WAR GAMES

Eric Ellis, San Sebastian

4/11/1992

FOR 20 years, Benito Arroyo kept an uncle's eye on young Inaki Gabirondo growing up in their tiny Basque village, Itziar. The typical village policeman, Benito would help Inaki with his studies, offer tips on his goal-shooting, worship at the same church and support the same football team, Real Sociedad, in the Spanish League. Later, when Inaki was old enough, Benito drank with him at the same bar.

Benito knew Inaki was a member of the Basque terrorist group ETA. He also knew Inaki was one of its most ruthless guerillas and had killed up to 20 men, many of whom were Benito's colleagues in the Guardia Civil. But Benito turned a blind eye. After marrying a local girl and being warmly embraced by his adoptive community, Benito hadn't arrested anyone from Itziar since 1960 - and the man he'd arrested in 1960 eventually married his sister-in-law.

Besides, he knew Inaki well. He was a good boy who was close to his mother. The family had lived six doors away for 20 years.

In April 1980, Benito was shot dead by ETA on Inaki's orders at the crossroads just below the town. In the nearby village of Orio two months later, Inaki was shot dead, avenged by the Guardia Civil.

Today, the graves of Inaki and Benito lie next to each other in Itziar's beautiful cemetery, high on the pine-studded hill above the village which overlooks the Atlantic.

Inaki's mother, Maria, makes the weekly trek to tend the grave and weep over her son's death. She often saw Benito's wife there and the two women wept together, until the death of Senora Arroyo.

In the village, a group of black-veiled senoras chatted in the Plaza de Iglesia. Asked if Inaki and Benito were enemigos (enemies), one said, wagging her finger: "No, no, no. No enemigos | Contrarios |"

The tragedy of Itziar - a traditional ETA stronghold of no more than 500 people where support for the group and its political wing, Herri Batasuna(HB), runs as high as 60 per cent - is a metaphor for a communal cancer that rivals the IRA's campaign in Northern Ireland in its violence and intensity, and threatens to leave bloodstains across Spain this year, its Year of Wonders.

Negoziazio | Daubed in the Basque language of Euskera on churches and public buildings across the region, the Spanish Government needs little reminding of what this word means as the nation prepares for a year which celebrates as much a "New Europe" of peace and integration as it does the Barcelona Olympics, the Seville Expo, Madrid as Europe's cultural capital and the 500th anniversary of Columbus's expedition to the Americas.

Negotiate the Basque right to independence, says ETA, and we will spare 1992 the violence that has left 2,000 people dead over the past 30 years.

Refuse and we will have no hesitation in making a bloodbath of the Olympics, Expo and the myriad celebrations to show off Spain to the world. If there are no visitors, the $US50 billion ($A65 billion) spent in total on 1992 may bankrupt the country.

Senor Juan Maria Artutxa, the Interior Minister of the autonomous Basque Government and a key person in the war against ETA, says: "I am in no doubt ETA is planning a last-ditch campaign this year. They want to do something spectacular. They want to make headlines all around the world. They are just about finished and that makes them desperate. When they are desperate, they are very likely to lash out. It's the only language they know, the language of death."

In Itziar, I was directed to a side-street where two men were daubing graffiti - GORA ETA | (Long Live ETA) and pasting NEGOZIAZIO | posters to a wall. One of the men, who said his name was Martin, claimed to know a number of Etarras.

Martin denied that he was an Etarra, but spoke matter-of-factly about the"unfortunate" death 18 months ago of a 15-year-old girl in San Sebastian from a bomb that was meant for her father, a suspected police informer.

How could ETA justify killing an innocent teenager? "Her father is a coward. He used her as a shield," Martin said.

Martin referred to an ETA communique published in the Basque newspaper Egin(Action) after the bombing. It pointed out that the girl had expressed an ambition to be a policewoman. The implication was that this provided some legitimacy to ETA's action.

"It was unfortunate that she died but her father is a pig and his day will come."

Martin said he'd heard a rumour that ETA was planning a big operation that"will make the newspapers". Did he mean the Olympics, Expo, the Columbus celebrations?

"I don't know. This is only what I have heard."

At 8.35 am the next day a small white car stacked with 75 kilograms of TNT exploded in the Plaza de la Cruz Verde in the historical centre of downtown Madrid.

Five men - three Army officers, a soldier and a civilian Army employee -were killed as their military minibus passed by the car bomb, detonated with radio control by an ETA operative watching nearby.

A resident of the square, Senor Ivan Calbuig, witnessed the blast. "I saw two cars completely destroyed ... they had people inside, actually it was just pieces of people."

It was ETA's most serious attack for years and it drew an unprecedented display of outrage from the Spanish Prime Minister, Senor Felipe Gonzalez, who has led an often-controversial campaign to wipe out ETA in the decade his Socialist Party has ruled Spain.

"I'd like to remind those who commit these attacks that they'll be in jail when this century ends and the next century, so they ought to abandon any hope that they're going to get any results from this bloody blackmail that they're trying to carry out," Senor Gonzalez told a news conference.

Euskadi, the Basque nation, is different. Anthropologists believe Basques to be Europe's aborigines, direct descendants of Cro-Magnon man. The Basque frame is hirsute, tall and burly with delicate limbs, the forehead is high and wide tapering down the head to a thinnish chin.

The Basque personality is generally more introverted than other Spaniards. They are more earnest, more industrious and more business-minded. Basques founded Spain's biggest bank, Banco Bilbao Vizcaya.

The language Euskera is almost impenetrable, so much so that the author of the first Basque grammar book entitled his work The Impossible Overcome. Euskera is older than Latin and bears no linguistic relation to any European tongue, though some etymologists claim to have detected an overlap with some obscure Caucasian languages from Georgia, more than 6,000 kilometres to the east in the former Soviet Union.

This isolation is perhaps best explained geographically. The Basque country is mountainous and, with its quaint chalets tucked into verdant valleys, the image is more of Switzerland. The mountains form a natural barrier from Spain in the south and France to the east and have helped repulse invading Phoenicians, Romans, Carthaginians, Moors and, more recently, Castilians.

The acronym ETA, Euskadi Ta Askatasuna - liberty for the Basque nation in Euskera - first appeared daubed in towns and villages across the Basque country in 1959, when the fascist regime of General Francisco Franco was at its most repressive.

Franco, a Galician, despised and feared the Basques. They had sided with the defeated Republicans during the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War against Franco's Nationalists.

He punished them brutally, first by deploying Hitler's Condor Legion to raze the sacred Biscayan town of Guernica - an act painted by Picasso in arguably his most important work - then by systematically repressing any semblance of Basque culture or identity for the 36 years of his rule.

Under Franco, anyone caught speaking or promoting Euskera was jailed. Schools were shut and Basque newspapers and customs, such as the popular squash-like game, pelota, and wood-chopping, were banned.

ETA blossomed during the Franco era and for a time was regarded by anti-fascists across Spain as a quasiopposition to the brutal dictatorship.

In targeting the hated Guardia Civil and armed forces, Franco's functionaries of repression, Etarras were widely admired for ingenuity and daring. Their blowing up of Franco's Prime Minister and anointed successor, Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, in 1973 was immensely popular across Spain.

ETA reached its peak of popularity in September 1975 when, two months before his death, an ailing Franco ignored international pleas for the clemency of three Etarras, and ordered their execution.

The howls of outrage stiffened Basque resolve against Madrid. Militants began blotting out Castilian reminders across the region, converting road signs, shop windows and advertising placards written in Spanish to Euskera as a statement of Basqueness.

(The practice continues today, making it very difficult for non-Euskera speakers to find their way around the Basque provinces.)

But the death of Franco and the gradual transition to democracy, which by 1979 had restored by referendum a wide-reaching Basque autonomy, deeply divided ETA, denuding it of members and popular support.

As moderates fell away, accepting amnesties, ETA went through a series of painful internal splits and on each occasion, a more violent, less ideological group emerged at its core.

ETA responded to seeing self-determination slip away in Spain's new democratic spirit of conciliation by stepping up its reign of terror. In 1980 alone, ETA was responsible for 200 killings.

ETA hardliners spat that those who had laid down arms and had taken Madrid's amnesty offer had "pulled down their pants like whores". That disgust was made violently clear in 1986 when the celebrated Etarra Maria Dolores"Yoyes" Gonzalez Katarain, newly returned from a seven-year exile in Mexico after accepting an amnesty, was assassinated in her village market in front of her three-year-old son.

Her killing was ordered by the recently arrested ETA leader and her former comrade-in-arms, Francisco Mugica Garmendia, best known by his nom de guerre, Pakito. In a communique issued after her murder, Pakito, whom police also hold responsible for the 1973 Carrero Blanco killing, said ETA had "no option" in executing Yoyes because she had betrayed the movement by accepting an amnesty

Yoyes's murder was a major turning point in how Basques regarded ETA. ETA was no longer representative of Basque nationalist aspirations. It was now a feared practitioner of radical and needless terrorism, and was clearly out of step with political reality.

This is even truer today. The ideology surrounding ETA and Herri Batasuna(People's Unity) is an anarchic throwback to Marxist-Leninism, Maoism and their own curious interpretation of socialism. They have no policy or platform other than self-determination.

Never thought to number more than 1,000 members at its peak in the late 1970s, Spanish security forces believe there are no more than 100 active Etarras. About 15 per cent of ETA members have traditionally been women.

Like the IRA, ETA is funded by direct donation (thought to be through HB), kidnap ransom, armed robbery and by a mafia-style "revolutionary tax", where ETA writes to a businessman and threatens him and his family if he doesn't make a secret donation.

ETA heroes include Fidel Castro, his revolutionary comrade-in-arms Che Guevera and former Albanian strongman Enver Hoxha. Fiercely anti-European and isolationist, ETA has said the closest to its concept of an independent Euskadi is the former communist Albania.

Despite the near universal condemnation of ETA's methods, Herri Batasuna commands 15 per cent of the vote for the Basque parliament, although that figure has been declining in recent years.

With its 13 seats HB is the third largest party, behind the ruling Basque Nationalist Party's 22 and Gonzalez's Socialists' 16. By comparison, Sinn Fein receives just 11 per cent of the vote in Northern Ireland.

Herri Batasuna does little to make itself attractive to voters. It refuses to participate in parliament nor will it condemn ETA terrorism or its statements that it will target this year's festivities.

Where Northern Ireland has its radical Ulster Unionists, Spain has the Grupos Antiterroristas de Liberacion (GAL), which between 1983 and 1987 carried out 32 terrorist attacks in France, 25 of which were on ETA suspects taking refuge in France.

GAL's attacks curiously stopped in the late 1980s around the time when the Mitterrand Government of France agreed to extradite ETA suspects rounded up in France to Spain. While GAL reprisals seem to have stopped, the bad smell surrounding them has not.

Lawyers representing GAL victims claim to have traced GAL connections all the way to the Interior Ministry in Madrid, with allegations that GAL hitmen were paid from a secret fund administered by the central government.

Amid allegations of a cover-up, Spanish courts have ruled that two senior police officers recently tried for GAL activities "acted alone and not with the apparatus of state".

Attempts by pro-ETA lawyers to subpoena evidence and witnesses have been frequently foiled by bureaucracy and officialdom, and Spain now awaits a trial of two men suspected of killing an HB leader in 1983 that threatens to expose a closer link between GAL and government officials.

"GAL is not history. This is state terrorism. What we are seeing in Euskadi is genocide." said the 48 year-old HB leader and a former Etarra, Itziar Aizpurua Egana, a "freedom fighter" since she was seven.

"Croatia fought for its freedom and we are fighting for ours," she said.

"I cannot guarantee this year will pass without incident. It will only be free when our people are free.

"I know for sure ETA does not want to target these events but this is a war and in war innocent people can get hurt."

Despite the recent arrests a fortnight ago of senior Etarras - including the intellectual, military and strategic commanders - Madrid still finds itself in a murderous bind with the organisation. The arrests were led by French intelligence in a joint operation with Spanish police, deflecting previous criticism from Madrid that Paris had been soft in cracking down on ETA. It was the most serious setback in ETA's history.

It is acknowledged even by its supporters that the movement is facing extinction. Get through this year safely and ETA will effectively be finished

But to accede to ETA's demands of negotiation and guarantee an Olympics and Expo free of violence would be to recognise ETA and accord it a status it deserves neither politically nor morally.

The recent arrests in Spain and France have been a severe setback to ETA but neither government believes the threat is over.

"ETA is still in a position to kill," the Spanish Interior Minister, Senor Jose Luis Corcuera, said after the arrests.

"We are expecting reprisals."

In this Year of Wonders, Spain and the world ignores ETA at its peril.