Ghosts of Spain (38 page)

The three arrested men, like many of those picked up after them, had never looked the part. Zougam wore jeans and had a fashionable haircut. Bekkali was a graduate from Tetouan
University
. A Real Madrid fanatic, he owned a David Beckham shirt. ‘He seemed a completely normal person. He eyed up girls and laughed and played with everyone. He smoked cigarettes, went to the beach, kissed girls on their cheek. Islamists don’t do those kind of things,’ a cousin told Bowcott. ‘You would never think he would be capable of this terrible act, this crime. Those bombs were acts of terrorism, not Islam. It’s a sick ideology.’

News of the arrests broke late on the day after the bombings. By the next morning, Saturday, all Spain knew that three Moroccans had been arrested and that at least one had fundamentalist
connections
. Political parties had suspended campaigning straight after the bombings. Saturday was, in any case, the official ‘day of reflection’. Voters were meant to ponder their choice. Politicians were banned from campaigning.

During the day, however, the murmur of discontent grew to a roar. Opposition politicians had already let it be known they thought the government was lying, deliberately sticking to the ETA line to win votes. A new political phenomenon was born that day – the instant text message demonstration. Anonymous text messages began to fly from mobile phone to mobile phone. They became known as the
pásalo
messages, because each ended with an
exhortation
to ‘Pass it on’. It was like chain mail, but instant. The first
pásalo
had landed on my mobile the evening of the attack. It simply said: ‘A candle in the window for the dead.
Pásalo
.’

On the day of reflection the messages became frantic, political and angry. By mid-afternoon, my partner’s phone had received this one: ‘Aznar smelling of roses? They call this the day of
reflection
and Urdaci (head of news at state broadcaster RTVE) is
working? Today, the 13th, at 6 p.m. PP HQ 13 Génova St. without parties. Silence for the truth. pásalo!’

Demonstrations are illegal the day before an election. But this was a call for one. In the space of a few hours, the messages flew from phone to phone. The internet picked them up. E-mails and message boards amplified the call. New protests were hurriedly called outside PP offices across the country.

At ten minutes to six I took up position outside the PP’s
Génova
Street headquarters. There were a dozen or more journalists and photographers there and a handful of people, no more than twenty, hanging about. At six on the dot, a protest
demonstration
materialised out of thin air. Suddenly there were fifty, then 100, then 200 people gathered. The police ordered them to move on. They refused. The police demanded their ID cards. The demonstrators held them out to the TV cameras. ‘We want the truth!’ they shouted. ‘
¿Quién ha sido? ¿Quién ha sido?
’, ‘Who was it? Who was it?’, began the chant. As the minutes ticked by hundreds more people arrived. Soon there were a thousand, then two thousand, then the street was blocked and the riot squad vans were arriving – always too late for the protesters as their numbers grew.

A small, determined woman was standing in the middle of the road, ignoring police orders to stay on one side and shouting at passing cars, many of which honked in support. I went up to ask her some questions. ‘We are just people who want the truth. Our pain has been caused by Aznar’s support for Bush,’ she said.

Within half an hour, 5,000 people were sitting on the road chanting: ‘We want the truth, before we vote!’ Another chant was ‘
¡Vuestras guerras, nuestros muertos!
’, ‘Your war, our dead!’ Madrid’s notoriously baton-happy riot police looked on, unable to do more than prepare to stop a full-scale assault on the PP building, where only a few lights burned. The blue vans kept
tearing
up and disgorging their cargo of helmet-and-visored police officers. If the demonstrators had wanted to riot, they could have done. I expected violence and half wished I had one of those
helmets
disguised as baseball hats that news agency journalists seem to get these days. But nothing happened. The police did not
charge. Nor did the demonstrators. One part of the text message was roundly ignored, however. There was no silence. The crowd howled.

A man walking a large, well-groomed dog started arguing
furiously
with the demonstrators. He was a university professor who, he told me, had been jailed by Franco. He was livid. ‘They [the left] are doing this because they know that tomorrow they will lose the elections,’ he fumed. The professor’s prediction was one of the worst made that day. He was one of the few people who dared to predict anything at all. Most people thought the
Socialists
were going to win extra votes, but nobody was prepared to say how many – or whether they might oust the People’s Party. Only at Aznar’s Moncloa Palace residence and at the headquarters of the two main parties – where a select few had access to private polling – did people know that the professor’s prediction was totally wrong.

The demonstrators kept going all night. It was remarkable, given the tension and the anger, that there was no violence. Spaniards, anyway, do not go in for riots. The only exception has been the Basque Country’s angry, organised, and systematically riotous, separatist radical youths. Later the protesters would move to the Puerta del Sol – Madrid’s answer to Piccadilly Circus or Times Square – and would wander loudly around the streets until the small hours of the morning.

It seemed nothing could add more tension to the situation. But, as protesters wandered the streets, the drama reached new heights. Telemadrid, the capital’s television station, received an anonymous call. The caller said that a videotape had been left in a waste-paper bin outside what Madrileños called the ‘
mezquita de la M-30
’, the shiny, Saudi-built mosque perched above the city’s ten-lane M-30 inner ring road. Police picked up the tape. When they put it into a video machine, they were greeted by the sight of three machine-gun-toting, masked men. They looked like they had come from a Hamas suicide bomber’s farewell tape in Palestine.

‘You want life and we want death,’ they had said. It was the mantra of angry, violent Islamists – an almost exact replica of what the imam Fizazi had reportedly said in Morocco.

The delivery of the tape was extraordinary timing. It drove the nation’s political blood pressure to coronary-attack levels, and it did so just hours before Spaniards went to vote. Nobody who stepped into a polling booth the following day could have had any doubt about who had attacked Madrid.

Or could they? As Spaniards voted the following morning, Foreign Minister Ana Palacio was interviewed by Sir David Frost on BBC television’s
Breakfast with Frost
. ‘The idea that ETA might be behind [it] is still strong in the investigation,’ she claimed.

There are many versions of why Spaniards voted the way they did, none of them provable. Zapatero likes to say he was going to win anyway – despite opinion polls which gave the People’s Party a five to seven point lead days before the bombings. Spanish polls are notoriously bad, but that is clearly absurd. The People’s Party blames the illegal demonstrations and rumour-mongering in the left-wing press. Others on the right see the old dark forces of Felipe González’s corrupt Socialists and their friends in the police at work in the shadows. Right-wing commentators in the US and Great Britain saw straight-forward cowardice. They claimed Spaniards had voted out of fear, especially after Zapatero stuck to his long-term pledge to pull Spanish troops out of Iraq. ‘Neville Chamberlain, en Español,’ said one
Wall Street Journal
opinion 
piece, commissioned from an angry Spanish right-winger, on Zapatero. A few days earlier his nickname had been ‘Bambi’, because of his look of doe-eyed innocence. Most reasonable
commentators
, however, point to only four definite conclusions: the bombs produced a larger than expected turn-out at the polls; Zapatero would probably not have won without them; the
People’s
Party would not have lost had it not supported war in Iraq and sent troops there; its huge error in insisting that ETA had planted the bombs drove the final nail into its coffin.

Spaniards have a history of rebelling against leaders who take them into wars they do not like. If they feel viscerally suspicious of war, one should not be surprised. Many countries have
experienced
its horrors. Few, however, are so convinced of its futility. As a child in 1960s and 1970s Britain, I grew up with the moral certainty that a previous generation of Britons – that of my schoolteachers – had fought a just war against Adolf Hitler. If the Auschwitz gas chambers proved they were right to fight, General Franco was proof to my Spanish friends that their grandfathers had butchered one another senselessly. The colourless decades of his rule hung heavily over the past, like a punishment for the bloodbath.

Spain’s experience of war has been better painted than it has been written. The few hundred metres of central Madrid that embrace both the Prado Museum and the Reina Sofía modern arts centre, contain, within them, some of the most telling
pictorial
denunciations of war ever painted or etched. In his painting
The Third of May, 1808
, or
The Executions on Príncipe Pío Hill
and his
Disasters of War
series of etchings Goya tells of the Spanish uprising against Napoleonic rule in 1808. ‘
Yo lo ví
’– ‘I saw it,’ Goya scratched onto one of his copperplates of killing, rape and pillage. In the Reina Sofía, Picasso’s huge, grey-blue
Guernica
is populated with terrified mothers, dead children, maddened animals and
dismembered
bodies. It evokes a world numbed by terror.

The horror of Guernica, blitzed by the German Luftwaffe on Franco’s behalf in 1937, was real, and more so because it was innovative. An ancient human fear was turned into reality. Death
rained from the sky. A local artist once showed me around the rebuilt town, telling me his memories of the fateful day. He had run for the hills as a boy and watched Guernica burn. What he saw was the invention of blanket incendiary bombing of civilian targets. What was shocking in 1937 became, sadly, commonplace within a decade. Guernica, and nearby Durango, were the experimental laboratories for the carpet bombing of Coventry or Dresden and, ultimately, for the nuclear wastelands of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

War played its part, but the most likely reason for the 2004 vote was the People’s Party’s obstinacy in insisting on the one version of events that would help them politically – that ETA was to blame. A post-voting poll showed one in five Spaniards had that uppermost in their minds when they voted. It was enough to swing it for Rodríguez Zapatero.

In the end, it was not Al-Qaida that brought Aznar’s People’s Party down. It was ETA. Or, rather, it was Aznar’s personal
obsession
with the separatist group. Under his guidance, the People’s Party had been drawn into defining itself in terms of ETA or, rather, in terms of its anti-ETA-ness. If ETA was absolute evil, the People’s Party saw itself as its only true opponent. It was, by extension, its noble, shining opposite.

The People’s Party, and Aznar in particular, was so blinded by that idea of itself that, when the bombs went off, it was as if a prophecy had come true. ETA had shown its full vileness, further justifying Aznar’s firm stance and shaming those he saw as appeasers. The People’s Party had no need to lie to Spaniards. It was already fully programmed to fool itself. As its thesis
weakened
, it instinctively dug its grave deeper. Little wonder Spaniards voted it out.

Ten days later, Aznar, who was still caretaker prime minister, appeared on television for a rare live interview. It had, presumably, been at his own request. For the first time ever, he began to talk about himself as a victim, though a surviving one, of terrorism. A roadside bomb in Madrid had, on 19 April 1995, blown his armour-plated car halfway across the road and caused a nearby
building to collapse. Aznar, then the opposition leader, insisted on walking to a nearby clinic and remained icy-cool in the aftermath. ‘I recall the terrible smell of explosive powder, my face was scorching, my hair was singed and, as the whole place was thick with smoke, my first reaction was to feel my own body with my hands, to see if I was injured. On finding that nothing was
missing
, I asked the driver and bodyguard if they were all right,’ he said later. Aznar, that day, showed both courage and cool. His advisers gloated. ETA, they said, had just blasted him into the Moncloa.

I had always been impressed, however, by his refusal to make political capital out of his status as the survivor of an ETA attack. It was a card he could have played many times, but did not – until it made no difference. Suddenly, stripped of power and personally responsible for his party’s defeat, he seemed to be seeking
sympathy
. Not that he was admitting he had done anything wrong. He, and his party, still refuse to admit that.

Long before terrorism became one of the dominant
preoccupations
of global politics, it was the personal bugbear of José María Aznar. It overlapped, at least in his mind, with his other main dislike, Basque and Catalan separatism. Aznar always had a black-and-white view of terrorism. The only thing negotiable with ETA, his party liked to say, was ‘the colour of the bars on their cells’. Terrorism was not a political problem, but a moral one. Terrorists were evil – and that was all there was to it. They had to be defeated. Little wonder that, even before 9/11, he saw
eye-to
-eye with George W. Bush. On a first, and somewhat fraught, visit to Europe, the US president made Madrid his first stop. Aznar blushed with pleasure when Bush rewarded him by pledging ‘our government is committed to stand side by side with the Spanish government as it battles terrorism here in Spain.’ He even dared to become Spain’s first-ever out-and-out Atlanticist premier. General Franco had signed deals to give the US bases in Spain. He had done so, however, more out of geopolitical, Cold War expediency than out of admiration for the country that humiliated Spain in 1898. ‘It causes me some anxiety to see the world in the hands of the North Americans,’ Franco once said. ‘They are very childish.’