Basque People Consulted to Preempt Extremists : Spain: After sabotage of earlier road project, regional officials appoint citizens’ panels to operate in spirit of <i> auzolan, </i> Basque for working together, to find what the people want.

In a region where separatist violence can determine the outcome of big and small projects alike, the Basque regional government has decided to try something new: Ask the people what they think.

To preempt extremists who sabotaged an earlier road project, the government has appointed citizens’ panels to evaluate a plan to widen the only two-lane stretch in a highway that runs from Sweden to southern Spain.

The last time officials tried to build a road in the troubled Basque country, the separatist ETA and environmental groups opposed it. ETA gunmen killed three people and wounded nine in a violent campaign to demonstrate that no major undertaking could succeed without their approval.

ETA, the initials of Basque Homeland and Liberty in the Basque language, has fought since 1968 for independence in Spain’s Basque country, the northern provinces of Alava, Guipuzcoa and Vizcaya.

More than 700 people have been killed, most of them police and military officers. Popular support for ETA has waned in recent years, but sporadic violence continues.

“The basic idea of the citizens’ panels is to change the tone of confrontation that affects controversial issues like these in the Basque country and turn it into a debate,” said Luxio Ugarte of the consulting firm that organized the three-month study of the highway project.

He believes the 14 panels, totaling 350 people, will succeed because of auzolan. That is Basque for working together, the normal practice among the tough farmers, fishermen and ironsmiths of the pre-industrial Basque country.

ETA was caught off guard and has remained silent. Its political arm, Herri Batasuna, has become just one more group presenting its position to the citizens’ panels.

Three years ago, when the regional government began building a road through the Leizaran River Valley, it failed to reckon with environmentalists and ETA. After a political deal that left ETA looking like the winner, the route of the road was changed and the cost of building it soared.

The Spanish Basque country, virtually independent until the early 19th Century, once again has considerable autonomy. Under terms of a 1979 home-rule arrangement, it collects its own taxes from the 1.7 million people, manages its own education system and maintains its own police force.

In a region where violence has touched everything from the Spanish military and national police to annual fiestas, the citizens’ panels provide a welcome chance for rational discussion. They also have pushed ETA and its supporters, who claim to be the only true voice of the Basques, off center stage.

“After what happened with Leizaran, something had to be done to deal with these issues in another way,” said Dr. Inaki Ormazabal, a surgeon serving on a 20-member panel that met for a week in Mondragon.

Panel members are being asked what they think should be done about the 25-mile stretch of road called GI-627, which snakes along the Deba River below farmhouses clinging to the mountainsides. About 100,000 people live in the narrow valley.

The road turns south from San Sebastian through Maltzaga to Urbina. Representatives of the Mondragon Cooperative Group, the valley’s economic engine, testified that business and jobs will move out unless the road is widened to four lanes so it can handle 2,000 semitrailer trucks a day.

Unemployment is nearly 18% in Spain, highest in the 12-member European Union. The Basque provinces have had a particularly difficult time attracting investment and keeping jobs because of ETA extortion and the threat of violence.

Conclusions reached by the panels are expected to weigh heavily in the final decision, but will not be binding on the regional government.

In October, 1993, a U.S. citizens’ panel that studied President Clinton’s health care reform program chose a broader plan pollsters had said the public would reject.

“This is the opposite of a referendum or an opinion poll,” said German sociologist Hans Harms, one of the consultants for the Basque study.

After such a thorough examination of the issues by participants, he said, “I’d bet that, when they present their report to the transport department, they will know more about this question than anyone in the government or elsewhere.”

A decision on the highway project, which would cost nearly $400 million as now conceived, is expected in May.