Continuing Violence Shatters Ray of Hope in Spain’s Basque Region : Terrorism: Murderous attack by extremists was aimed at gaining concessions as 1992 Barcelona Olympics approach. Instead it triggers national fury.

Sabadell is an old and quiet textile town a little more than 10 miles beyond the hills of Barcelona. Its Communist mayor is popular and many of the 200,000 inhabitants take pride in some of his works: a new parking garage under the main plaza, a restoration of the imposing city hall, the selection of the local stadium as one of the sites for soccer games in the 1992 Barcelona Olympics.

A lot of workers from other parts of Spain live here alongside native Catalans. But there is no friction. The national police do not go around in armored cars as they do in the troubled Basque region.

On Saturday, Dec. 8, a little before 5 p.m., a police van left headquarters for the local soccer stadium. The officers inside were to help keep order at the Sabadell versus Malaga match that evening. At a corner just a few blocks away, the driver swerved to avoid a car parked too far into the street. A young man on a motorcycle pressed a button. The parked car, loaded with more than 60 pounds of plastic explosive, erupted into a fearsome cyclone of hurtling metal.

Six policemen died instantly. Ambulances rushed two other officers and seven wounded passersby to the hospital. One of the civilians lay near death with a lug of metal in his chest. The motorcyclist sped away easily.

The slaughter was another attack by the Basque separatist organization ETA. The killers took two more lives during the next week, increasing the total of their victims to 23 for 1990 as the year drew to a close.

But the Sabadell killings rang with special terror. They heightened the gnawing fear in Spain that the Basque terrorists, weaker than ever before, hunted down in their former sanctuary across the border in France, still had enough organization and murderers and cold hatred and warped ideology left to wander far from the Basque region and threaten the 1992 Barcelona Olympics.

Soon after the attack, the government announced a special meeting in Barcelona late this month of all those responsible for Olympic security.

“I am confident,” said Mayor Pasqual Maragall of Barcelona, “that in 1992 we will have the best intelligence and resources at our side to confront this danger.”

ETA clearly wants to force the Spanish government into pre-Olympics negotiations that would give the separatists important concessions in exchange for ending the violence. ETA evidently believed that the Sabadell attack, a murderous example of what it could do near Barcelona, would frighten Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez into negotiations.

But Spain’s fury seemed to work in another direction. Gonzalez, who reportedly had sent an emissary to the Dominican Republic a few months ago to start informal talks with ETA leaders, proclaimed: “We are not going to have political negotiations with the terrorist organization ETA in any manner.”

At the funeral of the slain policemen, Interior Minister Jose Luis Corcuera ridiculed Basque separatists who look on ETA members as gudaris or Basque soldiers.

“If they are gudaris, “ the minister said, “they are gudaris of crap.”

In an angry column, Juan Tomas de Salas, publisher of the weekly newsmagazine Cambio 16, described ETA as “a band of gunslingers led by semi-imbeciles.”

There was an ironic, wistful note. The latest attack came at a time of some optimism within the small Basque region. But the terror and the fury of Sabadell smothered the signs of optimism and laid bare once more the gnarled and seemingly intractable problem of Basque separatism in Spain.

Only 2.2 million people live in the three provinces on the Atlantic that make up the Basque region of Spain, an area a little larger than the state of Delaware. Anyone taking a drive through the valleys of the Pyrenees quickly senses how different the Basque countryside is from the rest of Spain.

White sheep still fleck the lustrous green hills beneath the snowcaps of nearby mountains. White stone houses cluster around medieval churches in a procession of villages. Heavy-set men in black berets gather without women in bars and cafes and gossip in Euskera, the strange Basque language that bears no relation to any other in Europe and may have been the original language of Iberia when the Roman conquerors came with their Latin. When a stranger enters from the road, the men in the bars and cafe turn cold and suspicious, especially if they hear Spanish from the newcomer.

Yet these idyllic, almost cliched villages in the rural heartland are home to only a small number of Basques. The Industrial Revolution transformed the region at the turn of the century and made it the center of Spain’s iron and steel industry. Most people in the Basque country now live in industrial towns. Almost half the total population of the region, in fact, lives in or around the main port of Bilbao.

Many residents are not Basques at all but immigrants from poorer parts of Spain who have come to the Basque factories for work. The presence of the immigrants and the gradual movement of Basques from the countryside to the towns has weakened the Basque language. According to the Basque regional government, 58% of the population does not speak Euskera.

The weak position of the Basque language may account, in part, for the seeming desperation and zeal of many Basque nationalists. Another factor is the memory of Generalissimo Francisco Franco’s repression.

Franco, the dictator who died in 1975, looked on the Basque country as an enemy land and a culture to be suppressed. The struggle against this suppression evoked widespread sympathy. ETA, in fact, was praised throughout Spain when its first assassinations brought down powerful lieutenants of Franco. But many Spaniards expected ETA to lay down its arms once democracy was restored and were shocked to discover that ETA regards all rulers in Madrid, whether authoritarian or democratic, as the enemy.

Spaniards had forgotten that extreme Basque nationalism was twisted by its political legacy from the 19th Century. The guru of Basque nationalism, Sabino Arana, had preached a racist xenophobia, even admonishing his followers not to sully the Basque language by teaching it to other Spaniards. This philosophy, which made it almost impossible to absorb immigrants into the culture, actually weakened the Basques and made nationalists even more desperate to assert their Basqueness.

In the last two decades, ETA, which takes its name from the initials for the words Basque Homeland and Freedom in Euskera, has killed more than 700 people, mostly soldiers and police, mostly since the death of Franco. It has concentrated its attacks within the Basque region and in Madrid. But, in league with a Catalan independence group that has since given up violence, ETA killed 21 people in the bombing of a Barcelona supermarket in 1987. Yet, even counting this attack, ETA violence has declined since 1980, the bloodiest year, when 120 victims died.

ETA has been hurt by the enmity of two former sources of support: The French police, who once looked on its activities as almost legitimate acts against dictatorship and cultural suppression, turned on the organization in the mid-1980s and made it difficult for the terrorists to use the Basque areas of France as a sanctuary.

Perhaps just as important, moderate Basque nationalists, who once winked at ETA terrorism as a useful form of pressure on Madrid to obtain concessions for Basque autonomy, have finally decided the bloodshed must stop. In 1988, all political parties in the Basque country but one signed a pact condemning ETA and its violence. This isolated ETA and its supporters, making it clear they were out of the mainstream of Basque nationalism.

The decline in violence coincided with a period of political stability. Since 1986, the Basque Nationalist Party, a conservative party that represents moderate Basque nationalists, and the Socialist Party, which draws its strength from non-Basque workers, have run the autonomous Basque regional government in coalition. In the latest elections in October, the Basque Nationalists won 22 seats and the Socialists 16--just enough for a majority of the 75 seats in the Basque parliament. The two parties are now negotiating a new coalition.

All this generated relative optimism. In a recent survey of the Basque country by the newspaper El Pais, 37% of those polled believed that the political situation had improved in the last four years; only 15% believed it had worsened. The percentage who described the political situation in the Basque country as bad dropped by half since a similar poll in 1986.

Yet troubling signs remained. Herri Batasuna, the radical party that acts as apologist for ETA, had won more than 18% of the vote in the October elections, its highest percentage ever in regional elections, retaining its place as the third-largest party in the Basque country. And a poll by the newspaper La Vanguardia showed that more than half the people in the Basque region believe it will be many years before ETA terrorism comes to an end.

To make matters worse, confrontation has become a kind of way of life among younger Basques. The University of the Basque Country, which has 46,000 students on various campuses, has been in turmoil for much of the school year because of student and teacher strikes.

Fernando Savater, a professor of philosophy, said the turmoil seemed to come out of the tendency in the Basque country to always choose “the radical and violent way of confrontation.”

“There is always one group ready to assert total opposition to everything proposed,” he said, “and to convert sensible and reasonable demands into unsensible and unreasonable demands.”

Some Spaniards believe that the only hope for peace lies in negotiations between the government and ETA. Herri Batasuna often cries out for this, a sure sign that ETA wants to talk. But this presents complex problems.

For one thing, the Gonzalez government tried negotiations with ETA leaders in Algeria in 1987. But these fell apart when ETA terrorists, even while the talks were going on, resumed the violence.

It is hard, in any case, to see what can be negotiated. ETA has long demanded amnesty for all convicted ETA prisoners in Spanish jails; the absorption of the province of Navarre into the Basque region; control of all soldiers on Basque soil by the Basque government; the right of self-determination and eventual independence.

The Spanish government seems prepared to talk about shortening sentences for ETA prisoners who pledge to lead a normal life in society. But it does not intend to agree to the dismemberment of the Spanish state to assuage terrorists whose demands are supported by no more than one out of five people in the region.

Moreover, the Basque region already has an autonomous regional government that controls education, culture, tax collection and the local police. If more powers are transferred from the central government to the region, that is something that Madrid intends to negotiate with the regional government, not ETA.

Yet talks may be the only sure way to prevent attempts at violence during the 1992 Olympics. Perhaps it is true, as some analysts suggest, that ETA needs a face-saving way to give up its long and futile struggle.