Jacobin Magazine: The End of ETA

Basque nationalism has deep roots in the autonomy enjoyed by the provinces of Araba, Gipuzkoa and Bizkaia in the Middle Ages. Even after these provinces came under the rule of Navarra and Castile, and eventually the unitary Spanish state, they maintained their own traditional laws and fiscal privileges, the so-called fueros (charters). Only in 1839, at the end of a bloody civil war, were these fueros finally subordinated to the national constitution, as liberal forces promoted the creation of common Spanish institutions. When Sabino Arana founded the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV) in 1885, it harked back to this lost autonomy. Even today members of the PNV, a centre-right party representing the biggest force in the Basque Autonomous Community, are known as “jelkides,” followers of “Jaungoikoa eta Lege Zaharrak” (“God and the Ancient Laws”). This name also highlights the cultural thrust of the early Basque nationalist movement, and in particular its devout Catholicism.

Early Basque nationalism was also shaped by the industrialization that took place in the final quarter of the nineteenth century, notably in the Bizkaia province and later in neighboring Gipuzkoa. These changes drove inward migration and a radical change in the Basque Country’s cultural, linguistic and national identity, at the same time as the central state was trying to galvanize a common Spanish nationality. This also set the terms of the opposition between the PNV and the Socialist PSOE, founded in 1879. While this latter party arose in reaction against the exploitation and terrible living standards in the mines and the steel industry, the PNV emerged in reaction against the Basque people’s loss of cultural identity and national political institutions. [...]

If at first ETA did not declare itself socialist, this changed considerably over subsequent years. The revolutions in Algeria, Vietnam and Cuba over the 1950s – socialist-hued national liberation movements, centering on the armed struggle – deeply impressed ETA. At its Third Assembly (April-May 1964) it asserted that the Basque Country, like Algeria, Vietnam and Cuba, was a colony subject to a foreign state. This projection of ETA’s own aspirations onto distant examples also allowed it to adopt a vaguely-defined “socialist” perspective, and most importantly a strategy focused on armed struggle. Since these far-flung insurrectionary models were hardly practicable under the Franco regime, at first ETA’s “direct action” was limited to propaganda and graffiti, or a few occasional homemade bombs chucked at government buildings. In practice, the most important consequence of the Third Assembly line was that ETA adopted the perspective that national liberation would first require a common front of nationalist organizations to create an independent Basque homeland, only after which it would be possible to begin the transition to socialism. [...]

Even in this period of Transition from Francoism, ETA’s armed activity intensified. Between 1978 and 1988 ETA pm and ETA M claimed a combined total of 513 victims, compared to 75 in the previous decade. This was also a time of significant mobilisations in the factories (and indeed among education workers) as well as around questions like opposition to nuclear power stations and Spain joining NATO. Faced with severe police repression, the nationalist Left was an important part of all such movements and gained major popular recognition for its role. This was also the period in which the LAB trade union federation stepped up its activity, rapidly gaining shopfloor influence. The context of continuing violence and repression in the Basque Country highlighted the limits of the “democratic” transition from Francoism. The state continued a paramilitary Dirty War against the nationalist Left, combined with direct police repression. If in late 1977, the end of the dictatorship allowed for the release of ETA’s political prisoners, by 1987 some 504 of its members languished in jail.

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The New York Review of Books: The End of ETA’s Era

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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Jacobin Magazine: After Disarmament

ETA was founded in the late 1960s by members of the youth section of the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV), the traditional political force of the Basque independence movement. Facing severe repression by Franco’s dictatorship, it saw the armed struggle as the most efficient way to destabilize the Spanish state and resist the occupation of Basque lands. Long perceived to be the most dangerous and important internal enemy of the Spanish State, ETA has led an armed campaign of assassinations, bombings, and kidnappings of prominent political and military figures of both Franco’s regime and the post-1978 democratically elected governments of Spain. Over eight hundred victims, among them politicians, members of the military and the civil guard, as well as innocent bystanders and civilians were killed from 1968 until its final ceasefire in 2010. [...]

They have sought to rival the traditional political force within Basque politics, the center-right Basque Nationalist Party (PNV), by simultaneously advocating for national independence and the economic and social policies associated with the Abertzale left project — nationalization of key industries (particularly energy companies) and banks, higher taxes on the rich, opposition to nuclear energy, support for refugees, and solidarity with other national liberation causes and movements around the world (particularly in Catalonia, Galicia, Ireland, Palestine, and Kurdistan). [...]

I think we are witnessing the end of a large global cycle with the passing of outstanding figures like Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez, Manuel Marulanda, and Martin McGuiness, and that’s the context in which I think the disarming of ETA, a group that has carried out armed struggle for fifty years in our country, has to be seen. We are very pleased that this is the case, we are convinced — not only in political terms but also in terms of revolutionary morality — that in building the road forward to overcoming our condition as an oppressed people, we have to ensure peaceful and democratic methods. We think that this is the pathway, and I believe that in the end ETA will rise to the challenge by making an historic contribution to the independence movement with its own disarmament. [...]

When is there going to be a Europe-wide general strike against austerity policies? These sorts of demands need to be put to a global scale, or at least European scale, forum that can start to tackle these issues. Not so much a forum for theoretical debate but a practical forum that can develop answers on a global scale. We are going to make the effort to raise this thinking wherever we are — with our small forces and with great humility — but we really think it is necessary to move forward in this area. [...]

We have good relations with left-wing movements from around the world, because for us, we do not form part of the nationalist movement but rather of the pro-independence movement. We believe that independence will provide us with the tools for advancing alternative social policies: demanding national and popular sovereignty means a fight over that ground with the oligarchies who have hijacked our democracy.

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Al Jazeera: On terrorism, Basque nationalism and a 'bar brawl'

Altsasu, a sleepy Basque town in Spain's northernmost province of Navarre, was shocked on July 4, when a prosecutor's office announced (PDF) that eight of its residents will be facing a total of 375 years in prison on terrorism charges. The eight young Basques had a fight with two civil guards and their girlfriends in a local bar in the early hours of October 15, 2016. Three of the defendants have been under arrest since November 2016.

The eight young men and a woman are facing charges of "terrorist injury" and "terrorist threat" for being involved in what many activists consider a simple "bar brawl", possibly motivated by historical tensions between Basque nationalists and the Civil Guard. [...]

According to the Civil Guard and a considerable number of conservative Spanish newspapers, anyone who demands the withdrawal of the guards from Altsasu, including the eight young Basques involved in last year's "bar brawl", are part of the "ETA environment".

According to human rights activists, however, such accusations are nothing more than an extension of the Spanish judiciary and government's controversial theory dubbed "everything is ETA". [...]

Both the regional government of Navarre and the city council of Altsasu have already rejected the "terrorism" charges eight young Basques are facing. The provincial court also decided that the "bar fight" between the defendants and the members of the Civil Guard did not amount to "terrorism" and insisted that the case should be conducted locally. But the Spanish National Court chose to override the decisions of local authorities and charged the defendants with offences related to "terrorism" anyway.

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