Peace Push Grows in Disputed Basque Region of Spain

Juan Miguel Goiburu manages a sleek new tourist hotel in the verdant hills of northern Spain. He can be found there every day, a 45-year-old executive in a crisp shirt and tie, wool slacks cinched around a stocky waistline. The very picture, as he likes to say, of a “worthwhile citizen.”

But Goiburu is also a former guerrilla leader of the Basque separatists--fighters for a nation of their own in the region of northern Spain that abuts southwestern France. He is a man once hunted by Spanish security agents and then tossed into jail on charges of kidnapping and murder. Beneath his shirt, he still bears scars from a shootout with police.

A sign of just how far Goiburu and the Basque region have come since those days, though, is the small blue ribbon pinned to the executive’s sport jacket. Such ribbons are worn these days by Basques demanding freedom for a local businessman who was kidnapped more than 200 days ago by Goiburu’s former compatriots in the Basque Homeland and Freedom movement, known by its acronym, ETA.

As Goiburu’s transformation suggests, one of the oldest, deepest ethnic conflicts in Europe is undergoing important change these days. Never before in the 27-year armed struggle for Basque independence has the push for peace in the region been so great, nor a solution so close.

“Up until recently, the mainstream parties in Spain believed that the way to solve the Basque problem was through police repression and political isolation,” said Jonan Fernandez, head of Elkarri, an independent peace advocacy group. “But great changes are taking place.”

The peaceful resolution of the seemingly intractable conflict in South Africa and moves toward peace in Northern Ireland and the Middle East are seen here as models for Spain and the Basque people. In addition, more Basque political and business leaders are fed up with the violence, which has made it difficult for the economically depressed region to recover.

“The Basque people, and the people of Spain, have a very strong desire now to turn the page,” Fernandez said. “They are demanding solutions, not rhetoric.”

To be sure, large obstacles remain, not least among them the Spanish government’s unwillingness to negotiate with the ETA and the group’s continued armed struggle, which has claimed 750 lives.

But the ETA’s might has declined in recent years. It once had 50 military cells operating in Spain and southwestern France; today it has just four, police say.

Yet its potential for violence remains. In the past year, the ETA has staged seven operations, including the assassination of a Popular Party leader in the Basque region and an attempt on the life of the party’s chief, Jose Maria Aznar, in Madrid. If Aznar’s party wins national elections in March, as expected, he will become Spain’s prime minister.

The ETA launched its armed struggle in 1968 under the repressive rule of Gen. Francisco Franco. The dictator’s attempt to subjugate the Basque people, and particularly his ban on speaking the Basque language, helped generate broad support for the ETA.

But the death of Franco in 1975 brought democratic reform to Spain and a new constitution, which created 17 largely self-governing regions. Under that “home rule” system, the Basque region today is governed by an autonomous legislature that imposes taxes and controls health services, transportation and public works. It also has its own 7,000-member police force and court system.

The Basque language that Franco tried to destroy now flourishes. The tongue is again taught in schools and spoken by newscasters on television; fluency in both Basque and Spanish is required of civil servants.

Those changes, welcomed by the Basques, have cost the ETA much of its support. The leading political force in the region today is the Basque Nationalist Party, which rejects violence, favoring instead step-by-step moves toward Basque independence.

The ETA remains outlawed, but recent elections indicate that its legal political wing--United People, or HB--has the support of 17% of the region. Recent public opinion polls indicate that 70% of the people in the region consider the ETA’s violence unjustified, and 15% say it was justified only in the past.

But even the conservative Basque Nationalist Party acknowledges that attempts by the central government in Madrid to stamp out the ETA by force haven’t succeeded and will never succeed, even if the conservative Popular Party replaces the Socialist Party in Spain’s elections next year and launches a new crackdown.

“One thing is clear: The solution is not a police solution,” said Gorka Agirre, a member of the Basque Nationalist Party national council.

“No matter how hard the police try, they can’t solve it,” he said. “The ETA is not a bunch of felons and mobsters. They do what they do out of political conviction. That’s why I believe there has to be dialogue.”

In fact, most major Basque parties agree on the necessity of the region’s independence, based on the unique character of the Basque people, who inhabit a territory that spreads over parts of France as well as Spain. About 900,000 Basque-speakers live in four provinces of Spain, and 80,000 more live in three provinces of France, although a larger number in both countries identify themselves as Basques.

Since the early Middle Ages, the Basques have been known as skilled boat makers and whale hunters, but their origins are something of a mystery. Their language is unrelated to any known Indo-European language, and they possess certain special physical characteristics, including the highest frequencies of blood types O and Rh-negative of any people in Europe.

Through the years, isolated in rural western areas of the Pyrenees, they repelled invading Romans, Moors and Germanic tribes. But they lost their autonomy in France after the French Revolution and in Spain in 1873.

The Basque separatist struggle has dominated the political scene here for much of the 20th century, but the military option may now be succumbing to new pressure to talk. The ETA, which traditionally demanded direct talks with the Spanish government, has in recent months changed strategy, seeking talks with other political parties in the Basque region.

“It doesn’t matter what government is in power,” said Jon Idigora, an HB spokesman. “The Basque political parties, and unions and others, have to demand this peace process. And I think the solution to the conflict is closer today than ever before.”

A positive sign was the emergence three years ago of Elkarri, a peace group whose activities are applauded by parties across the Basque political spectrum. Unlike other peace groups in the region, Elkarri has its roots on the left, in the ETA and HB. Fernandez, its leader, is a former HB member.

Elkarri’s 2,500 dues-paying members now include supporters of other parties, and HB has distanced itself from the organization. But HB’s spokesman says that Elkarri “understands, much more than any other peace group, the deep conflict in the Basque country. It’s necessary and healthy that groups like that flourish.”

Elkarri’s single goal, Fernandez said, “is to propel these parties to talk.” To do that, Elkarri leaders have studied other regional conflicts, especially the one in Northern Ireland. That example resonates in this region, because it shows that negotiations can work better than force in ending the armed struggle of a separatist movement.

The growing sentiment for an end to violence in the Basque region has been underscored by the kidnapping, earlier this year, of Jose Maria Aldaia, a Basque trucking executive. He was abducted here, a few miles from the French border, minutes after leaving the Urbanibia Hotel, where he had stopped for a drink with friends.

Basque business people have long been subjected to ETA strong-arm tactics designed to exact “revolutionary taxes,” which the ETA uses to fund its armed activities. The kidnappings are designed to punish reluctant executives and to encourage other business owners to contribute.

Aldaia’s abduction, though, is the second-longest in ETA history and has generated wide anger. Each week, protesters wearing blue ribbons gather in the beautiful ocean-side city of San Sebastian to demand his release. And each week, HB supporters stage a counterdemonstration at the same spot to protest the incarceration of 600 ETA members by the Spanish government and the alleged torture of ETA supporters arrested by police.

“Nobody favors such an abduction,” said HB spokesman Idigora. “But these people in their blue ribbons are denying that there is other violence--state violence against us. You can’t condemn one and approve of the other.” His party refuses to publicly condemn the kidnapping.

No one knows for sure why Aldaia has been held so long. Some say his family has refused to pay ransom. Some say the weakened ETA is simply trying to prove its military might. And others suggest he is being held across the border in France, where police crackdowns after bombings in Paris have made it difficult for ETA operatives to bring him back to Spain and escape detection.

Whatever the reason, Aldaia’s cause has been embraced by tens of thousands in the region, including former ETA members such as Juan Miguel Goiburu. The hotel he manages is where Aldaia was last seen.

Goiburu is one of hundreds of Basques who have left the ETA underground, renounced violence and quietly rejoined society. They represent a formidable force for change. Among Goiburu’s former confederates are the head of a local bank’s security operation, a savings and loan manager, a high school teacher and a film producer who this year won the Spanish equivalent of the Academy Award.

“We still keep in touch,” Goiburu said. “We are all well-off citizens, and we have a feeling of solidarity.”

Although former ETA members have been killed by ETA operatives in the recent past, and Goiburu acknowledges that he and his friends are detested by the ETA, he insists he isn’t worried.

“These ETA guys know us, but we know who they are too,” he said. “And they know that if anything ever happened to us, we would act. That’s why I’m not afraid.”

Goiburu was just a teenager when he first joined the ETA. He rose to become head of the ETA political-military wing and was arrested after a shootout with police in the mid-1970s.

While Goiburu was in prison, though, Franco died and the political landscape changed. A week before the country’s first democratic elections in 1977, Goiburu and other ETA members were released in a peace gesture. He went into exile and resumed his ETA work.

But in 1981, Goiburu’s wing of the ETA declared a cease-fire, and he eventually returned to the country. He now says the turning point for him was the realization, after the Basque region won home rule in 1979, that the majority of the Basque people no longer supported the violent campaign.

“When I saw Basques on the street protesting against us, I realized that Basque nationalism couldn’t go hand in hand with violence,” he said.

He got married, went to college, had children and, a few years ago, took his current job--hired by a man who had survived an ETA kidnapping attempt.

These days, Goiburu has no regrets about his past. Asked if he ever killed anyone, he declined to answer, saying only, “We were involved in a war and I accept moral responsibility for what I have done.”

“I don’t see this as a personal issue,” he added. “It was just a political issue. The ETA grew out of a society under repression. It would never have been born had Franco not tried to suppress the Basque people.”

Kraft was recently on assignment in Irun.