TERRORISM : Basque Militants Still a Threat to Fair, Olympics, French Fear

If you cut off the head of the main Basque terrorist organization, does the body die?

That’s the question that French authorities are asking in the nervous weeks leading up to the Summer Olympic Games in Barcelona. The Olympics, which begin in July, and the World’s Fair in Seville, which opened last month, provide a potential world stage for the small but bloody Basque ETA armed separatist organization. It uses France as its base for attacks into neighboring Spain.

Unprecedented cooperation between French and Spanish officials has resulted in a series of spectacular recent arrests of Basque terrorist leaders.

Police in this rugged mountain region that is home to 3 million Basques on both sides of the French-Spanish border cautiously note that there has not been a terrorist attack by the ETA (acronym for Homeland and Freedom in the Basque language) since the arrest of three key officials in the French coastal town of Bidart on March 29.

But French Ministry of Interior officials fear that independent commando units of the terrorist group still have the ability to strike. “In more than 20 years of existence, the ETA activists have become professionals in clandestine violence,” said one official. “We know that we have deeply disabled the organization, but we cannot claim to have stopped it completely.”

Another important question, the official said, is whether the ETA has the political will to mount an attack during the two-week Summer Olympic Games that begin July 25.

The image of the separatist organization, which prides itself on targeting only the military and police, suffered badly after a May 29, 1991, attack on a Spanish police post at Vich in which three children were killed. The risk of civilian deaths in Barcelona or Seville would also be great.

“They probably still have the capability to do something,” the official said, “but it is not clear that it is in their interest.”

Pierre Sein, a journalist in Bayonne who has followed the Basque movement closely, observed of the ETA, “If they do something in Barcelona, it will be because it was programmed a long time ago.”

Since it was begun in 1968 by a small band of Basque intellectuals, the ETA, the military wing of the much broader Basque separatist movement, has claimed more than 700 victims.

The Basque militants once enjoyed support in both France and Spain because of their daring guerrilla activities against Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, including the 1973 assassination of Prime Minister Luis Carrero Blanco, Franco’s heir apparent. But since Spanish King Juan Carlos I helped install a democratic system after Franco’s death in 1975, their support has dwindled, particularly in France.

Under urging from the Socialist government of Spanish Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez, a close political ally of French Socialist President Francois Mitterrand, French officials intensified efforts to root out Basque terrorists living in France beginning in 1984.

French efforts included expulsion of known Spanish Basque political leaders and suspected militants from the southern Basque region to other parts of France. More than 40 French Basques with alleged links to the terrorists also are in French jails, Interior Ministry officials say. Karmelo Landa, a member of the European Parliament from the Spanish Basque region, estimates the number of jailed French Basques at more than 100.

The most dramatic French breakthrough came March 29 in Bidart, near Biarritz, when police arrested ETA chief Francisco Mugica Garmendia, 39, alias Artapalo. Also arrested were the ETA’s purported ideological leader, Jose Luis Alvarez, alias Txelis, and logistics chief Joseba Arregui Errostarbe, alias Fitipaldi.

A month later, French airport police nabbed the ETA’s main clandestine fund-raiser, Sabino Euba-Senarusabeitia, alias Pelo Pintxo, at Paris’ Charles de Gaulle Airport.

There has never been an attack by Basque separatists inside France. The overwhelming majority of Basques live in Spain.