The Basque History of the World - Mark Kurlansky [123]
THE SPANISH GOVERNMENT, along with the Madrid press, have successfully dominated Spain’s and the outside world’s view of Basques. The Spanish celebrate the great Basque soccer players and bicyclists, the great Basque cuisine. The adjective Basque on a restaurant in Spain implies quality. Traditional Guipúzcoa taverns, selling fermented cider from barrels, salt cod omelettes, and steak, are being imitated throughout the country. Atxaga, whose writings have been translated into Spanish, has a large following. Massive Chillida sculptures are planted like great iron Basque anchors on the wide boulevards of Madrid. Yet the first thing Spaniards think of as Basque is what the Aznar government estimates to be seventy ETA commandos and their 800 killings, without much reflection on what 15,000 police were doing to thousands of Basques.
The Basques provoke a deep insecurity in Spain. The legal charge that Basques have “insulted” the country is one expression of that insecurity. Spain has never gotten past 1898, the year of “the Disaster.” The centennial of it was an enormous event: Bookstore windows were filled with new books on 1898; the newspapers ran special feature series; television had special programming. The Spanish still feel theirs is a country that has failed or is somehow unworthy of nationhood. This is why the government so fears a condemnation from European governments.
But European governments accept without question the Spanish government line that ETA, whose primary demand for several decades has been negotiation, refuses to negotiate. In 1998, the U.S. State Department placed ETA on a short list of thirty “terrorist” organizations for whom it is illegal to provide funds. Neither the Irish Republican Army nor the violent Corsicans were on the list, but ETA was, along with Egypt’s Holy War, Iran’s Mujadeen, Peru’s Shining Path, which had killed thousands, and the Khmer Rouge, which had murdered a million Cambodians.
One recent study by Iñaki Zabaleta found that 85 percent of all articles on Basques in the U.S. press made a reference to terrorism. The outside world knows little of the 2.4 million Basques except those seventy faceless commandos. The Spanish government has learned, as did Franco, that international opinion can be managed.
The standing of ETA among the Basques is difficult to measure. In recent years there have been huge demonstrations against ETA violence. But there have also been significant demonstrations of support for ETA. ETA is not trying to be popular. It is trying to cause the breakdown of the status quo. Practices such as extorting money from Basque businessmen and killing Basques thought to be collaborating with the enemy were always certain to be unpopular. A campaign unleashed in the mid-1990s to assassinate local PP officials, Basques who belonged to the ruling party, both angered and mystified fellow Basques, who saw this as purposeless violence. Just when the Guardia Civil was becoming demoralized and receiving hundreds of requests for transfers out of Navarra and Euskadi, it was suddenly being ignored while small town mayors were instead becoming targets.
The PP, aside from the tragedy of seeing their colleagues murdered, coldly found the new ETA strategy to be to their advantage. The killing of PP officials, especially when they were Basque, was extremely unpopular with Basques. Charles Powell, an adviser to Aznar, said, “These attacks have enabled us to play the victim. The victim! Here we are the party in power, but we are also made to look like the victim. That is not a bad political position.”
The great majority of Basques had grown weary of the violence. If a vote for Herri Batasuna—renamed Euskal Herritarok, We, the Basque People, after the jailing of its leaders—is a vote supporting