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Geneva: short, chaotic ceremony as terror group ETA formally ends armed fight

After a 60-year armed struggle, Basque terror group ETA on Thursday announced it was dissolving in a ceremony lasting a matter of minutes.

Published: 3 May 2018 18:23 CEST
Geneva: short, chaotic ceremony as terror group ETA formally ends armed fight
David Harland, Executive Director of the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue. Screen grab: AFP

Following a week of rumours and speculation that the group was preparing to formally declare its dissolution, the announcement was made at the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue (HD) in Geneva. 

The centre, which for the past 15 years has been involved in mediating the Basque conflict, had attempted to keep the whole event under wraps.

It had refused to respond to media enquiries or to confirm any kind of ceremony would take place.

But after a leaked letter appeared to confirm the rumours Wednesday and media began camping out in front of the small centre, set in an idyllic park on the shores of Lake Geneva, its plans seemed to unravel.

The centre had invited only the BBC, Swiss broadcaster RTS and a Basque television station to witness the ceremony, but under pressure agreed to allow in other journalists, who at the last minute tumbled into a room full of dignitaries. 

“I can say that as of 1400 hours today, the 3rd of May, ETA has ceased to exist,” David Harland, the executive director of the HD centre, told the crowd, before reading an official statement from ETA.

No members of the group were present, although they simultaneously published an audio recording of the statement read in several languages by veteran, high-level ETA member Jose Antonio Urrutikoetxea — better known as Josu Ternera and who remains wanted by police — and jailed ETA militant Marixol Iparraguirre.

Created in 1959 at the height of Francisco Franco's dictatorship, ETA was blamed for hundreds of killings and kidnappings in its fight for an independent Basque homeland in northern Spain and southwest France.

In what it said was its final statement, the group announced it had “completely dismantled all its structures” and “put an end to all its political activity”.

“ETA wishes to end a cycle of the conflict between the Basque Country and the Spanish and French states,” it said.

As he wrapped up his short speech, Harland reflected on how suddenly ETA, which has been blamed for the deaths of at least 829 people during its armed campaign, had ceased to exist.

“That's it. It took us 15 years to get here, but it's over in 15 minutes,” he said.

He asked the guests to gather for a drink in the adjourning room, and waved out the media.

“Okay,” he said. “Thank you very much for coming. That is the end of ETA.”

Earlier on Thursday, Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy said Thursday there would be “no impunity” for ETA's crimes even though the Basque separatist group has committed to fully disbanding after more than four decades of violence.

“No matter what ETA does, there is no room for impunity for its crimes. ETA  can announce its disappearance but its crimes do not disappear nor do the efforts to pursue and punish them,” he said in a televised speech in the northern Spanish city of Logrono.

“We don't owe them anything and we have nothing to thank them for,” Rajoy added.

The legacy of ETA

Attacks by ETA and retaliation by Spanish state death squads traumatised Spain, peaking in the 1980s and 1990s.   

But weakened in recent years by the arrests of its senior leaders, it announced a permanent ceasefire in 2011 and began formally surrendering its arms last year.

On April 20th it asked forgiveness from its victims for the first time for the “pain” caused by its decades-long campaign of violence.   

Victims' campaigners complained that the call for forgiveness did not extend to those the group considered legitimate targets, such as police officers and politicians.

Some 300 ETA members are imprisoned in Spain, France and Portugal and up to 100 are still on the run, according to prisoners' families' group Forum Social.   

The group has demanded that prisoners be moved to prisons closer to their families after the end of ETA.   

International mediators are organising a peace conference in southwest France on May 4th.

BOOKS

How a remarkable novel is helping Spain come to terms with the Basque Country’s violent past

While politicians remain at loggerheads, the arts bring resolution to the Basque Country's long history of violence, writes Caroline Gray.

Published: 8 August 2019 12:55 CEST
How a remarkable novel is helping Spain come to terms with the Basque Country’s violent past

Western Europe’s last remaining home-grown terrorist organisation finally ceased operations in 2011 when Basque separatist group ETA declared a permanent ceasefire. And yet the decades of violence continue to cast a long shadow over Basque society and political life. As politicians on both sides remain as antagonistic as ever, novelists and other writers are taking on the challenge of tackling the subject with far more eloquence and nuance, telling stories that could provide a much-needed form of remembrance, catharsis and understanding.

Fernando Aramburu’s novel Patria (“Fatherland”) is a stellar example – and sets the bar high for others to follow. First published in Spanish in September 2016, it has reached a wider audience than novels on the subject written in Basque, and it has topped the bestseller lists – not only in the Basque region, but also in Spain every month so far this year. This is the novel that Spaniards are reading on the metro or bus on their way to work and packing in their suitcases to take on holiday. Translations into several other languages are now underway, including an English edition set for publication in 2019, the author told me.

 

In the past decade, Spain has been coming to terms with its 20th-century history of civil war and dictatorship, ever since the historical memory law of 2007 put an end to the unwritten agreement known as the “pact of forgetting” that had facilitated the transition to democracy.

Now, Aramburu has recognised that in the wake of ETA’s permanent ceasefire, there is another story that needs to be told and remembered in a sensitive and reconciliatory fashion. This cannot be achieved by politicians fighting over how best to facilitate ETA’s disbandment and address the legacy it leaves. It must be writers and other cultural practitioners who do that.

A history of violence

Originally founded in 1959 in opposition to Spanish dictator Franco’s suppression of regional identities, ETA persisted with its campaign of violence well into the 21st century, long after Spain’s transition to democracy. The separatist group has not killed since 2010, but its disarmament was protracted until April this year and its full disbandment remains pending. Moreover, politicians and society remain divided over controversial issues such as the treatment of ETA prisoners, who under Spanish law have their rights reduced and are subject to policies such as dispersion.

For too long, the Basque “conflict” was primarily portrayed, in a misleadingly simplistic fashion, as pitting Spain (or “the Spanish state”, as Basque nationalists put it) against the Basques. ETA itself, and the wider social and political movement linked to it, was responsible for propounding this vision to justify its existence. But sectors of the Spanish right then compounded the error by associating all Basque nationalism with ETA for their own political motives. In reality, however, one of the biggest tragedies caused by ETA is that it also pitted Basques against Basques.

Patria eloquently draws attention to this through its depiction of the impact on a typical small Basque village (which could be any one of many), focusing in particular on two once closely knit families that are torn apart when the father of one family ends up an ETA target while the eldest son of the other joins the terrorists. It is not only the relationship between the two families that suffers, but relations among parents and siblings within each individual family, too.

Aramburu is sensitive and sympathetic towards ETA’s victims and their families, and he conveys their suffering with tremendous poignancy. His real achievement, however, is to do so without descending into facile moralising or politicising. He shows the full complexity of the tragedy by seeing things from different perspectives.

This includes reflecting the way in which many naïve young Basques, brought up in pro-ETA towns and villages and subject to intense peer pressure, ended up buying into ETA’s ideology and somewhat unthinkingly obeying its orders.

Terrorism is unacceptable in any circumstances, but Spain’s way of dealing with it has not always been appropriate either – and Aramburu does not shy away from depicting the torture used on ETA prisoners or the violence wrought by the GAL, Spain’s covert paramilitary death squads back in the 1980s.

Family tragedies

This is first and foremost a novel of excellent literary quality that the reader is compelled to keep reading to find out what happens to the two families and whether there is any hope of reconciliation after ETA’s reign of devastation. The novel starts with ETA’s ceasefire and then darts back and forth to different periods of time in each chapter, telling snippets of the story in a non-chronological and non-linear fashion, keeping the reader waiting until the very end to get the complete picture.

Aramburu never intended for the novel to be political or didactic, but precisely for that reason, the end result can actually serve a much better purpose than most intentionally didactic novels. Propagandistic Basque novels portraying ETA terrorists as heroes or martyrs have tended to be intensely bad literature. But a brilliantly written novel such as Patria provokes the reader to think and reflect without him or her necessarily realising it.

For Basque citizens, the novel provides a sensitive portrayal of their community and its recent history. Perhaps even more significant, however, is the way in which the novel can contribute to an understanding in wider Spanish society of the complex social situation in the Basque Country prior to, and in the wake of, ETA’s ceasefire – something which is often quite misunderstood, due in part to Spanish politicians’ simplification of issues for electoral purposes. Once translations of the novel start to appear they will promote understanding even beyond Spain’s borders, while also providing a compelling read.

Through its popularity, Patria has far surpassed the author’s own expectations. Aramburu himself has aptly described this work as escaping his creative control as it becomes a social phenomenon with a life of its own.

Spain may have been rather late in confronting the ghosts of the civil war and Franco period after years of attempting to brush them under the carpet, but lessons have been learned. Patria provides a healthy dose of understanding and remembrance about the Basque Country’s violent past by a writer who is well aware of the need to talk of the past sensitively, all the more so when politicians remain at loggerheads.

Patria has been translated into English under the title Homeland and is available on Amazon.es HERE

By Caroline Gray, Lecturer in Politics and Spanish, Aston University

This article was first published in The Conversation. Read the original.

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