Apologies often take the form of addled justifications, an impossible quest for innocence, and so it is with ETA’s apology. Here we have, for the first time in the group’s history, some emotional language, and a clumsy attempt at empathy. ETA apologizes to the victims “not involved in the conflict,” while the others—security forces, politicians—are offered only formal “respect.” It plays with language, it asks for a reciprocal apology, it calls for some kind of moral equivalence between ETA and the Spanish state before its final disbandment. “Nobody can change the past,” read ETA’s statement, but the apology is an attempt to do just that. [...]
Odd as it may now seem, ETA was not born as an armed resistance group that turned to terrorism, but as a cultural enterprise to save the Basque language and its people’s customs (its name is an acronym of the Basque words for “Basque Homeland and Liberty”). It was founded in 1958 by a group of dangerously idealistic students, many of them connected to the Catholic Church, who were dissatisfied with the inaction of the clandestine Basque Nationalist Party. Arrests, police beatings, and fear hardened them, though their experience was probably no more extreme than what was suffered by members of other clandestine groups elsewhere in Spain who never resorted to violence. But in those days, there was a fascination with leftist insurgencies and anti-colonial struggles elsewhere in the world—in Indochina, Cuba, Algeria, and so on. The fledgling ETA began to envision an independent, socialist Basque Country. [...]
It did split. The larger and more powerful faction, ETA “political-military,” gradually abandoned violence in favor of political action, while the smaller, weaker faction, ETA “military,” carried on. This is what ETA means when its apology says that the pain “should not have been prolonged for so long.” But the truth is that the ETA that continued its campaign of terrorism after the advent of democracy was not the same ETA. The group had to be rebuilt almost from scratch. For this new ETA, Franco had been an adversary, but the real enemy was Spain itself. It was true that the group’s goal of a separate socialist republic was unattainable even in a democracy, but there was perhaps a deeper motive to stick to the gun. ETA had become enamored of the power it conferred. As other young Europeans were discovering in those years—the Red Army Faction in Germany, the Red Brigades in Italy, the Provisional Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland—violence in the name of a political cause is a powerful drug. [...]
That murder was just one among many, but its significance went beyond the unprecedented outpouring of grief it caused. It revealed something important about a group dominated by the demon of the gun. Normal people could not understand why ETA would do something like that when the group could so easily have improved, albeit minimally, its image by pardoning their hostage. Insiders understood it perfectly: ETA neither needed nor wanted sympathy or support; what it sought was unwavering loyalty beyond any possible moral qualm. If this had not been clear until then, after the death of Miguel Ángel Blanco, anyone who would still defend or justify ETA was someone ETA could count on forever. That is the secret logic of militancy: it is not rejection, but doubt, that it strives to suppress.
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