The Basque History of the World - Mark Kurlansky [117]
—Joseba Sarrionaindia, NI EZ NAIZ HEMENGOA,
(I Am Not from Here), 1985
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FRENCH POLICY TOWARD “the Basque problem” has always been to keep it in Spain. As long as the problem stayed in Spain, ETA members could stay in France. The French government’s support of Spanish Basque refugees had long helped to keep peaceful relations between Paris and French Basques. But after the death of Franco, French foreign policy changed. Being an enemy of Spain no longer gave a Spanish refugee automatic legitimacy in France. Since the Spanish government was no longer unquestionably the villain, Basques were no longer unquestionably the victims. Political refugee status and work permits for Spanish Basques were no longer automatically granted. Increasingly, French police rounded up Basques, not all of them ETA members, for questioning, broke into homes, and searched without warrants. Suspected ETA members were arrested and sometimes spent months in prison without being charged with a crime. In 1979, the French government ended political refugee status for newly arrived Basques. But it still refused to extradite Basques to Spain.
In 1980, an international conference on terrorism sponsored by the Council of Europe meeting in Strasbourg concluded, to the approval of human rights groups, that suspects should not be extradited to countries that practiced torture. The two examples cited were Turkey and Spain.
In May 1981, Mitterrand was elected president of France. The following year, on October 28, 1982, Felipe González came to power in Spain expecting a special relationship with France, since the president was his old colleague from the Socialist International. To his great frustration and disappointment, Mitterrand would not cooperate. To head his law enforcement team, González chose as minister of interior a fellow Andalusian of his generation, a forty-two-year-old son of a policeman of Carlist sympathy, José Barrionuevo. The day the new government was announced, El Pais noted that Barrionuevo was “considered by those who know him as a man capable of imposing authority because he knows how to legitimize it.”
The new Socialist government was to be “tough” like past regimes, but unlike its predecessors, it would operate by the legitimate rule of law. Yet on December 15, with the new Spanish Socialist government only two weeks old, Barrionuevo announced that he was reviewing antiterrorist policy. The result was the Socialists passed laws limiting the right of an accused to legal assistance and giving police the right to hold prisoners incommunicado—without access to lawyers and without presenting them to a court—for up to ten days. Known in legal language as the suspension of habeas corpus, this is considered a violation of basic rights in all Western law because it gives law enforcement the liberty to commit even worse crimes. That is exactly what happened with Spain’s new antiterrorist laws. Suspects detained under these new laws were routinely beaten and tortured, and then released in a few days without ever being charged. Journalists were arrested and convicted of “insulting the Spanish government and the King.” Especially targeted was the pro-Herri Batasuna paper Egin.
Egin, meaning “to act,” began publishing in 1977 with small investments from 25,000 backers. As the constant object of government repression, the paper gathered a following. The Spanish government’s attempt to shut it down seemed to be almost a reenactment of the Franco era. In 1983, an Egin columnist, Sanchez Erauskin, became a popular hero when, while serving time on charges of insulting the king, he used a hunger strike to force the government to reclassify him as a political prisoner. The editor of the paper, José Felix Azurmendi, was regularly arrested by the González government. Columnists, journalists, even people who were quoted in articles, were arrested and sometimes convicted