Ghosts of Spain (43 page)

This Romantic picture of the Basques was captured by William Wordsworth in his ode to Guernica’s oak, written as Spaniards – with help, in what became known as the Peninsular War, from Wellington – were trying to expel Napoleon’s troops in 1810.

The Basque
fueros
and their parliaments, however, were provincial affairs. Those of Vizcaya, Guipúzcoa, Alava and neighbouring Navarre acted autonomously of one another, swearing loyalty to whichever king ruled them. Rights varied, but could include not having to do military service outside their own frontier. What the
fueros
did not amount to, however, was independence – either as individual provinces or as a state called Euskal Herria, the Basque Country. The last Basque-centred kingdom was that of Navarre – which was conquered, and absorbed into the rest of Spain, in 1512. Both Vizcaya and Guipúzcoa had, in any case, gone into the orbit of Castile by 1200. The last time, in fact, that all the Basque lands – including those in France – were jointly ruled by a Basque was in 1035. This was when Sancho the Great held the kingdom of Navarre. He, however, titled himself King of the Spains, and ruled a far larger area. Collins says Sancho’s rule had no impact on Basque ‘self-awareness or aspirations’. They were too busy squabbling amongst themselves. Their social structure was based, instead, around the family. That does not stop ETA bloodily pursuing the impossible dream of a state that would, a thousand years later, again unite all Basques – be they French or Spanish – under a government of fellow Basque.

If Spanish history is today a political battlefield, Basque history is its bloodiest corner. The
fueros
, Arana, the tree of Guernica, the kingdom of Navarre and the Carlists are fought over tooth and claw. Even the Battle of Roncesvalles – when Basques fell on Charlemagne’s retreating rearguard in 778 – is the subject of heartfelt, emotional commemorations by separatists. It is still possible, for example, to buy books that state ‘the Basque
pueblo
was already formed in neolithic times.’

For my archivist in the Sabino Arana Foundation, the
fueros
obviously represented a golden era. Nationalists mourn what they see as a lost Basque Arcadia, where grass-roots democracy
protected the rights of man and there was harmony between man and nature. It is a world of clover-filled pastures, isolated valleys, peacefully ruminating cows, deciduous forests, mountain spirits, sturdy farmhouses, noble souls and fiercely proud farmers, blacksmiths and lumberjacks prepared to defend their idyll against all comers.

I left the Sabino Arana Foundation unenlightened as to the true course of Basque history. One thing, however, was clear. The founder of the Basque Nationalist Party had planted his political seed in fertile ground. The robust nationalist tree, despite the efforts of dictatorial force and democratic persuasion, has grown and gathered strength ever since.

I drove around behind Artea’s church and its
frontón
– a sort of large, open squash court with just two walls in the shape of a long L, where
pelota
vasca
, literally ‘Basque ball’, is played. The
frontón
is a feature of almost any Basque village. Larger towns – in both the French and the Spanish regions – boast covered, all-seater
frontones
with a third wall at the back. Here the great players of the sport knock a hard ball against the walls using their hands, small wooden rackets or the long-curved baskets of the spectacularly fast and exciting
cesta punta
or
Jai-Alai
version.

I stopped at a large building on the other side of the village. Measured in historical time, this was a journey of more than six decades from the time when Sabino Arana died. I was moving on to the 1960s, to the time ETA first emerged as a fighting force. It was a time when younger nationalists became frustrated with the Basque Nationalist Party’s peaceful opposition in exile and reached for their guns. I had come to see Xabier Zumalde, alias
El Cabra
(The Goat), who was one of the first to pick up a weapon in anger.
El Cabra
is in his late sixties now, though still lean, fit and keen. Years ago he was one of the first military leaders of what was still an embryonic, amateurish armed outfit. Today he is a maverick. ‘I am a military man,’ he said, as we tried to stave off the cold by an open fire. ‘I don’t understand politics. Give me fifteen or twenty men and I can do anything. Give me any more than that and I am lost.’

El Cabra
considered himself a freedom-fighting revolutionary. He handed me a photograph of his younger self wearing a black beret and sporting a revolutionary beard. Che Guevara had been his hero. He spent the final years of the Franco dictatorship running a small group of Basque guerrillas from exile in south-west France, carrying out mostly sabotage and propaganda attacks. In fact, another ex-ETA leader told me,
El Cabra
’s group rarely, if ever, exchanged shots with the Civil Guard. He buried his arms in
zulos
, underground hideaways, after Franco died and an amnesty was announced in 1977.

Up until Franco’s death, ETA had fought a classic war of provocation against the Caudillo and his Civil Guard. It had killed forty-four people – including a dozen civilians caught in a bomb attack on a Madrid cafeteria, the Rolando. Two dozen ETA members had also died – in shoot-outs, blowing themselves up, executed or summarily shot. ETA’s original fame stemmed as much from Franco’s violent reaction to it as from the handful of prominent assassinations carried out in those years. Franco declared eleven states of exception during his time in power. Four were nation-wide and six of the seven others covered the Basque provinces of Guipúzcoa, Vizcaya or both. At one stage, a quarter of his Civil Guard was said to be posted to the Basque Country. ‘If Sabino Arana considered Euskadi to be an occupied country, Francoism made that occupation real and effective,’ explains the Basque author of a history of ETA, José María Garmendia. ETA is, in fact, one of Franco’s legacies to modern Spain.

Some of those released or allowed home under the 1977 amnesty law would rejoin ETA and participate in the orgy of killing that swept through the Basque Country in the first years of the
Transición
. Between 1977 and 1980, more than 250 people would be killed as not just ETA but a swathe of separatist, leftwing revolutionary or reactionary right-wing groups reached for their weapons. ‘It was chaos,’
El Cabra
recalled. He, however, stayed away from the fight. ‘I cannot impose my doctrine on others by force,’ he explained. Plenty of others felt they could. Some still do.

Eventually, he set up a museum to the
caserío
in Artea. He still runs it, though it is clearly in decay as, having fallen out with all the politicians, he no longer receives a grant. It has, amongst other things, displays on farming, on whale-hunting – for centuries a traditional occupation for those living along the coast of the Bay of Biscay, where the first person to land a harpoon on a whale’s back could claim the valuable tongue as a prize – or for hunting wild boar. He has even built a working copy of a medieval
ferrería
and of a water-driven flour-mill. It is an innocent retirement.
El Cabra
should be history.

That is what he would have been, had he not decided to mount an exhibition on ETA’s early days and its fight against Franco three decades after the latter’s death. The display included weapons – which had been disabled long ago when he lived in France – as well as mock-ups of
zulos
and dummies dressed-up as ETA men.

The interesting thing about this exhibition, though, was not what it contained but the uproar it provoked. The ethical narrative of Spanish history has changed. ETA long ago lost its heroic halo as the only armed group capable of inflicting real damage against Francoism. In 1973 it quite possibly changed the course of Spanish history by killing Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, the man who had been expected to continue the Generalísimo’s work when the latter died. ‘Spain’s transition to democracy started that day,’ says Victoria Prego, author of various books on the period.

History, however, is being revised. ETA is now being painted uniformly black. Even its early fight is deemed to be no longer heroic or just. Even those like Gotzone Mora, who as a student leader in the 1970s led campaigns to prevent ETA members being executed by Franco’s firing squads, now think they were wrong to support ETA then. ‘We thought they were fighting Franco. In fact they were fighting for separatism,’ she explains.

Under Aznar, the revising of history went even further. All ETA’s victims – including, for example, the infamous San Sebastián police chief Melitón Manzanas – became official heroes. Aznar’s government awarded them all a medal, the Great
Cross of the Royal Order of Civil Recognition to the Victims of Terrorism. If all the victims were now heroes, those who attacked or killed them had to be villains.
El Cabra
was accused of praising – even encouraging – terrorism. No court, however, found a reason for banning his exhibition. Eventually, given the political scandal, Artea’s Basque nationalist mayor ordered him to close it as the museum was housed in town hall property. ‘The mayor was in the town hall under Franco. When the
Transición
came he changed jackets and, as he was a banker, the nationalists took him in,’ says
El Cabra.
‘It is the nationalists who have shut me down. They did not fight against Franco, they just sat around
tocándose
los cojones
– playing with their balls.’ Police were sent in to enforce the mayor’s order. He tore off the tape which they placed across the exhibition’s entrance in a wooden shed into which he had carved a saying in
euskara
‘
edozen txoriri eder bere kabia
’, ‘every bird thinks its own nest is the best’. ‘Now they are going to try me. Not even Franco managed to send me to prison.’

‘In each family there is someone who receives from the Basque Nationalist Party,’ he says. ‘It has the vote of the grateful stomach.’ This is a common complaint. The Nationalists have run the regional government for more than a quarter of a century. Their critics claim that they have bought the Basque Country up. ‘Where else in the world do parties stay in power for twenty-five years?’ one non-nationalist Basque historian asked me desperately.

If those who
El Cabra
calls ‘grateful stomachs’ have a modern patron it is not the man who now runs the regional government – the lehendakari Juan José Ibarretxe. It is Xabier Arzalluz, the man who commanded the Basque Nationalist Party for more than two decades.

It would be hard to find a greater hate-figure in Madrid (excepting ETA and its political allies such as the spokesman of the banned Batasuna party, Arnaldo Otegi) than this tough former Jesuit priest whose father had backed Franco during the Civil War. To many critics Arzalluz is the modern incarnation of Arana.

He has occasionally reached for genetic definitions of Basqueness. ‘If there is a single nation that exists in Europe then that has
to be Euskadi … there are objective figures such as cranial studies and blood (type) studies. Is there anyone who, after all the studies carried out by the world’s best universities, dares to say that we don’t have rhesus negative?’ he once said.

Arzalluz retired as party boss in 2004. I went to see him in his new office perched a few doors up from the stone Arenal bridge over the Nervión River that connects Bilbao’s old quarter with the modern city. He was beginning to look his seventy-three years. He had, however, lost none of his verbal vigour. Basque Socialists, he said, ‘hate
euskara
or any form of difference’ and ‘most are not from here and they do not love this country.’ ETA itself, he added, was ‘consumed by hatred’ and was a block to any progress towards independence. Its violence had been a main factor in bringing Aznar to power. During the key
Transición
years Arzalluz was the Nationalists’ man in Madrid. His party called on Basque voters to boycott the 1978 constitutional referendum (which won the votes of only 31 per cent of Basques, or three-quarters of those who turned up). He helped negotiate, however, a Statute of Autonomy that gave a generous dose of self-government while making no mention of self-determination or Basques not being Spanish. Basques backed that referendum. I wanted to know whether the nationalists’ long-term goal was really independence. Arzalluz, thankfully, does not dress his answers up. ‘The Basque Nationalist Party was born to create a Basque state,’ he replied. Its aim was to make the Basque Country one more star on the European Union’s flag, like Holland or Spain. What mattered above all was that Basques should be able to express their own will.

The PNV was not in a hurry, he said, but that should be the ultimate goal. Given that between them, Nationalists and the
ezker abertzale
separatists consistently gain just over half of Basque votes in regional elections, that might be taken as a majority for independence. In fact many Nationalist politicians – and many of their voters – are more moderate than Arzalluz. Opinion polls show only a third of Basques want a separate state. A similar number – which has to include some Socialist voters – would like Spain to be a federation. The rest are broadly happy with it as it is.

Self-determination lies at the heart of the Basque problem. It is a right that does not, legally, exist – though the Basque parliament wants it. Ibarretxe claims Basques have a right to ‘decide freely and democratically, their own framework of organisation and political relations.’ He put forward a plan which would see them ‘freely associate’ with Spain, but also, in effect, push them a long way down the path towards self-determination and, potentially, independence. Aznar reacted by rushing through a law that would allow him to lock Ibarretxe up if he called a referendum. It was typical Aznar – a measure certain to drive more Basques into the nationalist embrace. Zapatero revoked that law. Ibarretxe’s plan, meanwhile, was approved by a wafer-thin majority in the Basque parliament but rejected by a huge majority of Las Cortes, the parliament in Madrid. The final vote was 313 votes against, and just twenty-nine in favour.