Ghosts of Spain (40 page)

Spain now has several hundred thousand Muslim immigrants. Many work in the intensive, plastic-tented vegetable plantations of Almería, in the south-east. There, the joint head of Spain’s Islamic Commission, Spanish convert Mansur Escudero, told me that ordinary Muslims thought of Al Andalus as history.

‘To argue that this country is impious and in need of a Muslim
Reconquista
is barbarous,’ he said. The half-dozen Moroccans who stepped out from midday prayer at the Al Tawba mosque, a one-room outfit at Vícar, near Almería, pointed out that Al Andalus had a reputation for religious and ethnic tolerance. ‘Al Andalus was a common project between Christians, Muslims and Jews,’ they said.

Bin Laden would not agree. Nor would Aznar.

The arrival of Islamist terrorism, however, seemed to bring an unexpected bonus. For the Islamists may have sealed the fate of Spain’s home-grown terrorists, the Basque separatists of ETA. Even the most radical separatists had claimed to be sickened by the 11 March train bombings. How could they now justify meting out more of the same? As this book goes to print an already
weakened
ETA is thought to be involved in a secret peace process. Even if it does stop killing, however, the scars ETA leaves behind will take generations to heal. In the meantime the Basque Country remains the supreme example of Spain’s longest-running and most intractable problem. Is it really a nation? Or is it several nations squeezed into one?

It has the feel of a secret, slightly dangerous assignment – as if I was meeting someone from an underground, illegal movement. I have arranged to see Gotzone at the university, but I do not yet know where. Gotzone, when she is there, often has to hide. She is a lecturer, and has been in this faculty for almost thirty years, but that is no protection. I am to call her mobile phone before I set off. Her instructions, when we speak, are to get to the university and then call again. These are routine safety procedures, she explains. She does not want me to feel offended.

The campus is a compact, ugly jumble of glass walls and concrete pillars on a hilltop outside Bilbao, the Basque Country’s biggest city. I sit on a raised circular dais in the atrium of the university library and call again. Gotzone tells me to wait. Someone will come and find me. A young man in black casual clothes hisses to me – that Spanish ‘
tsss
,
tsss
’ that means ‘look over here’ – from the top of the staircase. He crooks a finger. He is too smartly dressed, and is just a bit too old, to be a student. There is a bulge in his jacket, too, where a pistol sits. This is one of her bodyguards. I walk up the stairs and he signals me to follow. He looks carefully around as we walk off.

I experience a sadly familiar, depressing feeling. I am back in the Basque Country. Once more I must talk to people about violence and fear. Why is it, three decades after democracy arrived, that this prosperous, northern patch of Spain is still stained by bloody hatreds? Domestic terrorism has, after all, almost disappeared from the rest of western Europe. It is early in 2005. I have been coming here as a journalist, on and off, for a dozen years. I am still, however, writing the same story. The axe and the serpent, symbols of the violent Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) – Basque
Homeland and Freedom – separatist group cast a shadow almost wherever I go. Rumour has it that a peace process might be starting. I hope it does. But, for the moment, ETA would still like to kill Gotzone. And, even if peace does arrive, the damage done over three decades of violence is too large for it to be overcome instantly by a few signatures on a piece of paper. ETA, or the violent emotions that drive it, will be present for a long time to come. If it is not here in person, its spectre will be.

We greet another bodyguard, who is standing in a corridor. He ushers me into one of the hundreds of nondescript offices dotted around the campus. Gotzone is in there with her cardboard boxes. ‘As I change offices, they come with me,’ she explains. Changing offices is part of her life.

She currently has three offices. One is official, but her bodyguards do not let her go there too often. So there are two other secret ones as well, like this, in different departments. When she gives a lecture, however, everyone knows where she is – even with two bodyguards at the door.

Gotzone Mora is small, with that neat, short haircut favoured by Basque women above a certain age. She wears frameless glasses over hazel eyes and has two solid gold earrings clamped to her lobes. Basques have more than double the normal incidence of the rhesus negative blood type. This is almost certainly a left-over – along with their remarkable language
euskara
– from their centuries as one of the most isolated groups in Europe. To me, however, the main physical aspect that differentiates some Basques from other Spaniards – apart from the women’s practical, sensibly short haircuts – are their noses. Gotzone has a fine version of what might be considered the typical Basque nose – large, proud and strong.

Gotzone is hiding from western Europe’s last significant armed separatist group. As well as lecturing on sociology here at the University of the Basque Country, she is a local Socialist politician and an outspoken ETA critic. Documents found in one ETA member’s home revealed an elaborate plan to shoot her at the university. They contained the following commentary: ‘Gotzone
Mora is so far-sighted that she would not see someone put a gun to her head.’ A bomb planted in the faculty lift a couple of years ago failed to go off. Police believe it was waiting for Gotzone or one of two other professors here who have been vocal in their denunciation of separatist violence. ‘They could have brought the whole place down,’ she says. Now she takes the stairs.

An election campaign for the regional Basque assembly, which elects what is already one of the most autonomous regional governments in Europe, is on. ETA, it is said, has ordered its people to ‘put corpses on the negotiating table’, as it prepares for talks. Gotzone is a prime target. ‘I have been told the more time I spend outside the Basque Country, or even outside Spain, the better,’ she says. ‘The trick is to make sure that, if ETA finally stops, you are not the last one to be killed.’

The locks to the door on her main office have had to be changed six times because the master-key keeps disappearing from the porters’ room. She suspects colleagues, or university employees, who support ETA and are either prepared to help them kill her or just want her to be frightened. When we visit it, she shows me a bookshelf that had been mysteriously moved from the wall a few days ago, before the latest lock-change. ‘We think they wanted to plant a bomb behind it,’ she said. She now has the only key.

The high-pitched sound of a
txistu
(a Basque flute) and of drums floats up towards her temporary office. Somewhere on campus, she explains, there is a demonstration in favour of letting ETA members back to study – from their prison cells – on the university’s courses. It was a right they lost after Gotzone discovered that lecturers were being threatened by their jailed students. A colleague had received a letter from Idoia López Riaño, alias
La Tigresa
, The Tigress.
La Tigresa
, accused of twenty-three killings, has been in jail for a decade. ‘You know what to do if you do not want problems,’ the letter said, according to Gotzone. She meant, Gotzone explained, that he was expected to pass her at exam time. That would improve her job prospects when she got out.

Gotzone tries to avoid walking past the regular demonstrations calling on the ETA prisoners – who can now study at Spain’s
distance-learning university – to be let back. ‘
¡Puta socialista, vete a España!
’ ‘Socialist whore, go to Spain!’ they shout at her if she goes near them. One day she went to the bathroom and found ‘
Gotzone Mora; ETA, mátala
’ – ‘ETA, kill Gotzone Mora’ – graffitied on the wall.

‘The radicals are a minority, but they manage to spoil everything. Campus life is dead,’ she says. Later on I see the two musicians. They are grey-haired, red-cheeked men wearing large, black, floppy Basque berets. They are wandering around the campus, still playing. Music should be pleasure. Hearing it now, with Gotzone’s explanation, it sounds like menace. It reminds me of the Protestant Apprentice Boys on their marches through Catholic territory in Northern Ireland. Or am I just being infected by paranoia?

As I walk beside Gotzone, I find I have to make an effort to stick close by her side. The natural thing to do is drift away. The chances of anything happening to her, here, with two bodyguards and ETA on what may – or may not – be its last legs, is minimal. But she carries the mark of the hunted. Instinctively, and ashamedly, I am uncomfortable beside her. I notice that other people on campus either blank her out or avoid her. ‘My neighbours at home complain. They worry that if my car is bombed, it might affect them,’ she says. The impact on her social life is also devastating: ‘People do not want to be seen out with me.’ Then there is her family. Her husband, a law lecturer, has been sidelined at the university, she claims. Friends say his health has been affected.

I ask why she puts up with it. She explains that there have been political and trades union militants on both sides of her family. Spanish socialism had its first flowering right here, in and around Bilbao, in the 1890s. Dolores Ibarruri, the Basque communist firebrand known as
La Pasionaria
, once hid out in her family’s house.
La Pasionaria’s
most famous phrase was: ‘
¡No pasarán!
’, ‘They shall not pass!’ It was uttered during the Spanish Civil War and directed at Franco’s troops.

‘When I can’t stand it any more then I’ll just leave,’ Gotzone says. She would not be the first to go. There are no reliable figures
but lecturers, politicians, journalists and businessmen – those on ETA’s list of targets – are amongst those who have fled. It amounts to a kind of intellectual cleansing, she says.

Gotzone’s biggest complaints, however, are reserved for the Partido Nacionalista Vasco (PNV), the Basque Nationalist Party. If Basque society is neatly sliced into two halves – one that favours unity with Spain and one that tries continually to either weaken or break the tie – then the
nacionalistas
are the leading force against the latter. They have, through a variety of coalitions, controlled the Basque Country’s regional government for the quarter century since it was established. Since then, critics like Gotzone claim, the nationalists have set about moulding the Basque Country to their own desires.

Nationalism in the Basque Country, as in Catalonia, is as much an emotion – or an identity – as a set of political arguments. Its voters are people who put their Basque-ness before any other political desire. Because, like religion, it is based on belief and feeling, other politicians find nationalism hard to battle against. Its most fervent critics tend to be repentant former members of the clan. One of them, the writer and former ETA member Jon Juaristi, has described the dominant emotion of nationalism as ‘patriotic melancholy … though they do not cry for the loss of something real. The nation did not exist before nationalism came into existence.’ This contradiction, he claims, is resolved by inventing a past out of
historias
rather than
historia
– stories, not history. Those stories, he says, are inevitably about loss. There is always a victim, too. The victim must be Basque, if it is not the Basque Country itself.

Gotzone has a deep dislike and distrust of Basque nationalists. She complains that, amongst other things, Basque schoolchildren are now taught that their natural
patria
extends into the Basque region of France and into neighbouring Navarre. She obviously thinks that, consciously or unconsciously, the nationalists egg ETA on. The pro-nationalist media, she says, paint her as a dangerous madwoman. ‘They are making me a target … If ETA kills me, it will be clear to everybody that I was already an
impresentable
, a disgrace.’ Few are prepared to raise their voices against
ETA – or even Basque nationalism – as loudly as this. ‘I know I scream, but some screaming has to be done,’ she says.

I do not share all of Gotzone’s ideas about the Basque Country or nationalists, but I cannot help admiring her determination to scream. For it is a dangerous, potentially lethal, thing for a Basque to do. Those who dare raise their voices are, however, privately thanked for doing so. ‘I have cried for you and I have felt terribly frustrated for remaining silent, for not banding together with my classmates and coming to your aid … but we, too, are afraid,’ one student wrote to Gotzone. ‘Thank you for telling us that murder makes no sense; thank you for fighting for my freedom; thank you for being on the side of those who suffer; thank you for being there, day after day.’

Gotzone is a councillor in her home town of Getxo, which is governed by the Nationalists. She has spent years watching enviously as Nationalist councillors walk calmly out of the door onto the street after meetings while she squeezes into her armour-plated car. Her fellow Socialists and members of the Conservative People’s Party all also have had bodyguards. These have been kept, as this book goes to the printers, although ETA – in a first sign that it is ready to talk – has said they are no longer targets.

I walk with Gotzone as she prepares to leave. The bodyguards, one behind and one in front, lead her through the campus. They call ahead to their colleagues in the cars. Two Peugeots await in the car park – a blue one with armour-plating for Gotzone to ride in and a silver one to follow her. Gotzone opens one of the doors. ‘These doors are so heavy that they give me cramp,’ she complains. The cars speed off. As I watch them go, I find myself hoping, once again, that this is my last encounter with Basque violence and the fear that goes with it. It may be. ETA has never been so weak. A new government is willing to talk. It may, still, be able to bow out without humiliation. But there have been talks and ceasefires before that were followed by more violence.

Long ago, when I first came here, I was captivated by the romance of the Basques. There is something deeply attractive, dashing even, about a small group of people proudly defending their culture in a globalising world. That unique language,
those strange sports, the food, the steep, green valleys and the wide-open Cantabrian Sea are all captivating. They start to pall, however, if you only ever come here to talk about shootings, bombings and kidnappings. At my regular hotel in San Sebastián, a small, charming, secret place, the owners once told me that they thought I was jinxed. ‘Something always seems to happen when you are here,’ one of the family explained.

My view is, of course, skewed by the experiences of a journalist. Only a small minority of Basques have shared Gotzone’s daily contact with violence. Even when I have tried to avoid it, however, the violence has had a way of throwing itself into my line of sight. Not even the gleaming Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao – its shiny, sculpted titanium roof picking up the clouds that scud over one of Spain’s rainiest cities – has managed to quite avoid the curse of ETA. The dazzling museum designed by architect Frank Gehry is the glittering new image of a city, and a region, that, like the rest of Spain, has undergone profound change over the last three decades. Its opening, however, was marred by the shooting to death of a member of the Basque regional government’s own police force by ETA gunmen. They had been trying to sneak a bomb into the forty-three-foot-high, flower-clad ‘Puppy’ sculpture (of a West Highland White Terrier) by Jeff Koons that stands outside the museum entrance. So it is that a place which boasts a unique language,
euskara
, and that has fine traditions in everything from sculpture to sport, to writing and cuisine is reduced to a tale of fear and loathing.