THE SUDDEN surge in Eta’s terrorist campaign for an independent Basque Country has surprised and disturbed many observers, not least in Spain’s interior ministry. The ministry, along with the French authorities, has enjoyed a series of significant police successes against Eta over the last year, including the detention of four successive alleged chiefs of the group’s armed operations. Meanwhile, Eta units have been repeatedly arrested almost as soon as they had been formed, often without carrying out a single attack.
While the group has not yet claimed responsibility for last week’s bombings, which cost two lives and caused dozens of injuries, the modus operandi leaves little doubt that they were the work of Eta, possibly as a macabre “celebration” of the 50th anniversary of the group’s foundation. A car bomb was detonated without warning outside a civil guard barracks in Burgos on Tuesday, causing massive damage and many minor injuries. In Palma Nova, Mallorca, on Thursday, two civil guards were killed by a limpet bomb attached to their vehicle, also near their barracks.
The fact that the bombings occurred in two cities hundreds of kilometres apart within three days, against well protected targets, suggests that there are now at least two effective Eta units operating in Spain for the first time in several years. This is a prospect which causes justified alarm in Spain, where a certain complacency that the group was close to final defeat had become widespread. There is no doubt that Eta is at one of its weakest points, not only in terms of arms and experienced activists but also in terms of political support. Many former sympathisers believe that “armed struggle” offers no way forward for the Basque independence movement. But they have been unable to persuade a young and radical leadership to abandon terrorism.
Eta has overcome severe crises in the past, especially in the 1990s when it regrouped after a long period of quiescence following the arrest of its entire leadership. In any case, there is still a big enough pool of young militants to keep filling at least some of the places vacated by the recent waves of arrests, which have brought the total number of Eta-related prisoners to 750.
The 2003 banning of Batasuna, a political party linked to Eta, has deprived the radicals of broad representation on Basque town and city councils. The ban, and a rather indiscriminate “judicial offensive” against other Basque organisations, has been questioned by human rights organisations, but the ban was recently endorsed by the European Court of Human Rights at Strasbourg.
The hope must be that these attacks are not the start of a new sustained campaign by the group but are, as the interior ministry claimed, simply a last desperate attempt to convince both its supporters and the Spanish government that Eta is still a significant force. Clearly though, there are still Basques who believe that self-determination for the region is a prize worth fighting for. Much will depend on how many Eta can call on for such actions and the success enjoyed by the police in catching the culprits and their leaders.