1968 - Mark Kurlansky [149]
So little progress was seen in the stalemated Paris peace talks that on the first day of summer The New York Times offered Americans a sad crumb of hope in the carefully worded headline CLIFFORD DETECTS SLIGHT GAIN IN TALKS ON VIETNAM. On June 23 the Vietnam War edged out the American Revolution as the longest-running war in American history, having lasted 2,376 days since the first support troops were sent in 1961. On June 27 the Viet Cong, attacking nearby American and South Vietnamese forces, either accidentally or intentionally set fire to the nearby fishing village of Sontra along the South China Sea, killing eighty-eight civilians and wounding more than one hundred. In the United States on the same day, David Dellinger, head of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, said that one hundred organizations were working together to organize a series of demonstrations urging an end to the war, all scheduled to take place in Chicago that summer during the Democratic National Convention. On August 8 American forces on nighttime river patrol in the Mekong Delta, attempting to fight the Viet Cong with flamethrowers, killed seventy-two civilians from the village of Cairang, which had been friendly to American forces.
A new generation of Spaniards, after submitting passively to decades of Franco’s brutality, was beginning to confront the violent regime with violence. In 1952 five young Basques, dissatisfied with the passivity of their parents’ generation, formed an organization later called Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, which in their ancient language meant “Basqueland and Liberty.” Until 1968, the activities of the organization, known as ETA, consisted primarily of promoting the Basque language, which had been banned by Franco. Later, ETA members began burning Spanish flags and defacing Spanish monuments. In 1968 Basque linguists created a unified language in place of eight dialects. An example of the linguistic difficulties prior to 1968: The original name for ETA used the word Aberri instead of Euskadi, so that the acronym was ATA. But after six years of clandestine operations as ATA, they discovered that in some dialects, their name, ata, means “duck,” so the name was changed to ETA. The unified language of 1968 cleared the way for a renaissance of the Basque language.
But in 1968 ETA became violent. On June 7 a Civil Guard stopped a car that had two armed ETA members in it. They opened fire and killed the guard. One of the ETA killers, Txabi Etxebarrieta, was then tracked down and killed by the Spanish. On August 2, in revenge for the killing of Etxebarrieta, a much disliked San Sebastian police captain was shot dead by ETA in front of his home with his wife listening on the other side of the door. In response to the attack, the Spanish virtually declared war on the Basques. A state of siege was established that lasted for most of the rest of the year, with thousands arrested and tortured and some sentenced to years in prison, despite angry protests from Europe. Worse, a pattern of action and reaction, violence for violence, between ETA and the Spanish was established and has remained to this day.
In the Caribbean nation of Haiti it was the eleventh year of rule by François Duvalier, the little country doctor, friend of the poor black man, who had become a mass murderer. In a midyear press conference he lectured American journalists, “I hope the evolution of democracy you’ve observed in Haiti will be an example for the people of the world, in particular in the United States, in relation to the civil and political rights of Negroes.”
But there were no rights for Negroes or anyone else under the rule of the sly but mad Dr. Duvalier. One of the cruelest