`All hours strike," reads a proverb inscribed in a cemetery in the French-Basque village of Sare, "the last one kills". The last hour very nearly struck last week for an entire family in another cemetery, in the Spanish-Basque town of Zarautz. The father, sister and other relatives of Jose Ignacio Iruretagoyena, who was assassinated by ETA three years ago, had gathered to lay an anniversary floral tribute on his grave. They were accompanied, in private, by several leaders of the conservative Partido Popular, which Iruretagoyena had represented as a local councillor.
The ceremony passed off without incident. Hours later, an anonymous phone caller told police that ETA, the Basque separatist group, had planted a bomb in the grave opposite Iruretagoyena's, but that it had failed to explode. The explosives, and the shrapnel in which they were wrapped, were so well hidden that it took the police several hours to find them. The controlled explosion which followed damaged more than 200 grave-stones, and brought human remains to the surface.
Even in the annals of ETA, an organisation which has killed some 800 people since 1968, and 23 since it ended a 14month truce just a year ago, this attempted massacre seemed particularly horrifying. The graveyard is a special kind of sanctuary in most cultures, but in few more so than in the Basque Country, where Christian - and pre-Christian - attitudes to the dead are still powerful. "They tried to kill Jose Ignacio twice," said one of the family when they learned what had happened.
No organisation is more conscious of these attitudes than ETA, whose own members' funerals often take the form of dramatic, quasi-pagan rites of passage. Imagine the IRA's farewell to Bobby Sands, directed by Macnas, and you will begin to get an idea of how Basque radicals say their own goodbyes. Four years ago, I interviewed relatives of two young ETA members who had been kidnapped, tortured, killed and buried in quicklime by the Spanish security forces during the dirty war against ETA in the 1980s. The most heartfelt of the many legitimate complaints they laid against the authorities was reserved for the fact that their families were brutally attacked by police in a Tolosa cemetery, when they finally won the right to bury what remained of their dead.
The most shocking thing about the Zarautz bomb is this: the horror it evoked was, almost certainly, understood and desired by its perpetrators.
Had the bomb gone off, ETA would no doubt have claimed that the intended victims were the Partido Popular leaders, targeted by the group for many years for their opposition to Basque nationalism. ETA might even have expressed regret at any collateral damage to the dead man's family and friends, and to the holy ground on which they stood. The fact is, however, that such attacks fall fully within the sharply radicalised strategy developed by Herri Batasuna, the political movement close to ETA, since the early 1990s. This is summed up by a grim slogan: "Socialise the suffering". As long as the Basque conflict remains unresolved, ETA supporters argue, all citizens must share some of the pain experienced by their militants and prisoners.
This strategy has been found expression in ETA's ever longer list of "legitimate targets", which now includes academics and journalists. Dozens of university professors and newspaper reporters who have been critical of ETA must now attempt to live their professional and personal lives shadowed by bodyguards. This is not paranoia. Jose Luis Lopez de Lacalle, a 60-year-old journalist who had spent five years in jail for his opposition to Franco's dictatorship, was shot dead in the street last May. He had refused to accept police protection. Mikel Azurmendi, a professor of anthropology, is the author of a thoughtful critique of Basque nationalism entitled, The Patriotic Wound (an injury which he believes is largely self-inflicted). Like many prominent Basques now in their 40s and 50s, he was himself a member of ETA in his youth, and was exiled during the Franco period. Last summer, he decided to go into a second exile in the US, rather than continue working in an atmosphere where his name appeared painted on his faculty wall, framed in the crossed hairs of a gunsight.
You do not even have to be particularly prominent to attract such attention. Last November, Aurora Intxausti, a middle-ranking reporter with El Pais, Spain's newspaper of record, found a bomb in her post. It very nearly killed her, her husband - who is a TV journalist - and their one-year-old baby. Intxausti, despite her impeccably Basque surname, has had to leave her native region, with her family. The human rights organisation, Reporters Without Frontiers, had already described the situation for journalists in the Basque Country as "untenable" before this attack took place.
Fear and loathing creep into daily experience in less dramatic but nonetheless corrosive ways. Last week, I went for dinner with two Basque journalists. Two years ago, we would have taken a relaxed paseo through San Sebastian's seductive old quarter, sampling its marvellous range of pinchos before getting down to some serious eating and drinking in one of the dozens of restaurants which crowd its maze of streets.
On this occasion, an unspoken decision was taken to stroll around its margins, under the discreet protection of two bodyguards. There was no casual dropping into and out of bars, an essential part of Basque social interaction. I was told that my reservation in a restaurant a few hundred yards away would have to wait for happier days. Being able to choose where to eat is a relatively minor freedom, but it seemed particularly galling that these people, both themselves veterans of the anti-Franco resistance, could not go at will into one of the most delightful areas of their own city.
"It's easier for us, precisely because we are veterans," says one of them. "It is much tougher on the younger journalists, who did not know the Franco period."
Most Basques do not experience the threat of violence so directly, but very few go unaware of the conflict. Teenage supporters of ETA have made the kale borroka (street struggle) part of the local ambience. Groups of youths, often as young 14 or 15, frequently wearing balaclavas, set out almost nightly to burn ATMs, telephone boxes, buses, and social clubs belonging to other parties. This choreographed intifada is the second phase of the strategy of "socialising the suffering". The attacks seem calculated to maintain and intensify levels of fear and social division, which might otherwise evaporate in the prosperous, consumerist culture of what ETA's opponents consider to be a dynamic region of democratic Spain.
Careful with the language here. Too late already. It sometimes seems that there is hardly a word, let alone a sentence, one can write about the Basque Country which does not deeply offend at least one of the parties involved. We are in Derry/Londonderry territory here, with a vengeance. References at the beginning of this article to the "French Basque Country" and the "Spanish Basque Country" are unacceptable to Basque nationalists, who refer to Iparralde (the northern part) and Hegoalde (the southern part). Hegoalde is not - or should not be - in Spain, and what others call democracy is, for the radical nationalists, a continuation of Franco's fascism by other means.