In Europe (49 page)

As we talked and walked, I noticed that my Basque acquaintances were driven by more than simply the pursuit of political independence. I kept sensing that something else was not being said. Monica and her friend were singularly pleasant, intelligent and committed people, but at a certain point I kept running into a brick wall. ‘Why are all of you so attached to those rituals? Why is independence so important that everything else has to take second place?’ I was given no answer.

Their nationalism was an amalgam of the old and new, of resistance, but also of nostalgia. On the one hand it was a belated product of the nineteenth century, an outgrowth of the fundamental conflict that divided Spain throughout a large part of the twentieth century: is Spain a land of several nations, as the republicans believed, or should it remain the unified nation held dear by Franco and his followers? On the other, it fits perfectly with those other movements that arose in Europe in the late twentieth century, peculiar and significant counterparts of modernisation and globalisation.‘The Basque movement is a typical agrarian movement,’ Monica said. ‘That's what makes it different from Catalan nationalism.’

Hence the movement's popularity, one supposes, in the alternative young people's circuit, here and throughout the rest of Europe. Nostalgia was – and is – an important signal: in essence it is an indictment of a modern age filled only with materialism and a blind faith in all that is new. But nostalgia can also produce monsters. From Kosovo and Ruthenia to the Basque Country, everywhere Europeans have been driven mad by the longing for a fatherland that no one ever knew, that in many ways never even existed.

All this lends the Basque Country a certain ambiguity. It is privy to the ocean's vast skies, but at the same time as impacted as an Eastern European mountain village. It is probably the most autonomous region in all Europe, it has a status of which Northern Ireland can only dream, it is modern and industrialised, it has profited greatly from Spanish and European subsidies, but none of that has brought cosmopolitanism or tolerance: in the eyes of the nationalist Basques, Madrid remains a colonial power, to be fought with all available means. What is to become of
that language and that independence, I ask my acquaintances, now that a significant part of the population is non-Basque, now that almost two thirds of the Basques do not speak a word of Basque, now that almost all opinion polls show that the opponents of secession far outnumber those in favour of it? I ask them: ‘Can the Basque Country you dream of ever come about democratically, when members of the opposition can only campaign when surrounded by ten bodyguards? What kind of country would that be, for heaven's sake?’ Once more there is no reply.

In Guernica, the notorious German bombardment of 26 April, 1937 is commemorated with a modest monument close to the Mercury Fountain, a large stone with a hole in it, ‘in honour of the victims’. That is the only text on which all parties could agree.

The bombing is viewed in as many ways as there are viewers. For most Europeans it was a characteristic Nazi atrocity against an innocent Spanish town, a rehearsal for Warsaw and Rotterdam. For the average Spaniard it was, first and foremost, one of Franco's dirty tricks. To this day, the Basque nationalists see Guernica as Madrid's violation of their ‘holy city’. And the old supporters of the Franco regime take a fourth view: the whole bombardment never happened. Guernica, they say, was torched by the ‘Red’ Basques themselves. The Germans admitted their culpability years ago, but the Spanish government has never been willing to rescind Franco's reading. ‘Let bygones be bygones’ is how people deal with the past in these parts.

The issue of Guernica is typical of the relationship between Madrid and the Basques. Both parties are possessed of a brutality that keeps all wounds open, and in that they resemble each other more than they care to admit. Suspected ETA terrorists – and even the editor-in-chief of a Basque-language daily is readily counted among them – can be detained for years without due process. Amnesty International regularly accuses the Spanish police of torturing prisoners. But when a victim files a complaint, even that complaint is seen by the Spanish government as an indication of one's ETA affiliations.

Can one speak here of the classic drama of a forgotten ethnic group divided by the relative capriciousness of a national border, doomed forever
within the Spanish nation to play the role of ‘national minority’? Is this where the old conflict between ‘national’ and ‘people’ rears its head, marked by the same wounds as those borne by the Hungarians, the Laps, the Frisians, the Welsh, the Scots, the Irish and all those smaller European peoples who woke up one day to find that, for whatever reason, they had ended up behind the wrong dotted line on the map of Europe? In some ways, yes; in other ways, no. Historically speaking, one has never been able to speak of ‘the Basque provinces’ rising in unison against France or Spain. The inter-regional conflicts were at least as serious, and every bit as numerous. Almost all of the great conflicts, including the Spanish Civil War, were also internal Basque wars. Ethnically speaking, it is equally tenuous to speak of ‘the Basques’: due to waves of migration, particularly those of the last fifty years, the Basque Country has become an ethnic potpourri in which one can recognise the ‘real’ Basques at best by their Basque surnames. Basque nationalism, therefore, bears telltale signs of a last-ditch movement: too late, too weak, dreaming of a country that never existed and that probably never can or will exist.

None of this detracts from the fact that the Spanish nation is faced with a problem. During the final decades of the twentieth century, ETA – second only to the IRA – were responsible for the most victims of terror in all Europe: some 800 in all. (By way of comparison: the Italian Brigate Rosse killed approximately 400 people in the 1970s, the German Rote Armee Fraktion killed 28.) What is more, the group is not isolated, its supporters are numerous, and even the pacifist nationalists are prepared to hitch a convenient ride with ETA's ‘successes’.

The result is a painful, extremely complicated situation that no government can safely ignore. The legitimacy of any democratic state is called into question when it has such a militant separatist movement operating within its territory. Any sensible government will then do all it can to negotiate longer-term solutions. That is what Charles de Gaulle did with the terrorists of the OAS, and what the British have done with the IRA. One does not seek terms of peace with the people one likes, but with one's enemies.

For years, Spain ignored that rule of thumb. It wanted to be a modern, forceful nation, with its pronouncedly autonomous regions, but deep down, the Spanish mentality still seemed to bear the mark of feudalism.
Seemed, I say, because this apparent brutality may be the product of fear, of the feeling that the country will fall apart once the final bonds are cut. The process of nation-forming, which every country in Europe has gone through at some point, has in a certain sense never been completed here. Madrid is Madrid, Catalonia is Catalonia, and the Basque Country is the Basque Country.

A similar internal confusion can also be noted within ETA. Bit by bit, one sees that there are almost more attacks carried out in the Basque Country and against Basques themselves than against Spanish targets. Some authors therefore conclude that the Basque conflict is no longer one between Spain and the Basque Country, but between the Basques themselves, based on the question: to which fatherland do we belong, anyway?

In the museum at Guernica hangs a page from the
Heraldo de Aragón
, a daily newspaper sympathetic to Franco, dated 30 April, 1937: ‘After heavy fighting our troops took Guernica, where our soldiers were dismayed to find entire neighbourhoods destroyed by the Reds.’ The
Diario de Burgos
of 4 May, 1937 bore the headline: ‘The horror of Guernica, the work of Red arsonists’. In the late 1960s, when a German bomb was found in the mud, soldiers quickly cordoned off the area and the bomb was never heard of again. That bomb was not supposed to be there.

‘Right after the bombardment, my mother ran into one of Franco's officers,’ Asunción Garmendia told me. ‘“Who destroyed Guernica?” he growled at her. She acted as though she had not seen a thing. “The Reds did it, the Reds, you know that!”’ Asunción's mother said nothing. She carried the key to their bombed-out house in the pocket of her apron until the day she died.

These days Asunción is a professional survivor of the bombardment. She belongs to the Basque nationalist group of victims, and that is a very different set from the Guernica victims of that namby-pamby Euro peace group on the square. She wants this to be clear from the start. She is a little grey-haired lady, but on 26 April, 1937 she was a pretty seventeen-year-old. ‘I worked in the munitions factory,’ she says. ‘We made bombs, “half moons” we called them, they looked like big waffles. It was Monday, market day. There were lookouts on the mountaintops, and when they saw planes coming they would flag to the lookouts on the church steeple.
They were supposed to start ringing the bells, and the factory sirens would take over. That's how the air-raid warning worked here. But that afternoon the bells suddenly started ringing like mad, and right away a big plane came over, trawng, trawng, trawng, and dropped a bomb. Our boss said, “Get down into the shelter, fast. This is going to be bad.” So we stayed down there, for four hours. You kept hearing this thud, thud, and smoke came seeping into the cellar, people were weeping and praying and all I could think was: what am I going to do when this is over, where's my family? Finally a man came in and said, “You can all go out now. But Guernica is gone, there is no Guernica any more.” We went outside, and you saw a hand lying here, a foot there, a head lying over there. And the whole city was red. Everything was just silent and red, as red as this.’ She points to a Coke can.

That evening I sit on the patio of Café Arrien with Monica, a Basque writer. It is warm, the trees are blossoming and over by the fountain crowds of children are playing, cavorting about and dancing in circles. Behind them lies the new centre of Guernica, reconstructed in pseudo-antique style, built by one-time civil-war prisoners in about 1950.

We talk about the ‘society of silence’, the way Spain tries to deal with its past. ‘All my father ever talked about later was the hunger,’ Monica says. ‘Never about the war. Almost all the good books about Franco and the civil war have been written by foreigners. It's still taboo.

‘Here you have two kinds of silence within a marriage,’ the writer says. ‘Partners who refuse to speak their own language, and those who refuse to talk about the war. My parents belonged to both categories. My father was a leftist political prisoner, a worker from the south who was sent here as an exile. My mother was a real Basque, a staunch Catholic. One time they had a huge fight about it, on Christmas Eve. “You communists and anarchists, you came here and murdered our priests and raped our nuns!” my mother screamed. “Not enough of them!” my father screamed back. “Not nearly enough!” That was the only time.’

Across from our café the local young people are pouring into theirs. It has pictures of Cuban, Irish and Palestinian heroes on the walls. This is the mini-world of the ultra-nationalists, the closed circuit within which approximately fifteen per cent of all Basques live, the heart of their own
party, their own trade union, their own sports, language, history and cooking clubs, their own newspaper, their own celebrations. Here every Spanish official is a ‘fascist’, every moderate journalist a ‘collaborator’. Everywhere in the city you see their slogans: ‘Model A is genocide for the Basque language!’ And: ‘Go home!’

‘Doesn't this ever end, with you people?’ I ask.

‘ETA has stopped for the time being,’ the writer says. ‘It's not a stunt, it took endless discussions to get to there. But the road of violence wasn't leading anywhere.’ We talk about how the IRA has now taken a political tack, and about how ETA is trying to do the same, but with much less discipline. ETA's political grass roots consist largely of young people between eighteen and twenty-five; the issue of self-rule does not play a central role in the lives of most Basques over thirty. My companions feel that ETA has pretty much stopped thinking strategically, and is gradually using its attacks only to save its own, isolated little world. ‘Take the execution of Miguel ángel Blanco, that city councillor, in July 1997,’ the writer says. ‘He was just a normal guy, like everyone else. It shows you how morally poisoned the movement has become. It goes further with every attack. The one on the Guggenheim Museum, a Basque institution, killing a Basque policeman. That we could ever have come this far …’

The writer could say a great deal more, that is clear, but at Café Arrien there is a point at which one stops talking.

Six months later the attacks began again. A new generation had come on the scene.

EVER SINCE 29 SEPTEMBER, 1938, DISCUSSIONS ABOUT WAR AND
peace in Europe have revolved around the same, fearful question: will this be a Sarajevo or a Munich? In other words: can a great deal of diplomacy achieve a shaky balance, or must evil be crushed by force? We know that, in both cases, a war was the result, we know that everything went wrong afterwards, but each time we come back to those two cities, those contrapuntal reference points for the twentieth century.

In an out-of-the-way display case in London's Imperial War Museum lies airline ticket number 18249, the British European Airlines ticket with which the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, left for Munich on the morning of 29 September, 1938. Hitler had been waving the banner of war on behalf of the ‘oppressed’ Sudeten Germans, Mussolini had organised a conference, Great Britain and France wanted Hitler to guarantee fixed borders, and the Czechoslovakian delegation sat in an ante-room waiting to hear what happened. Under pressure from the Allies, the Czech president, Edvard Benežs, finally offered up part of his country to keep the peace. The rest would soon follow. In that same display case lies the famous documents Chamberlain waved when he arrived home: ‘Peace in our time!’ Here, for the first time, I read the weak-kneed phrases of the agreement: ‘the wish never to wage war against each other again’, ‘this method of consultation will be the manner in which we deal with problems from this day on’.