active Terrorist Group 55 target list, as the Irish Republican Army (IRA) issued a statement on 20 September condemning the 11 September attacks and announcing an inten- sification of its dialogue with the International Commission for the Disarma- ment of Northern Ireland.2 The fact that the IRA’s announcement was fea- tured by the website of the Basque provincial government in northern Spain was revealing, as the ETA is thought to have close links to the IRA and may occasionally follow its tactical lead.3 It did not do so at this time, however. After a period of relative inactivity following 11 September, the ETA hinted in late October that it would stop fighting if its maximum demand was met: that Spain must hold a vote on Basque independence. Prime Minister José Maria Aznar refused, saying that the 11 September attacks on the United States showed that it was “suicide” to deal with terrorists. “They must be defeated,” he said, “because the only aim of killers and fanatics is to kill and exclude those who don’t think as they do.”4 And so the stage was set for the violence to continue. It helps to personalize the developments in Spain. Otherwise one can be caught up in waves of revenge killings and the logic of retribution. Two inci- dents seem to have formed the brackets for the ETA’s current activities. The first was the kidnapping of Segundo Marey in the French Basque region on 4 December 1983 by an extralegal group of paramilitary thugs in the pay of the Spanish government called the Group Antiterroriste de Liberation (GAL). That incident, and the twenty-seven killings that followed, under- lined the brutality of the counterterrorist effort and seemed to illustrate what the ETA was fighting against. The second marker event was the ETA’s 10 July 1997 abduction and murder in the Spanish Basque region of Miguel Angel Blanco, aged twenty-nine, an unpaid town councilman and member of the ruling Popular Party, who was looking forward to his wedding soon. This senseless and premeditated murder of an appealing victim that all Spain could identify with seemed to illustrate for many the cruel and point- less violence of the ETA. Taken together, the two events seem to encapsulate the current impasse. 2. “IRA Se Suma A Las Criticas Por El Atentado Contra EEUU,” at www.euzkadi.com, 20 September 2001. 3. “Letter from Euzkadi: Home Fires, Basque Separatists Are Escalating Their War against Spain,” New Yorker, 12 February 2001, 40, 46. 4. Jerome Socolovsky, “Basque Group Lays Claim to Attacks,” Associated Press, 28 October 2001. 56 Mediterranean Quarterly: Winter 2002 Marey died on 13 August 2001. He was an office furniture salesman who was abducted from his home while watching the Benny Hill program on tele- vision. The mercenaries who abducted him thought they had nabbed an important ETA terrorist. They had not. They kept Marey in an abandoned stone farmhouse for ten days until his release. It is not known whether the chronic bronchitis and bone marrow disease that were exacerbated by the cold and the binding of his limbs contributed to his death at the age of sixty- nine. The eventual trial of those responsible for his kidnapping was a major scandal for the Spanish government of the Felipé Gonzalez era and still raises questions regarding the ultimate responsibility of those who carried on paramilitary operations against suspected Basque terrorists across the French border. Blanco was murdered in cold blood with two shots to the head and left to die on a hillside near San Sebastian after Madrid refused the ETA’s demand to transfer some five hundred ETA members held in Spanish prisons to prisons in the Basque region. In death the young man became a martyr to violence and a national rallying point against ETA terrorism. In Madrid and Barcelona, 2 million people marched in protest, and in Pamplona, where the famous running of the bulls was under way, festivities were suspended. For a while, the murders continued, but after each ETA killing, enormous popular marches throughout Spain memorializing each ETA victim and demanding an end to the violence became a regular feature of Spanish public life, illus- trating the ETA’s lack of mass support, even in the Basque region. How Did Matters Go So Far? The ETA was born in 1952 in response to hostilities directed against the Basque people and region by Francisco Franco both during and after the Spanish Civil War, the most celebrated of which, the bombing of Guernica by Franco’s Nazi ally in 1937, inspired the world-famous painting by Pablo Picasso. The Basque people thought that Franco was trying to root them out as a people and turn their homeland into an industrial wasteland. After the end of the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War, when anti-Basque measures not only were not eased but became an institutionalized response Shepard: The ETA: Spain Fights Europe’s Last Active Terrorist Group 57 to Basque agitation by the Franco regime, the situation in the Basque region became unbearable. Over time political groupings appeared espousing Basque nationalism, and in their wake armed Basque nationalists gradually organized and turned to violence. The initials ETA are an acronym in the Basque language for Basque Homeland and Freedom, or Euskadi Ta Askatasuna. (The group’s first, and similar, name had an acronym of ATA, which was discarded when the founders discovered that in one Basque dialect, ata means duck.)5 The group became the ETA in 1959, and 13 July, the Saint’s Day of Ignatius Loyola, perhaps the most well-known Basque and the founder of the Jesuit order, was selected as the founding date. Since eta is Basque for the con- junction and, any Basque document, however innocent, will be full of refer- ences to the acronym, a public relations windfall for the organization.6 Dur- ing the period before Franco’s death in 1975, Basque pressure for an independent nation became more serious under the ETA’s prodding. In 1968, following recruitment and political radicalization by the ETA and repression by Spanish authorities, particularly the police (Guardia Civil), the first killings took place. At a roadblock, the inevitable happened. “Txabi” Etxebarrieta (all ETA activists have code names), a member of the three- man ETA executive committee, was stopped by a Guardia Civil. Etxebar- rieta killed the man, and was in turn later killed by the authorities. Other ETA killings, and retaliation by the authorities, soon followed. Dur- ing this period, the ETA seemed careful to target figures who had been iden- tified with the Franco regime and the repression of Basques. In the early days, the assassination of such figures gave the ETA an image borrowed from the days of heroic Basque resistance to fascism, even to the point of other governments petitioning the Spanish government not to execute convicted ETA murderers.7 Finally, in 1973, the ETA decided to target the prime minister, Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco. They launched Operation Ogre in an attempt to prevent Carrero Blanco from succeeding Franco and ensuring the 5. Mark Kurlansky, The Basque History of the World (New York: Walker, 1999), 234. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid., 243–4. 58 Mediterranean Quarterly: Winter 2002 continuation of his policies. They killed him on 20 December 1973 with the help of 165 pounds of dynamite planted in the street under his car, which was always parked outside a church in the same spot while the prime minister attended mass each morning. From those beginnings, the violence, arrests, and killings in the Basque region and then beyond have multiplied, assuming their own logic and justification. It is estimated that the ETA has killed more than eight hundred people since 1968.

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