The worst fears of both Eta members and their potential terror targets may be over, writes PADDY WOODWORTH
EUGENIO ETXEBESTE, a leader of Eta during its bloodiest years in the 1980s and a participant in failed peace talks with the Spanish government at the end of that decade, used to talk about having a recurrent political nightmare.
His greatest fear, he said, was that the group would continue fighting until long after most Basques had ceased to support it. In those circumstances, it would finally fade away ignominiously, due to public indifference and successful police operations.
In recent years, his nightmare has become daylight reality. Backing for Eta drained away in the Basque nationalist heartlands, and leader after leader has been captured by the police. The group had become virtually incapable of carrying out a single successful operation more than a year before it declared its current ceasefire on September 5th last.
Etxebeste must wonder whether his nightmare has ended with Eta’s long-awaited statement yesterday, which clarifies that this ceasefire is “permanent, general, and verifiable by the international community”. Many other Spaniards and Basques must also be wondering whether their infinitely worse nightmare, the experience of being targeted for serving in the security forces, or simply speaking out against terrorism, is also finally at an end.
Etxebeste has been an influential if shadowy figure behind an unprecedented shift in the thinking of radical pro-independence leaders in the Batasuna party in recent years.
Batasuna has long been regarded as Eta’s political puppet, and it was finally made illegal for playing this role in 2002.
After that, Batasuna leaders like Arnaldo Otegi began to assert themselves as autonomous voices, especially during the group’s last ceasefire in 2006.
That proved to be a bitter experience for Otegi and his colleagues, as Eta imposed its own ultra-radical agenda during negotiations with the Spanish government. The group then brutally ended any hope of a resolution of the Basque conflict at that time by bombing a Madrid airport terminal, killing two people.
Batasuna found itself in the wilderness, excluded from all political institutions and any possibility of engagement with the government.
Meanwhile, disarmament by the IRA and the advent of Islamist terrorism on the scale of the 2004 Madrid bombings, had made Eta seem increasingly anachronistic.
Otegi and his colleagues also found themselves the object of a devastating offensive by the Spanish judiciary, which has kept many of them in prison for most of the last four years.
The charges against them often appear politically motivated and are sometimes dismissed when they come to court, but few in Spain had any sympathy for people regarded as cheerleaders for terrorists.
In the past, gross human rights abuses by the Spanish state, including the use of death squads, have provided Eta and Batasuna with invaluable propaganda tools in their own communities.
And such practices have not been entirely extinguished, as the conviction of four civil guards on serious torture charges against Eta suspects earlier this month clearly revealed.
Today, however, such cases elicit only shadows of past protests. A completely new political strategy was clearly needed if Batasuna was to survive politically.
So the party has gone for broke on the concept of a “new scenario” – the peaceful but vigorous pursuit for self-determination.
The long delays in Eta’s responses to this strategy, however, show that a hard core remains resistant to dumping its weapons. But yesterday’s statement goes much further towards doing so than the group has ever done before, despite little prospect of early prisoner releases in return.
There is undoubtedly still a big reservoir of support in the Basque Country for Batasuna’s new departure. But even if Eta does finally quit the scene, the radicals still face the huge challenge of Spanish public opinion.
Not only most Spaniards, but also many Basques, are deeply hostile to renegotiating the status of the Basque Country under any circumstances.
Nevertheless, the dream of a new, democratic and peaceful scenario is infinitely preferable to the nightmare engendered by the bitter conflict of the last 50 years.
Paddy Woodworth is author of Dirty War, Clean Hands: Eta, the GAL and Spanish Democracy(Yale 2003) and The Basque Country(Oxford 2008)