A Basque Bomb’s Fallout

Last Aug. 7, four young Basques died when a bomb loaded in their car exploded prematurely, about 100 yards from the newspaper office they apparently aimed to blow up.

At first, it seemed like the kind of violent but fleeting disruption that Basques have learned to live with. Since 1968, when guerrillas began fighting for an independent Basque homeland in northern Spain, most people here had avoided any involvement.

But the blast in Bilbao triggered a much wider conflict.

Evidence in the bombed-out car led police to a safe house, where they found a surprising hit list. It included Basque entrepreneurs, writers and teachers who remain loyal to Spain, as well as the kind of government and law enforcement officials the rebels had been killing for years.

Other documents led to the arrest of about 20 guerrillas of the Basque Homeland and Freedom movement, known by its Basque initials, ETA. As the rebels have struck back at a wider range of targets, police have detained and interrogated hundreds of law-abiding Basques who support the rebel goal of independence while rejecting violence.

In different but equally chilling ways, the bomb blast brought the war home to Teo Uriarte, Araitz Zubimendi, Maria San Gil and Joxan Lizarribar.

Uriarte and Lizarribar are middle-aged businessmen with strong, opposing loyalties. Zubimendi and San Gil are younger, politically active women who represent forces committed to destroying each other. All four are Basques, from families that know one another. Three live in the small city of San Sebastian.

Their stories illustrate the divisions among the Basque Country’s 2.1 million people in a conflict that has claimed about 900 lives, 27 of them since August. The two camps, roughly equal in number, will test their strength Sunday in a regional election.

Because the antagonists are ethnic kin who cross paths in everyday life, their feud has an intimate quality that magnifies the impact of each killing, death threat, abduction or arrest.

Uriarte learned a few days after the blast that the ETA had marked him for death. The hit list condemned him for attacking the rebel group in a newspaper column.

The 55-year-old Bilbao executive was shaken. Files seized from guerrillas documented his daily movements. “The details were perfect,” he said. Since that day, he has lived under police protection.

The death threat brought him full circle from hunter to hunted.

As a student in 1965, Uriarte joined the ETA to resist Spanish dictator Francisco Franco’s repression of the Basque Country, which included prison terms for those who spoke or wrote the Basque language. Armed with a rusty pistol, he rose to membership on the ETA’s Central Committee and in 1968 voted in favor of the group’s first assassination--that of a Spanish police official responsible for the torture of hundreds of Basque prisoners.

Arrested in 1969, Uriarte left prison in a 1977 amnesty, two years after Franco’s death. Later, he quit the guerrilla group, considering it an obstacle to Spain’s democratic awakening and the revival of Basque autonomy.

Under the post-Franco constitution, the three Basque provinces--a hilly, industrial region that is one of the richest in Spain--gained an autonomous government. It controls tax revenue, public services and a police force that collaborates uneasily with Spain’s Civil Guard in the fight against the ETA. Basque is taught in schools and spoken by newscasters on public television.

In return, the constitution kept the region an integral part of Spain.

The conflict today is over whether Basques should obtain the right to choose independence. Uriarte insists that because Spain is now a democracy, everything is open to discussion--but not before the ETA’s guns are silenced.

He is at a loss to explain the mentality of today’s ETA militants.

“When we killed, we were ashamed,” said the former guerrilla, a heavyset man in a well-tailored suit. “For them, it’s an honor. . . . Sometimes I think they’re killing for the sake of killing. To justify their own existence, they have to be far more cruel and aggressive against a democracy than we were against a dictatorship. Otherwise, they might disappear, as well they should.”

The ETA’s recent victims include a newspaper columnist, a business leader and a university professor killed for their anti-separatist views. The rebel group calls this new strategy “the socialization of suffering,” meaning that a wider circle of Basques--not just the guerrillas--must share the pain.

Police say 620 Basques now have bodyguards, more than quadruple the number five years ago. Hundreds of others who feel threatened, Uriarte believes, are quietly leaving for other parts of Spain.

“I don’t know exactly how many,” he said. “In our region, even fear is clandestine.”

Araitz Zubimendi, a 24-year-old law student, lost her friend Ekain Ruiz in the August explosion. Mourning gave way to alarm. She believes that she could be arrested at any moment.

The two friends grew up in neighboring towns and joined the Basque separatist youth group Haika when it was formed last spring. Discovery of the 20-year-old Ruiz’s body in the wreckage bolstered the Spanish government’s case that Haika, Basque for “rise up,” is an ETA training ground.

In March, Spanish prosecutors sent police to shut down Haika’s offices and arrest 18 of its leaders. But the group keeps active; its marches often end in clashes between youths hurling firebombs and police fighting back with tear gas and rubber bullets.

“They’re trying to drive us underground,” Zubimendi said, sitting at an outdoor cafe in San Sebastian’s Constitution Plaza, where some of these skirmishes occur. “But this is civil disobedience. We refuse to hide what we do.”

Despite the pressure, she appears relaxed and smiles a lot, exuding the youthful energy and optimism that sustain the separatist cause.

The ETA draws from middle-class, university-age youth. It is believed to have about 200 active fighters and a support network of perhaps 2,000 collaborators. Haika’s 4,000 members agitate for independence and the release of separatist prisoners, who now number 528.

The movement is backed by about 15% of Basques, who vote consistently for the guerrillas’ political wing, the Basque Citizens Party. Its provocative campaign poster shows a naked pregnant woman with the slogan “A Free Nation Is About to Be Born.”

Another 35% or so of Basques want some form of independence but reject violence, according to voting patterns. The other half of the region’s inhabitants feel loyal to both Spain and their Basque heritage, and oppose any separation.

To the dismay of most Basques, Zubimendi and other militants do not condemn the the ETA’s killings. As long as Basques are denied full sovereignty, the law student insists, “we have the legitimate right to choose any instrument of resistance, including violence.”

Both Zubimendi’s grandfathers took up arms against Franco’s forces in the Spanish Civil War. Her parents set up clandestine Basque-language schools, which gained official status after Franco’s death. The schools reinforced her sense of identity with a people who have resisted outsiders since the days of the Roman Empire.

“Each generation needs to go a step further,” she said. “I have no doubt that ours will live in an independent homeland.”

Maria San Gil remembers every detail of Gregorio Ordonez’s slaying except one. She remembers the date in 1995, the name of the restaurant, the food they were eating, the pistol raised close to his head--everything except the killer’s face.

The car explosion last August led police on a long trail that ended three months ago with the arrest of Ordonez’s alleged assassin, Xabier Garcia Gaztelu. News of the arrest brought San Gil’s trauma back in a flash. “It left me cold,” she said.

San Gil, 36, is deputy mayor of San Sebastian. Ordonez held the same job, and she was his secretary. His killing propelled her into politics to fight terrorism and defend the unity of the Spanish state.

In Sunday’s election, she is running for a seat in the Basque Parliament from the Popular Party of Jose Maria Aznar, Spain’s conservative prime minister.

Aznar’s tough stand against the ETA has made his party more popular, giving it a fair chance to end 21 years of rule here by the independence-minded but nonviolent Basque Nationalist Party.

The Popular Party’s stand has also put its elected officials at the top of ETA lists. Ordonez was the first of 15 to die; the latest was Manuel Gimenez Abad, shot in the head Sunday as he and his son walked to a soccer game in Zaragoza.

San Gil, a slender, energetic woman who moves about with four bodyguards, points to the besieged quality of her own life to illustrate the injustice of the ETA’s tactics.

She never takes her two small children to the park, for fear they will be killed. If one of them falls ill in the middle of the night, a bodyguard must be summoned before rushing to the hospital. She seethes at the sight of her neighbor, a Basque Nationalist Party official, who comes and goes without armed protection. They cross paths in the parking garage but barely speak.

To remind her of her place on the ETA’s hit list, separatist gangs gather outside her home shouting, “San Gil, you’re dead!”

“Why do I have to choose between the Basque Country and Spain?” she said wearily. “Why can’t I love both, as a child loves both parents?”

In San Gil’s view, the ETA survives with the complicity of the Basque Nationalist Party, which she says promotes separatism in the schools and on television.

The solution, she insists, is to oust the nationalists and take even harsher police action against the ETA. “How am I going to sit and talk with a guy who has a pistol and wants to kill me?” she said.

Another trail from the would-be bombers’ safe house led to the arrest of Jon Guridi, who was accused of killing a Basque columnist for El Mundo, the Spanish newspaper. Police also discovered that Guridi had used an alias to rent an apartment from Joxan Lizarribar’s wife, a real estate agent.

The Lizarribars and their two grown children were held at gunpoint for 90 minutes while a dozen Spanish Civil Guardsmen ransacked their two-story home in San Sebastian. Oddly, it was 20-year-old Paul Lizarribar, not his mother, who was hooded, handcuffed and driven to Madrid for a long night of interrogation punctuated by death threats.

The law student was freed without charges or explanation the following day, leaving his parents to wonder about the reason for the ordeal.

Joxan Lizarribar, a 49-year-old executive who sells machinery to steel mills, tells the story with righteous ire while gliding through San Sebastian in his Mercedes-Benz. He thinks he knows the answer: He is well connected and outspoken in favor of independence; the Civil Guard wanted him to know he was being watched.

The hit man’s rent contract probably triggered the raid, Lizarribar figures, but the guardsmen didn’t ask much about that. They had copies of the family’s e-mail and phone bills. The interrogation of the son reflected knowledge of his father’s travels, his sister’s friendships, the family’s properties, its private conversations, its house guests.

Lizarribar, who opposes violence, sees a parallel between the state’s methods and the ETA’s. “The state is also widening its field of targets,” he said.

Few Basques believe that the police alone can defeat the ETA. Lizarribar worries that extremists on both sides could someday turn the factions of Basque society against each other with the full fury of a Balkan-style civil war.

“We cannot let that happen,” he said. “This is a very small place. Everyone knows someone on the opposite side. But it’s beginning to look like anything is possible here. If you’re the least bit paranoid, you can go crazy.”