Spain yesterday celebrated the 21st anniversary of its 1978 constitution. That constitution was the result of a remarkable consensus which brought about a transition from dictatorship to democracy and reconciled the bitter enmities of the Spanish Civil War. All of them, it seems, except one. Yesterday's celebrations were overshadowed by the announcement by ETA, the group which has pursued Basque independence by terrorist means, that its 14-month ceasefire was over. Its deadline expired last Saturday, at the end of a week which saw a former IRA leader take up a ministry in Northern Ireland. The contrast between progress in the two peace processes could hardly have been more striking, a fact which probably influenced the timing of ETA's decision.
Mercifully, no armed action has materialised so far. The declaration which announced the reasons for ending the ceasefire, appears to be deliberately vague as to whether ETA actually intends to resume violence in the immediate future.
It seems more likely that the announcement is a tactical ploy, an attempt to persuade both the group's moderate nationalist allies, and the Madrid and Paris governments, to advance the peace process along the lines ETA considers appropriate.
It is easy to say that persuasion by the threat of terror has no place in any democratic negotiation. ETA is operating according to authoritarian ideas, inherited from a cocktail of Marxist-Leninism and radical ethnic nationalism. Yet the principle that democrats should never negotiate with terrorists has been bent or glossed over, with positive results, in instances too numerous to list here, from Israel to Belfast. It is dangerous to generalise, but it seems that some accommodation must be made with terrorist groups when they can demonstrate a persistently significant level of popular support. This in turn may demonstrate the presence of a deep-seated grievance, apparently invisible to the rulers of a democracy, but patently obvious to the section of the population that lends their support to armed struggle. Two organisations, the Provisional IRA and ETA, have remained active for 30 years, and their political fronts consistently poll between 10 and 20 per cent of their electorates.
The primary responsibility for any return to violence in the Basque Country must be ETA's alone. But it should also be said that the Spanish (and French) governments have failed to respond flexibly and imaginatively to the ceasefire. The issue of ETA prisoners has been badly handled, and the arrest in France of two ETA's top negotiators seems cack-handed. Meanwhile, the moderate Basque nationalist parties have also failed to fully seize the opportunity offered by ETA's offer to abandon arms.
At the core of the Basque issue lies a complex knot of conflicting loyalties, further complicated by the fact that the problem overlaps two jurisdictions. ETA says it would accept the result of a referendum on independence, encompassing the seven provinces they claim as Basque. It should not be beyond the skills of politicians of goodwill to find a formula that might meet that challenge.