There the similarities end. While IRA guns have been silent for three years, ETA ended its ceasefire last December. And last week in Zumarraga, in the Basque country, ETA’s terror campaign claimed its 12th victim in eight months, a 29-year-old town councilor shot in the head as he tended his candy store. Thousands of Spaniards protested the latest ETA atrocity, but Spain’s conundrum is that for ETA, unlike the IRA, there are no small steps left. Under Spain’s decentralized system of autonomous regions, the Basques have had for two decades more home rule than Northern Ireland is just now getting: their own parliament, tax-raising powers and state-funded Basque-language schools. As they acquire a taste of autonomy, Irish nationalists know there are many steps to go before they reach the distant dream of reunification of north and south. But ETA’s laundry list of demands is down to one item: full independence from Madrid–now.
The Spanish government has responded with an intransigence of its own. When ETA called its ceasefire, Madrid branded it a “trick truce.” The government argued that ETA, weakened by a string of police successes, was really looking for time to regroup. According to the Interior Ministry, ETA used the ceasefire period to steal eight tons of French explosives (half of which were swiftly recovered). While the British government has been both cajoling and conciliatory, President Jose Maria Aznar–who last week accused ETA of “ethnic cleansing”–has been uncompromising. “The only political negotiation is for [ETA] to accept the rules,” Aznar, who survived an ETA assassination attempt in 1995, told NEWSWEEK in an interview earlier this year.
For all its tough talk, Aznar’s government has been careful not to turn ETA terrorists into martyrs. It has not engaged in the sort of “dirty war” against terror that backfired against the previous, socialist government, avoiding a tit-for-tat war. Madrid believes it has ETA on the ropes–or at least wants to convey that impression. Last week a leaked government-intelligence report asserted that ETA’s latest campaign is a death rattle and cannot be sustained beyond October.
The Basque situation neither commands world attention nor attracts powerful intermediaries the way Northern Ireland does. There’s no President Clinton to promote the peace process since most countries see the Basque struggle as a purely internal Spanish affair. The conflict also does not divide neatly along the fault lines of religion or cultural tradition. Basque families tend to be split on the issue of independence, and the Basque diaspora in America and elsewhere has shown little interest in taking sides. In the case of Northern Ireland, all the political parties in the Republic of Ireland and both nationalist parties in Northern Ireland support to one degree or another the republican goal of a united, independent Ireland.
So is the Basque country forever trapped in a widening gyre of stop-start terror? Not necessarily. Public outrage could be the key to change. Spain may be decentralized but the horrors of its civil war in the 1930s are universally remembered by ordinary Spaniards, including most Basques, who have demonstrated a potent revulsion to ETA terror. As happened again last week, ETA killings routinely send thousands into the streets to protest. When ETA ended its ceasefire, half a million people marched through Madrid. Aznar sees all of this as support for his hard line. But he may not be as intractable as he seems. If ETA lays down its arms, as the IRA has done in Northern Ireland, he told NEWSWEEK in his interview, “Spanish society and the state will know how to be generous.” That’s tantalizing–but vague. Unless both sides in the Basque conflict display a new willingness to compromise, ETA surely will remain on the road to war, not peace.
