Basque Youth Risk Jail, Even Death, in Battle for Independence : Spain: New generation breathes new life into violent separatist movement. Rarely a week goes by without some incident. Five people have died this year.

At 18, Inaki is already a veteran of the Basque revolution.

While still in his last year of high school, the earnest young man with tightly cropped hair has become an old hand at organizing radical youths in a quest for an independent, socialist Basque country.

The vanguard recruited him three years ago, when he began leading student strikes and demonstrations in his neighborhood.

Now Inaki and his adolescent comrades are serving notice that one of Western Europe’s few violent separatist movements has a young generation willing to risk jail, and perhaps even death, for its cause.

Since April, rarely has a week gone by without either a riot breaking out after a demonstration, a political party’s office being sacked, or hooded youths mounting an attack against police patrols, the worst of which nearly killed an officer when a homemade firebomb was tossed into a squad car.

Police, politicians and others who watch the movement say that although similar acts have been carried out sporadically over the years, they have increased sharply as part of a strategy to broaden the movement’s independence campaign led by the armed underground group ETA.

ETA--which stands for Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, or Basque Homeland and Freedom in the Basque language--has killed five people this year, in addition to the 745 others, mainly members of the Spanish military and police, killed since it took up arms in 1968. ETA’s attacks, including its April assassination attempt against the leader of Spain’s conservative opposition, Jose Maria Aznar, have led the Socialist government in Madrid to define it as “the state’s principal enemy.”

But among the Basque region’s inhabitants, it is the growing street violence that is having the strongest impact on daily life.

The long-term aim of Inaki’s movement, a loosely tied amalgam of groups known as the Basque Movement for National Liberation, is a country comprising seven provinces that straddle the Pyrenees along the Atlantic coast of Spain and France.

Like several other ethnic independence movements active in Scotland, Wales, Corsica, Brittany and other regions, the Basque separatists hope one day to be welcomed in a federal Europe in which today’s big nation-states would play a diminished role.

But for the moment, the Basques’ main battleground is the three northeastern Spanish provinces that make up the Basque Autonomous Community, one of Spain’s 17 largely self-governing regions. Its population of 2.1 million dwarfs the 250,000-strong French Basque provinces where a far-weaker nationalist sentiment prevails.

About 20% of the Spanish region’s population strongly supports independence, and an additional 15% backs it with some reservations, according to a survey by the Basque regional government conducted in February.

“We want to guarantee the Basques some minimums: self-determination, the right to the Basque language, amnesty for political prisoners, workers’ rights,” Inaki said, ticking off the objectives on his fingers as he stood in a condemned building in San Sebastian taken over by young squatters.

“Armed struggle is necessary to achieve this.”

Young people do plan the attacks on police, Inaki acknowledged. But he denied that Jarrai, his public youth group of about 2,000 paying members, organizes or leads the violent acts, as Spanish law enforcement agencies contend.

Four young people Inaki has worked with in Jarrai have been arrested in connection with the street violence, he said. They were leaders at school, in unions, in organizing neighborhood fiestas, in promoting the Basque language, he said.

“If the police can’t determine the culprits, they go after the people who are mobilizing people,” Inaki said. And that, he said, is why he would be at risk if his real name were published.

The world Inaki lives in can seem light-years away from the society most visitors encounter in this elegant Atlantic resort.

Officers sporting the bright-red jackets of the Basque regional police casually patrol boulevards lined with smart shops that end just short of the city’s famous crescent-shaped beach.

Like everywhere else in the Basque region, the sick go to Basque-run clinics and hospitals, children go to Basque-run schools, and the Basque government raises its own taxes.

The conservative Popular Party, of all Spanish parties the one most fervently opposed to Basque independence, won the most votes in the city’s municipal election May 28, competing against several Basque nationalist and Madrid-based parties.

But in San Sebastian’s Old Town, where jovial crowds spill into pedestrian alleyways from the hundreds of small bars brimming with seafood delicacies, there are also signs of another reality.

On one apartment building wall, a plaque accompanied by a photo of a young man in his 20s reads: “Antxon Tolosa: He died in the struggle for national liberation.” Tolosa, a member of ETA who once lived in the building, died in 1983 when a bomb he was making exploded.

At a bar not far down the same street, dozens of other photos hang in a line on the wall behind the bar. The faces are of Basques jailed on charges of aiding or belonging to ETA.

To the bar’s clientele, these are the faces of political prisoners in a battle that pits the Basque people against the Spanish government, Spanish police, even the Spanish press.

“More than 300 people have been wounded in demonstrations since 1991,” said Josetxo Otegi, a Jarrai leader in his third year of law school in San Sebastian. Demonstrators have lost eyes and kidneys and suffered other serious injuries, he said. “We’re not going to tell people not to defend themselves by all the means at their disposal.”

In May, police in San Sebastian arrested nine people between 18 and 24 years old who, under interrogation, provided information and a key to an office where material for making explosives and gasoline bombs was found.

The office belonged to Herri Batasuna, the movement’s legal political party supported by about 15% of the region’s voters. Documents belonging to ETA were also discovered there, said Jose Maria Jauregui, the Spanish government’s senior police official in San Sebastian.

The movement’s leaders speak warily of ETA and the youth violence, since openly supporting either can land them in jail. Instead, they draw attention to the alternative society they say is being built through an eclectic network of anti-draft, environmental, feminist, labor and human rights groups that expands the movement’s ranks.

A wall poster bearing a portrait of Che Guevara invites participation in Basque Solidarity, a group that has sent volunteers to Cuba, Central America and Palestinian territories.

Others announce meetings of a support group for the friends and families of roughly 600 ETA members serving sentences in Spanish prisons.

There is a second and equally crucial common thread in the movement: an almost religious commitment to the Basque language, the oldest on the Continent, which just a generation ago seemed destined to disappear.

Though less than a quarter of the population of the Basque region speaks Euskera, as the language is called, about 80% of Herri Batasuna’s rank and file are Basque speakers, said the party’s spokesman, Jon Idigoras.

Jarrai’s strength lies in Guipuzcoa province, where nearly half the population speaks Basque. Most of its members have studied in independent Basque-language schools or in public schools that offer a program of mainly Basque-language courses, said Jose Manuel Mata, a sociologist who writes extensively on the independence movement.

The deep commitment to Euskera helps to explain one of the movement’s most controversial demands, fusion with the much-larger neighboring province of Navarre, where Basque-speakers predominate in many areas.

“I would renounce further development toward an independent country without Navarre,” said Martxelo Otamendi, editor of the only Basque-language daily newspaper, Egunkaria.

Spain’s refusal to merge the two regions led a majority of Basques to abstain in referendums on the 1979 Basque home-rule statute and on Spain’s 1978 post-Franco constitution that set up the country’s system of autonomous regions.

This spring, calls for self-determination were revived by the mainstream Basque Nationalist Party. ETA and the rest of the independence movement began saying the key issue was allowing Basques to decide between staying within or separating from Spain.

The sharpest fault line in Basque society seemed not over independence as an objective, but over the means to achieve it.

Nine of every 10 Basques think ETA should give up its arms, according to the same Basque government survey that queried them about independence. But the three pro-independence Basque parties hold a slim majority of seats in the regional parliament.

“I could see independence in 15 years,” said the leader of the Basque Nationalist Party, Xabier Arzallus, who forecast a slow transition toward Basque sovereignty within a Europe that will have one army and one currency.

Even if a majority of Basques favored independence, they would face a major impediment in Spain’s constitution, whose articles establish the country’s indivisibility.

But long before any of that, Arzallus said, there must be an end to the violence. “I won’t take a step while it continues.”