Ghosts of Spain

by Giles Tremlett

  Watching three city councillors in Bilbao leaving a bar after a coffee, I realised just how saturated with bodyguards the place had become. As they moved, six other people began moving too, getting ahead of them to scour the street, walking beside, behind or just in front of them for the fifty metres it took for them to get back to their offices. Town hall meetings in some places required the presence of dozens of bodyguards. The Basque Country must have had more of them per square mile than anywhere else in Europe.

  An already weak ETA called a unilateral ceasefire in 1998. It was dismissed out of hand by Aznar’s government as a trap. Fourteen months later ETA unilaterally brought the ceasefire to an end. For Basques it was a tantalising taste of peace. For abertzale radicals, it was a political boon. Their share of votes increased to between 18 and 20 per cent in municipal and regional elections held that year. For ETA, however, it was a time to rearm and reorganise. It came back fast and furious for a couple of years, but police slowly strangled its capacity for action. By 2002 it was already killing only in single figures. French police became especially active. In 2004, despite its attempts, it failed, for the first year in three decades, to kill anyone at all. The abertzales, now gathered in Batasuna, lost one-third of their voters. Then Batasuna was banned altogether.

  Numerous ETA members were picked up at what were described as ‘routine police checkpoints’ in France. Rumours began to appear that the same French police officers were at every checkpoint where the terrorists were caught. France had been slowly increasing the pressure on ETA since GAL had carried out attacks on French soil in the 1980s. Now it was arresting dozens of ETA suspects every year. The group’s leadership was broken up time and time again. ETA itself was said to be infiltrated all the way through. Some ETA members even broke the group’s longstanding policy of not shooting back when in France – with gendarmes being wounded. That policy had been meant to ease police pressure on the hideouts in France where its leadership, training and logistics are based and from where it organises its attacks.

  Spain can claim to have carried out one of the world’s most effective anti-terrorist policies. ETA could keep going for years, if it wanted. It has enough support. Militancy often goes through more than one generation of a family. Even a fresh ceasefire would be no guarantee that it might not reappear at a later date. It looks, however, unlikely ever to become as dangerous as it was in the 1980s – unless, in a radical change, it turns to totally unrestrained attacks against arbitrary targets. That tactic would see its support all but evaporate. A definitive renunciation of violence, meanwhile, would probably see the abertzale left launched into the centre of Basque politics. If the 1998 temporary cease-fire gave it 18 to 20 per cent of votes – how much more could it get for a full-time one? Just a little more, and it would become the second power in the region. As its violence decreases at the time of writing this book, hopes grow that it may be tempted to follow that path. Parliament has given the Zapatero government permission to negotiate if ETA renouces violence permanently. Some analysts say that ETA must first recognise that, militarily, it has been defeated. ETA, however, is nothing if not unpredictable.

  The one thing police have not been able to crack has been the group’s financing. Much of this used to be provided by the rewards of kidnappings – usually of members of prominent Basque business empires. Several years have gone by, though, since the last kidnapping. ETA’s other main source of income has traditionally been an extortion racket it calls the impuesto revolucionario – the revolutionary tax. Directors of large companies, small businessmen, lawyers and accountants are amongst those invited to pay up – or pay the consequences.

  Those consequences can run from murder to the firebombing of your shop or business. José María Korta, a business leader from San Sebastián who refused to pay and called on others to follow his example, died when a bomb was placed under his car in August 2000. How many Basques share Korta’s courage? How many pay up? And how many large companies are secretly topping up the group’s funds in order to be left alone? One example serves to suggest that the extortion racket goes much further than most suspect. In 2004, a stock-market-listed vending-machine company called Azkoyen replaced several board members after Judge Garzón accused an executive of handing over £150,000 in extortion money. The company, which operates across forty-two countries and has an annual turnover of £85 million, admitted the cash may have gone missing from its accounts a few years earlier. Azkoyen executive Jesús Marcos Calahorra allegedly drove to Vert in November 2001 where, ‘near to the church, he met two unidentified members of ETA to whom he handed over the money’, according to Garzón.

  ‘Calahorra, obeying an obviously illegal order from the board of directors of Azkoyen – using accounting practices to hide the real destination – handed over the 37 million pesetas in the full knowledge of its real destiny,’ the judge said. Newspapers reported that Mr Calahorra was paid £4,000 for the task. Azkoyen sacked him when the payments became public. He was reinstated by a labour tribunal that said he had just followed the board’s instructions.

  The Basque attitude towards paying a tax that buys bullets can be strikingly ambivalent. Again, a single example serves to illustrate. Juan Mari Arzak is the most famous of a group of very famous Basque chefs. The New York Times has placed Spain ahead of France in culinary innovation thanks, in great measure, to Basque chefs. Arzak started a revolution from the kitchen of what used to be his mother’s restaurant – and, before that, his grandparents’ taberna – on a busy road out of San Sebastián. He has, deservedly, been rewarded with three Michelin stars. Other Basque chefs, people like Pedro Subijana and Martín Berasategui, also boast Michelin stars for their restaurants. San Sebastián has always produced chefs, both professional and amateur. Its sociedades gastronómicas, where the (traditionally) male members meet – and compete – to cook and eat Basque dishes, have a history stretching back to at least the mid-nineteenth century.

  I have been to Arzak’s restaurant once, to celebrate a birthday. We were lucky. Real Madrid were in town that night, playing San Sebastián’s Real Sociedad. Ringing just a few days before, I was still able to get a table on a Saturday night. A hushed and reverential atmosphere was more than compensated for by the dishes placed before us. Norway lobsters, large carabinero prawns, hake and young pichón pigeon were brought to our table by serious waitresses in grey uniforms. A jolly Arzak appeared at one stage – his happiness undoubtedly increased by Real Sociedad’s victory over Real Madrid – to enquire whether the food had been to our taste. The, not inconsiderable, bill paid, we left, happy, replete and excited by our immersion in Arzak’s brave new Basque cuisine.

  Newspaper headlines that appeared some time later, however, suggested that a fraction of our bill may have ended up in ETA’s coffers. Arzak was, reportedly, called to court to explain why his name – along with three other famous chefs, who boasted a further five Michelin stars amongst them – had been cited by an alleged ETA accountant as a revolutionary-taxpayer. It has not been proved that Arzak, or any of the other chefs, paid ETA. Nor have there been any charges, so we must assume that no crime was committed or money paid. But the idea that they might have paid out was not considered shocking by other Basques. ‘The only ones to blame are ETA … judgement should be cast on those who extort and not on those who are victims of extortion,’ Basque government minister Miren Azkarate said. The chefs, she said, were good men. They were ambassadors for the Basque Country. ‘With their daily effort, they have placed this country in first place when it comes to gastronomy … all we can do is offer them our support.’

  In 1998 the nationalists broke their alliances with Madrid-based parties and began negotiations with ETA. The nationalists said they were merely trying to wean ETA away from violence. They claim no deal was ever agreed on, or signed. It marked, however, a sea change. From now on the nationalists would increase their demands for greater autonomy and self-determination. It has made them the whipping post of newspaper columnists and
radio debate show guests, ever since.

  The nationalists presented the attacks on them as further proof of the Basque Country’s victim status. Much of the most passionate vitriol came, however, from the mouths of fellow Basques who write in El Mundo, El País or ABC. The barrage continues today – to such an extent that the nationalists’ radio station, Radio Euskadi, now broadcasts a regular weekly résumé of outrageous comments on Basques and Basque nationalism by tertulianos. The barrage reached its most unpalatable extreme, however, when the film-maker Julio Medem made a documentary in which he aimed to present the differing opinions of Basques to a wide audience. Medem, born in San Sebastián, had dug deep into the Basque arcadia and into themes of violence and cowardice in feature films such as Vacas and La Ardilla Roja (The Red Squirrel).

  La Pelota Vasca: la Piel Contra la Piedra (Basque Ball: the Skin Against the Stone) – designed to ‘see hatred without hating it’ – was the most controversial thing to hit Spanish cinemas for years. With Aznar’s party and several prominent anti-ETA intellectuals, including the philosopher Fernando Savater, declining to take part, the result was inevitably skewed in favour of the nationalists. It did not deserve, however, the bile with which it was received by Aznar’s government and others opposed to nationalism (including Gotzone Mora). Culture minister Pilar del Castillo backed calls for it to be banned from San Sebastián’s film festival. The Spanish embassy in London mysteriously withdrew funding for the Spanish strand of the London Film Festival – where it was shown to packed houses – claiming it no longer had sufficient funds. Medem was compared to Hitler’s film-maker, Leni Riefenstahl. One politician demanded he return money that state television TVE had paid to show a previous film.

  The reaction was a sign of just how tough the Aznar government was prepared to play with anything that smelt, however faintly, of support for ETA. ‘The majority of us Basques do not confuse nationalism with terrorism,’ Medem complained. ‘But when one travels around Spain one realises an increasing number of Spaniards do.’

  With the People’s Party in power, the crack-down on ETA also began to throw up concerns about civil liberties. There was no repeat of the GAL outrages committed under the Socialists. The results, however, still sound shocking: the Basque Country’s fourth-largest political party has been banned; two daily newspapers and a magazine have been closed by the courts, with the editor of one claiming he was tortured by police; a court administrator was appointed to run a series of Basque adult education schools; and various groups supposedly devoted to promoting youth, culture or other pastimes have also been closed or had their organisers charged with collaborating with ETA.

  With most of these cases still going through the courts, it is impossible to say just how far, if at all, the anti-terrorist overreach has gone. There is no doubt that, somewhere, parts of some of these groups morph into ETA itself. Others are, probably, just front organisations. Proving exactly where they overlap is difficult. It may be impossible. ETA itself is aware of this. Police claim that it tries to bury itself inside anything from ecology groups to trade unions.

  When newspapers, such as the Basque-language Euskaldunon Egunkaria, are closed down on the orders of an investigating magistrate, however, but a trial is not due to be held for several years, it is obviously essential that the case be cast-iron. In 1998 Judge Garzón decreed the temporary closure of the radical paper Egin – which sold 50,000 copies a day – while its connections with ETA were being investigated. By the time he ordered it to be reopened more than a year later, the company that published it was considered bankrupt. When Euskaldunon Egunkaria’s editor, Martxelo Otamendi, accused police of torture, the Aznar government announced it would lobby for him to be charged with ‘collaborating with an armed group’. By making the allegations, it said, he had simply followed ETA’s instructions to its members. ‘To sue alleged torture victims, or to describe allegations as false even before there has been a chance to carry out a thorough investigation, will only help foster and nourish a climate of impunity, in which fear of reprisals prevents the reporting of possible acts of torture,’ Amnesty International said. It is difficult to know what to make of torture allegations in the Basque Country. Amnesty says there is no evidence of systematic torture against ETA suspects. It has demanded, however, that cameras be placed in interrogation cells during the five days in which terrorism suspects can be held incommunicado. In the meantime, police officers found guilty of torture are, Amnesty complains, regularly handed pardons.

  The abertzale left knows how to capitalise on any opportunities it is handed to reinforce its image as a victim of Spanish persecution. In 1997 the twenty-three leaders of one of Batasuna’s predecessors, Herri Batasuna, were jailed for showing a video made by ETA during an election campaign. The decision was overturned later by the Constitutional Court but not until after one leader, Eugenio Aramburu, had hung himself in his brother’s caserío rather than go to jail. I went to film the funeral in the village of Mallabia. Folklore, death and hard-edged politics overtook a village where local businesses closed down for the day. There were pipes and drums and dancing girls in long red skirts and white blouses carrying long hoops decorated with ribbons. A male dancer performed a neat, austere and highly acrobatic dance – the aurresku – full of on-the-spot turns and impressively high kicks in front of the coffin. There were also angry speeches and denunciations of Madrid. It all ended with the surprising, high-pitched sound of women ululating and the turning-over by angry radicals of a radio reporter’s car. I do not recall any masked men this time. But at another funeral in Soraluze – this time for an ETA gunwoman shot by the army sergeant she had tried to kill when he stopped his car at a traffic light – masked characters appeared with a huge banner bearing the axe and serpent of ETA.

  ETA constantly invites crackdowns. The revolutionary’s maxim of action-repression-reaction (which worked for ETA with Franco) predicts an increase in support if police can be provoked into overstepping the mark. The more ‘martyrs’ or ‘victims’ that are created, the more support holds up. It is a trap for the unwary.

  The most controversial of the banned groups was the radical Jarrai youth group. This was considered to be behind a campaign of street violence, the kale borroka, that swept through the Basque Country for several years. Jarrai was, in an expression first attributed to Arzalluz, a meeting place for ‘the pups of ETA’. Before it was closed down I went to see Jarrai in action at a three-day ‘festival’ in the Guipúzcoa village of Zaldibia. The mix of radical politics, Basque folklore and underground culture produced bizarre contrasts as three thousand teenagers and students camped out in a bucolic landscape of green pastures overlooked by steep, verdant hills. Perhaps the strangest thing of all was to see a group of tough, street-wise, medallion-wearing, black Los Angeles heavy-metal rappers called Body Count walking down a Basque Country lane. Their most famous song was ‘Cop Killers’ which, according to the radical daily Egin, had to be interpreted as the product of ‘an oppressed people’. In the opposite direction came a group of traditional ioaldunak dancers dressed up in sheepskins, conical hats decorated with colourful ribbons and wearing huge cowbells attached to their waists. The ioaldunak, their bells ringing as they jogged rhythmically along, were there to make the youths feel Basque. The rappers were there to make them feel hard.

  A large marquee housed political meetings, where stony-faced Jarrai leaders sat in silence while the audience struggled to think up suitable questions – all asked in euskara. The same marquee was transformed at night, as bands took to the stage. The words were unintelligible, but the music was good. A mixture of thrash guitar, rock and punk, it had the raw energy that only four angry youths with electric guitars and a drum kit can produce. Trying to leave that night, however, I was reminded that this was about more than music and folklore. I, and several others, wanted to take the short route out of Zaldibia. The road was blocked by Jarrai marshals – teenagers dressed in the grunge apparel of the times but determinedly and spookily discipli
ned when it came to maintaining the rules. They insisted we had to go the long way around. Nobody dared break ranks. I was glad to leave. Jarrai went on to provide many ETA recruits.

  With the ban on Batasuna – which was Aznar’s personal initiative – a significant shift took place in Spain’s democratic arrangements. A law was introduced which required a special tribunal of Supreme Court judges to decide whether the party was, in effect, part of ETA. The judges said it was. This was the equivalent of Britain banning Sinn Fein. It also left some 140,000 Basque voters (more than 10 per cent) without their traditional party.

  Most Spaniards, however, welcomed the ban. Amongst other things, the aim of the law was to cut off Batasuna’s access to public funds. These go to officials and political groups represented in parliaments, provincial assemblies and town halls. Some of those receiving funds doubled, undoubtedly, as ETA members. Perhaps the best-known was Josu Ternera, a deputy in the Basque parliament who has since gone back into hiding. ‘Since then we have no longer had to experience the shame of seeing terrorists occupying seats in parliament,’ Aznar explains in his memoirs.

  In Bera, a town on the River Bidasoa just a few miles from the French border, I went to see the ousted Batasuna mayor, Josu Goya. Goya, a friendly, bearded man in his fifties, ran a shop selling everything from umbrellas and underwear to tourist knickknacks and ironmongery. Bera was a nationalist and separatist stronghold. It was also, Goya joked, a place where ‘everyone should be considered a contrabandista, a smuggler, unless they can prove otherwise.’