Two bombings by the Basque terrorists shattered a widespread belief that the group no longer had such a lethal capacity, writes PADDY WOODWORTH
ETA HASN’T gone away, you know. That, in a nutshell, was the message which the Basque terrorist group was sending with two dramatic bombings this week, on the occasion of its 50th anniversary.
The killing of two civil guards in Mallorca on Thursday, along with a massive car bomb against a civil guard barracks in Burgos on Tuesday, ticks many of the sad boxes familiar from Eta’s past campaigns. Few observers thought Eta still retained such a lethal capacity.
The explosion at Burgos echoes a similar attack in Zaragoza in 1987, which killed 11 people, including five children.
The Mallorca attacks, so near to its beaches, recall Eta’s many summer campaigns. These aim to raise its international profile and damage the Spanish tourist industry, without the bad publicity of killing foreign tourists. The bombs were also close to the summer residence of the royal family, a coveted Eta target.
The civil guard bore the brunt of both attacks. This paramilitary police force, still closely associated in many Basque minds with the Franco dictatorship, was also the object of Eta’s very first killing in 1968. The civil guard gave Eta its first “martyr” by killing the perpetrator.
Those events launched the so-called “spiral of action-repression-action” between Eta and the Spanish state. Sometimes the state has fed this spiral with terrorist campaigns of its own, especially the notorious 1980s GAL death squads, which presented Eta with a significant propaganda victory.
The current centre-left government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero started out very differently five years ago, by courageously offering talks to Eta in the teeth of fierce opposition from Spanish conservatives. To the bitter disappointment of many of its own supporters, Eta derailed the subsequent peace process with an airport car bomb in late 2006.
Zapatero’s ministry for the interior has since pursued an aggressive and – until this week – apparently successful police and judicial strategy against the group and its supporters. Four alleged military bosses of Eta have been arrested within the last year. New Eta units have been repeatedly arrested before they could carry out a single attack.
Eta’s alleged political wing, Batasuna, had been banned in 2003. Since then, a series of political parties and civil associations allegedly linked to Eta have been banned and their leaders jailed. This has raised some serious human rights questions but – again apparently – was quashing the more obvious manifestations of support for Eta on streets in the Basque Country.
Last March, Zapatero’s Socialist Party (PSOE) scored a historic electoral victory by displacing the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV) from the Basque autonomous government. The PNV has been accused, sometimes fairly, sometimes not, of failing to use the autonomous police force effectively against Eta.
With state and Basque police now under a single political authority, PSOE politicians seemed confident that the final defeat of Eta was in sight.
In June, Eta killed a police inspector with a limpet bomb near Bilbao. But it was probably more significant that the group had just concluded a three-year internet consultation with its members, which resulted in a very hawkish “five-year plan”.
The ministry of the interior still argued yesterday that this week’s bombings were a desperate show of strength by an organisation on its last legs. But the attacks indicate that Eta now has two efficient units operating deep within Spain for the first time in several years. If you couple that with a survey showing that 15 per cent of teenage Basques still support Eta, there is a clear prospect that the group can continue to draw on a reservoir of popular support.
Many older Basques, while often disgusted by Eta’s methods, still quietly insist that the issue of self-determination, and not merely a criminal conspiracy by Eta, remains the source of the conflict. This view is utterly dismissed at all levels in Madrid.
One aspect of Eta’s new plan offers a glimmer of hope, though at a very high price. The group now intends to add the moderate wing of the PNV to its target list. Txema Montero, a former Batasuna MEP who is now close to the PNV, told this writer recently: “The beginning of the end of Eta came in the 1990s when it began killing Basque PSOE and PP [conservative] politicians. The end of the end of Eta will come if it decides to kill Basque nationalists, because then it will be rejected by . . . Basque society.”
Paddy Woodworth is the author of two books on the Basque Country. See www.paddywoodworth.com