ETA Ceasefire Could be Near as Basque Tourism Flourishes
September 2nd, 2010
Tourists are strolling on beach promenades and filling outdoor cafes in Spain’s Basque region, where burning cars and screaming police sirens now seem only a distant nightmare.
The region received more than 250,000 tourists in July, the highest number in one month since comparable statistics began to be compiled in 1992.
Local officials attribute the increase largely to the absence of headlines about the militant Basque separatist group ETA, which has not staged significant attacks in Spain for more than a year.
Could there finally be hope of a permanent peace, as expectation mounts that ETA will declare a ceasefire? The Spanish government is sceptical and fears that ETA would only use the eventual truce to rearm and to then resume what it regards as its “armed struggle” against the Spanish state.
ETA, which is listed as a terrorist group by the European Union and the United States, has killed about 850 people in its more than four-decade campaign for a sovereign Basque state carved out of northern Spain and southern France.
Today, however, very few of the 2.1 million Basques support the group’s violent tactics. Additionally, relentless police crackdowns have decimated its leadership to a point where it is only a shadow of its former self.
ETA has been weakened further by the 2009 election as Basque regional premier of Patxi Lopez, a member of Spain’s governing Socialist Party, who has clamped down on violent separatists harder than his Basque nationalist predecessors.
The political organizations linked to ETA are known as the izquierda abertzale, or patriotic left. They include trade unions, youth groups, associations defending jailed ETA members and the separatist party Batasuna, which was outlawed in 2003.
The ban on Batasuna has increasingly marginalized radical separatism in Basque political life. That has apparently led to growing pressure within the izquierda abertzale and among imprisoned ETA members for the group to lay down arms.
Batasuna is now trying to create a separatist movement based on “peaceful and democratic” methods, though it has not gone as far as condemning ETA’s violence. That move would allow it to become legal and to contest the 2011 local elections.
ETA “has two possibilities: joining the political process or committing suicide,” Batasuna’s jailed leader Arnaldo Otegi said in a taped conversation quoted by the daily Spanish newspaper, El Mundo.
A ceasefire was necessary for Spain to move towards a Northern Ireland-style peace process, a group of international personalities including South African Nobel Peace Prize laureate Desmond Tutu and former Irish president Mary Robinson said in a statement issued in March.
Analysts believe ETA could be internally divided over the possibility of a military surrender. The mounting pressure could force the group to declare a ceasefire later this month, El Mundo quoted police experts as saying.
Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero’s government, however, does not want to see another ceasefire like the one ETA declared in March 2006.
That ceasefire persuaded the government to attempt peace talks, but ETA used the truce to rebuild its military capacity, and finally shattered the incipient peace process with a car bombing that killed two people at Madrid airport in December 2006.
This time, the government does not intend to accept anything less than ETA’s definitive surrender, an alternative that was made unlikely by Madrid’s refusal to even discuss the possibility of Basque independence, analysts said.
Around 30 per cent of those living in Pais Vasco (Basque Country) are not satisfied with Zapatero’s willingness to increase the region’s autonomy. They would like it to sever all ties with Spain, polls indicate.
There was a sufficient number of independence supporters to act as a “fundamental axis in a nearby future that will bring solutions,” wrote the Basque newspaper Gara, which is close to separatists.
The Basque region “is an increasingly attractive place where violence has passed on the back burner,” one Italian tourist said in the coastal resort of San Sebastian. Yet the shadow of ETA could remain hanging above the region for years to come.
ETA will not lay down arms, but it will end up like Spain’s far- left group GRAPO, former Basque secret service chief Angel Ugarte predicted in an interview with the daily El Pais.
GRAPO killed dozens of people in the 1970s and 80s. It still exists, but it has dwindled into such insignificance that most Spaniards hardly remember it. DPA
