In Europe

by Geert Mak

  All the other hard-fought hills remain unsung. The dead have been hidden away beneath the soil, without a single marker. ‘Forget’ is the motto here. No one wants to rake up the past.

  Chapter TWENTY-THREE

  Guernica

  HALFWAY THROUGH THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU wrote: ‘Guernica is the most fortunate city on earth. Its people arrange their own affairs in a meeting of representatives that is held beneath an oak tree, and the decisions they make are always of the wisest sort.’ That, at least, is what all Basque sources claim. In fact the great philosopher was talking about Switzerland, but none of that matters here.

  Euskadi, otherwise known as the Basque Country, has a dreamlike quality. You fall into a deep abyss, and at the bottom you suddenly find yourself in a luxuriant garden, a different world with different people and a different language. After the parched Spanish plains, here there is suddenly a green little Switzerland, inhabited by a strange and ancient people. Their language grates like cuneiform. Outsiders have no idea what these people are writing or saying. Their communication with others is largely through tastes and smells: in the kitchen, a Basque becomes a true sorcerer. The hills are dotted with white farms and cows wearing bells; you can smell the ocean. Madrid is far, far away.

  The average Basque is no different from the average European. He lives in a villa or in a cruddy high-rise neighbourhood close to Donostia (San Sebastian) or Ibaizabal (Bilbao), he spends his days in an office, a shop, at school or beside the conveyor belt, he spends his weekends with friends or family, in restaurants or at the disco. Still, if you ask him what he considers the ideal life, he will start talking about a section of valley with a few cows and a farm, about the life of his grandparents and great-grandparents.

  For every Basque, the Basque separatist movement has another face. You have anti-nationalists, radical nationalists, theoretical nationalists, light nationalists, violent nationalists, pacifist nationalists, nationalists who plant bombs and fight in the street and nationalists who condemn that. Never lump them all together, not the Basques, and not the Basque nationalists either. Ever since the fifteenth century, the Basque provinces – just like other regions of Spain – have been fighting for the rights of the local nobles and citizenry, and for the traditions that go along with them. That struggle was usually about practical matters: privileges, locals laws and taxes. At the end of the nineteenth century this ‘feel for independence’ took on a more romantic hue, as it did everywhere in Europe. The founder of this new movement, Sabino Arana, advocated a government of national character for all Basques, both Catholic and pure-bred. In his study he tinkered away at assembling a nation: from the various Basque dialects he constructed an official Basque language, he composed a national anthem and even created his own ‘typically Basque’ typography. His final play, Libe, was about a woman who chose death rather than marry a Spaniard. Arana himself married a farm girl, simply for the ‘purity’ of her blood. After he died, she wasted no time finding a new husband: a Spanish policeman.

  Arana called his new nation Euskal Herría, meaning ‘the country where Basque is spoken’. The region was to include the three Basque provinces, plus Navarra and the French Basque Country. Many Basque nationalists regard him these days as having been a bit soft in the head, but his Partido Nacionalista Vasco (PNV) is still the biggest party in the Basque Country, his bust still figures prominently in the headquarters of the PNV, the most important nationalist prize bears his name, and his racist speeches have never quite been forgotten either.

  During the Spanish Civil War, Basque nationalism turned into a militant resistance movement. At first the Spanish nationalists saw the staunch Catholic Basques as their natural allies, but that changed quickly enough. Franco and his supporters wanted a strong, central government, and that was what the Basque nationalists so vehemently opposed. In exchange for their loyalty, the republican leaders gave the Basques the republic they had been dreaming of. That independent Euskadi was short-lived. After only a few months, the new republic was trampled underfoot by Franco's troops in May 1937. The nationalist leaders went into exile or were imprisoned, an end was put to all forms of autonomy, the Basque language was banned and Basque teachers were sacked. Thousands of Basques were murdered: some estimates put it at more than 25,000. In the prison at San Sebastian the executions took place every day until 1947.

  The PNV survived and developed into the moderate conservative Christian party that has been in power in the Basque Country for years. For a small group of Marxist students in Bilbao, however, that was far too tame. In 1959 they took a more radical tack: they set up Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (Basque Country and Freedom), otherwise known as ETA. One of their first attacks, in 1961, was on a train full of Franco veterans on their way to San Sebastian. Franco reacted vehemently and in kind: at least a hundred people were arrested, many of them were tortured, some were executed, others received decade-long prison sentences. The most famous ETA attack came on 20 December, 1973, when Franco's crown prince, Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, was blown up. The explosion was so powerful that the admiral, with car and all, flew fifteen metres into the air and landed in the courtyard of a neighbouring Jesuit monastery. The badly damaged Dodge, licence number PM 16416, is now on display at the Army Museum in Madrid. Blanco was Franco's last prospect of a natural successor.

  According to some Basques, there never was a ‘good’ ETA that later went bad. ‘ETA has always been bad,’ writer and ETA pioneer Mikel Azurmendi said later, and that had to do with the total imbalance between ends and means. After Franco's death, and countless schisms within the movement itself, ETA gradually degenerated into a powerful terrorist organisation which financed itself by means of extorted ‘taxes’, which did not shrink from blowing up a Barcelona supermarket full of women and children, which would threaten anyone with death merely for voicing different views, and which, despite all this, still maintained considerable support, particularly among young Basques.

  When I travelled through the Basque Country in May 1999, it was intermission time. ETA had declared a ceasefire, and people were willing to talk. I had been put in contact with Monica Angulo, a Basque sociologist who spends six months a year in America. Along with a friend, she showed me everything there was left to see in Guernica: the stump of Rousseau's legendary oak – now protected by a Grecian dome; the old hall where the free Basques once met and still meet; the museum with its paintings of priests, banners and the taking of solemn pledges; and the new oak tree that has already been in place for 140 years. ‘Basque nationalism is mostly anti-Madrid,’ Monica said. ‘It has a very personal background. Almost everyone here has a friend, a brother or a cousin who has been in prison at some point or who has had other major runins with Madrid. That automatically makes people nationalistic.’

  As we talked and walked, I noticed that my Basque acquaintances were driven by more than simply the pursuit of political independence. I kept sensing that something else was not being said. Monica and her friend were singularly pleasant, intelligent and committed people, but at a certain point I kept running into a brick wall. ‘Why are all of you so attached to those rituals? Why is independence so important that everything else has to take second place?’ I was given no answer.

  Their nationalism was an amalgam of the old and new, of resistance, but also of nostalgia. On the one hand it was a belated product of the nineteenth century, an outgrowth of the fundamental conflict that divided Spain throughout a large part of the twentieth century: is Spain a land of several nations, as the republicans believed, or should it remain the unified nation held dear by Franco and his followers? On the other, it fits perfectly with those other movements that arose in Europe in the late twentieth century, peculiar and significant counterparts of modernisation and globalisation.‘The Basque movement is a typical agrarian movement,’ Monica said. ‘That's what makes it different from Catalan nationalism.’

  Hence the movement's popularity, one supposes, in the alternative young peo
ple's circuit, here and throughout the rest of Europe. Nostalgia was – and is – an important signal: in essence it is an indictment of a modern age filled only with materialism and a blind faith in all that is new. But nostalgia can also produce monsters. From Kosovo and Ruthenia to the Basque Country, everywhere Europeans have been driven mad by the longing for a fatherland that no one ever knew, that in many ways never even existed.

  All this lends the Basque Country a certain ambiguity. It is privy to the ocean's vast skies, but at the same time as impacted as an Eastern European mountain village. It is probably the most autonomous region in all Europe, it has a status of which Northern Ireland can only dream, it is modern and industrialised, it has profited greatly from Spanish and European subsidies, but none of that has brought cosmopolitanism or tolerance: in the eyes of the nationalist Basques, Madrid remains a colonial power, to be fought with all available means. What is to become of that language and that independence, I ask my acquaintances, now that a significant part of the population is non-Basque, now that almost two thirds of the Basques do not speak a word of Basque, now that almost all opinion polls show that the opponents of secession far outnumber those in favour of it? I ask them: ‘Can the Basque Country you dream of ever come about democratically, when members of the opposition can only campaign when surrounded by ten bodyguards? What kind of country would that be, for heaven's sake?’ Once more there is no reply.

  In Guernica, the notorious German bombardment of 26 April, 1937 is commemorated with a modest monument close to the Mercury Fountain, a large stone with a hole in it, ‘in honour of the victims’. That is the only text on which all parties could agree.

  The bombing is viewed in as many ways as there are viewers. For most Europeans it was a characteristic Nazi atrocity against an innocent Spanish town, a rehearsal for Warsaw and Rotterdam. For the average Spaniard it was, first and foremost, one of Franco's dirty tricks. To this day, the Basque nationalists see Guernica as Madrid's violation of their ‘holy city’. And the old supporters of the Franco regime take a fourth view: the whole bombardment never happened. Guernica, they say, was torched by the ‘Red’ Basques themselves. The Germans admitted their culpability years ago, but the Spanish government has never been willing to rescind Franco's reading. ‘Let bygones be bygones’ is how people deal with the past in these parts.

  The issue of Guernica is typical of the relationship between Madrid and the Basques. Both parties are possessed of a brutality that keeps all wounds open, and in that they resemble each other more than they care to admit. Suspected ETA terrorists – and even the editor-in-chief of a Basque-language daily is readily counted among them – can be detained for years without due process. Amnesty International regularly accuses the Spanish police of torturing prisoners. But when a victim files a complaint, even that complaint is seen by the Spanish government as an indication of one's ETA affiliations.

  Can one speak here of the classic drama of a forgotten ethnic group divided by the relative capriciousness of a national border, doomed forever within the Spanish nation to play the role of ‘national minority’? Is this where the old conflict between ‘national’ and ‘people’ rears its head, marked by the same wounds as those borne by the Hungarians, the Laps, the Frisians, the Welsh, the Scots, the Irish and all those smaller European peoples who woke up one day to find that, for whatever reason, they had ended up behind the wrong dotted line on the map of Europe? In some ways, yes; in other ways, no. Historically speaking, one has never been able to speak of ‘the Basque provinces’ rising in unison against France or Spain. The inter-regional conflicts were at least as serious, and every bit as numerous. Almost all of the great conflicts, including the Spanish Civil War, were also internal Basque wars. Ethnically speaking, it is equally tenuous to speak of ‘the Basques’: due to waves of migration, particularly those of the last fifty years, the Basque Country has become an ethnic potpourri in which one can recognise the ‘real’ Basques at best by their Basque surnames. Basque nationalism, therefore, bears telltale signs of a last-ditch movement: too late, too weak, dreaming of a country that never existed and that probably never can or will exist.

  None of this detracts from the fact that the Spanish nation is faced with a problem. During the final decades of the twentieth century, ETA – second only to the IRA – were responsible for the most victims of terror in all Europe: some 800 in all. (By way of comparison: the Italian Brigate Rosse killed approximately 400 people in the 1970s, the German Rote Armee Fraktion killed 28.) What is more, the group is not isolated, its supporters are numerous, and even the pacifist nationalists are prepared to hitch a convenient ride with ETA's ‘successes’.

  The result is a painful, extremely complicated situation that no government can safely ignore. The legitimacy of any democratic state is called into question when it has such a militant separatist movement operating within its territory. Any sensible government will then do all it can to negotiate longer-term solutions. That is what Charles de Gaulle did with the terrorists of the OAS, and what the British have done with the IRA. One does not seek terms of peace with the people one likes, but with one's enemies.

  For years, Spain ignored that rule of thumb. It wanted to be a modern, forceful nation, with its pronouncedly autonomous regions, but deep down, the Spanish mentality still seemed to bear the mark of feudalism. Seemed, I say, because this apparent brutality may be the product of fear, of the feeling that the country will fall apart once the final bonds are cut. The process of nation-forming, which every country in Europe has gone through at some point, has in a certain sense never been completed here. Madrid is Madrid, Catalonia is Catalonia, and the Basque Country is the Basque Country.

  A similar internal confusion can also be noted within ETA. Bit by bit, one sees that there are almost more attacks carried out in the Basque Country and against Basques themselves than against Spanish targets. Some authors therefore conclude that the Basque conflict is no longer one between Spain and the Basque Country, but between the Basques themselves, based on the question: to which fatherland do we belong, anyway?

  In the museum at Guernica hangs a page from the Heraldo de Aragón, a daily newspaper sympathetic to Franco, dated 30 April, 1937: ‘After heavy fighting our troops took Guernica, where our soldiers were dismayed to find entire neighbourhoods destroyed by the Reds.’ The Diario de Burgos of 4 May, 1937 bore the headline: ‘The horror of Guernica, the work of Red arsonists’. In the late 1960s, when a German bomb was found in the mud, soldiers quickly cordoned off the area and the bomb was never heard of again. That bomb was not supposed to be there.

  ‘Right after the bombardment, my mother ran into one of Franco's officers,’ Asunción Garmendia told me. ‘“Who destroyed Guernica?” he growled at her. She acted as though she had not seen a thing. “The Reds did it, the Reds, you know that!”’ Asunción's mother said nothing. She carried the key to their bombed-out house in the pocket of her apron until the day she died.

  These days Asunción is a professional survivor of the bombardment. She belongs to the Basque nationalist group of victims, and that is a very different set from the Guernica victims of that namby-pamby Euro peace group on the square. She wants this to be clear from the start. She is a little grey-haired lady, but on 26 April, 1937 she was a pretty seventeen-year-old. ‘I worked in the munitions factory,’ she says. ‘We made bombs, “half moons” we called them, they looked like big waffles. It was Monday, market day. There were lookouts on the mountaintops, and when they saw planes coming they would flag to the lookouts on the church steeple. They were supposed to start ringing the bells, and the factory sirens would take over. That's how the air-raid warning worked here. But that afternoon the bells suddenly started ringing like mad, and right away a big plane came over, trawng, trawng, trawng, and dropped a bomb. Our boss said, “Get down into the shelter, fast. This is going to be bad.” So we stayed down there, for four hours. You kept hearing this thud, thud, and smoke came seeping into the cellar, people were weeping and pray
ing and all I could think was: what am I going to do when this is over, where's my family? Finally a man came in and said, “You can all go out now. But Guernica is gone, there is no Guernica any more.” We went outside, and you saw a hand lying here, a foot there, a head lying over there. And the whole city was red. Everything was just silent and red, as red as this.’ She points to a Coke can.

  That evening I sit on the patio of Café Arrien with Monica, a Basque writer. It is warm, the trees are blossoming and over by the fountain crowds of children are playing, cavorting about and dancing in circles. Behind them lies the new centre of Guernica, reconstructed in pseudo-antique style, built by one-time civil-war prisoners in about 1950.

  We talk about the ‘society of silence’, the way Spain tries to deal with its past. ‘All my father ever talked about later was the hunger,’ Monica says. ‘Never about the war. Almost all the good books about Franco and the civil war have been written by foreigners. It's still taboo.

  ‘Here you have two kinds of silence within a marriage,’ the writer says. ‘Partners who refuse to speak their own language, and those who refuse to talk about the war. My parents belonged to both categories. My father was a leftist political prisoner, a worker from the south who was sent here as an exile. My mother was a real Basque, a staunch Catholic. One time they had a huge fight about it, on Christmas Eve. “You communists and anarchists, you came here and murdered our priests and raped our nuns!” my mother screamed. “Not enough of them!” my father screamed back. “Not nearly enough!” That was the only time.’

  Across from our café the local young people are pouring into theirs. It has pictures of Cuban, Irish and Palestinian heroes on the walls. This is the mini-world of the ultra-nationalists, the closed circuit within which approximately fifteen per cent of all Basques live, the heart of their own party, their own trade union, their own sports, language, history and cooking clubs, their own newspaper, their own celebrations. Here every Spanish official is a ‘fascist’, every moderate journalist a ‘collaborator’. Everywhere in the city you see their slogans: ‘Model A is genocide for the Basque language!’ And: ‘Go home!’