Spain struggles to exorcise Eta’s ghosts

It is four years this week since the terrorist group Eta announced the definitive end of its armed campaign for an independent Basque state. After the years of violence that left more than 800 people dead and Basque society bitterly divided, this northern region of Spain is embracing peace.

"One of the most notable phenomena of the recent history of our country is the way in which over four decades of terror have been left behind in just four years," Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, who was the Socialist interior minister when Eta announced its ceasefire on October 20, 2011, wrote in El País this week.

The last time Eta killed on Spanish soil was in 2009, when it targeted two civil guards in Mallorca. The organisation still exists, but the vast majority of its members or those accused of membership – about 400 people – are in prison while the rest, according to the current interior minister, Jorge Fernández Díaz, “would fit in a minibus”.

Some progress is also tangible in the political arena. Bildu, the pro-independence party seen as the successor to Eta’s outlawed political arm, Batasuna, has been legalised and now governs many Basque towns.

Yet despite the four years of official peace Eta remains a thorny and divisive issue. Consolidation of the peace and attempts at reconciliation in the Basque Country have been frozen out of mainstream national politics.

Last week the leader of the Basque arm of the conservative Popular Party, Arantza Quiroga, resigned just days after presenting a controversial proposal to promote political coexistence in the region. Quiroga’s initiative suggested including Bildu in the process, without requiring the party to condemn Eta’s past violence – a long-standing demand of the political right.

Criticism of the plan by influential victims’ groups and senior figures in the Popular Party, which governs Spain, made Quiroga’s position untenable. Although in the Basque Country the Popular Party – or PP – has relatively cordial relations with Bildu, in Madrid the former still tends to see the nationalist party as an extension of Eta and a political pariah.

“The Basque PP has been in the vanguard of the fight against Eta terrorism, and now it should be in the vanguard of the search for peaceful coexistence and the delegitimising of terrorism,” Quiroga said on resigning.

Two of the biggest obstacles to the kind of reconciliation she envisaged are the lack of a disarmament process by Eta and the government policy of deliberately holding members of the group in jails hundreds of kilometres from their homes.

Jesús Eguiguren, a Basque Socialist who was involved in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to negotiate with Eta under the previous government, believes that the current administration is blocking progress.

“This government acts as if Eta were still killing,” he told one interviewer this week. “This government maintains the fiction that the terrorism continues.”

The central government of Mariano Rajoy has refused to make any move that the hawkish right wing of the Popular Party and terrorism victims’ groups might interpret as a concession to Eta. When the group handed over a small cache of weapons to an international commission as a first step towards disarmament, early last year, the government dismissed it as “more of the same”. The process has gone no further since, and the only announcement Madrid says it would welcome from Eta is that of the organisation’s disbandment.

Similarly, the Rajoy administration has been rigid in its penitentiary policy, refusing to move prisoners closer to the Basque Country so that their families can visit them more easily.

“The government’s penitentiary policy is less flexible now than when Eta was active,” says one official in the region’s government, which is led by the moderate Basque Nationalist Party. This official also rues the lack of co-operation between the central government and its Basque counterpart.

“When Eta was active, historically the Spanish and Basque governments used to work together. But now it’s not active there’s nothing.”

Rajoy’s government is not expected to relax its rigid Basque policy, especially with a general election approaching in December. The region’s government, meanwhile, is known to be hoping for a Socialist victory, believing that party would be more proactive and less in hock to victims’ groups.

But one of the biggest barriers to the longed-for bedding down of peace is the stance of Bildu. The party has officially rejected violence, but as long as it refuses to condemn Eta’s past killings it will struggle to gain mainstream acceptance in national politics. It could be some time before that issue, and those related to prisoners and disarmament, are resolved.

In the meantime Basques have plenty to celebrate. One example is San Sebastián. The bloodiest city during the years of violence, where Eta killed nearly 100 people, next year completes its transformation into a modern, peaceful hub by becoming the European capital of culture.