SPAIN: ETA has suffered severe setbacks to its political and armed campaigns, writes Paddy Woodworth.
ETA has a rather sinister logo. It shows an axe, representing military strength, around which a serpent is coiled, representing political cunning.
Several police raids this month have taken much of the edge off the already battered axe. The group's chief political ideologue and some 30 other alleged militants have been arrested, and large quantities of weapons and documents have been seized,
However, the survival skills of the serpent should not be underestimated, though it is undoubtedly weaker now than at any time since the group carried out its first killing, in 1968.
Yesterday, the Spanish prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, gave top billing to the arrests in a major interview with the Madrid daily El País, marking his first six months in power, but was careful not to proclaim any final victory over the Basque group.
"It is an important step towards the defeat of terrorism," he said. "And I think we are closer to ending the violence. But there is no doubt that there is still some way to go to achieve this goal."
Some observers believe that some form of negotiations may be taking place, but there is no hard evidence for this. Zapatero flatly refused to be drawn on whether the government had any new strategy to bring about ETA's dissolution.
There is a similar cautiousness about drawing hasty conclusions from the arrests in the Basque Country itself. "This is not the end of ETA," Ander Landaburu told The Irish Times from Bilbao. "I think it is the beginning of the end, but we cannot yet see what that end will be. Bad things can still happen."
Landaburu is from a prominent Basque nationalist family, and was briefly a member of ETA in the 1960s, like so many young Basque opponents of the Franco dictatorship. He is now the Basque regional editor for El País. For several years he has been unable to walk down the street without a bodyguard. ETA considers him a traitor, because he is resolutely opposed to terrorism in a democracy. His brother, Gorka, who has also been outspoken against ETA, lost two fingers and an eye when a letter bomb blew up in his study in 2001.
The targeting of local councillors, academics, and journalists has been one of the hallmarks of ETA under the leadership of the man French police arrested in Salies-de-Béarn near the Spanish border on October 3rd, Mikel Albizu Iriarte (alias Mikel Antza). His legacy is that 5,000 Spanish and Basque civilians now live in the shadow of death threats, and need 24-hour protection.
Albizu's arrest, the detention of other alleged militants, and the arms finds have been described as "historic" by the Spanish Interior Ministry. They clearly spell the end of the long leadership of Albizu. Curiously, he had taken over after similar high-profile arrests of three ETA leaders in Bidart, in the French Basque Country, in 1992. There were claims at that time that ETA was finished, but Albizu devised a new strategy which kept the group bloodily in business throughout the 1990s.
This strategy was proclaimed as "socialising the suffering". The implication was that everyone had to feel the pain suffered by ETA's militants, hence the expansion of the list of "legitimate targets". The reality was that there was less risk to ETA members in killing civilians rather than members of the security forces.
The Basque Country experienced a grim descent into a climate of fear. Divisions became acute between moderate Basque nationalists, who support greater self-rule for the region but reject violence, and the large minority of Basques who support Madrid-based parties. Fostering this division seems to have been the aim of Albizu's strategy. When Spanish public opinion was outraged over the killing of a young conservative party councillor, Miguel Ángel Blanco, in 1996, the moderate Basque nationalists began to feel that Basque identity in general, and not just ETA, was under attack.
This led to a convergence between the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV), which controls the regional parliament, and ETA, resulting in a ceasefire, modelled on the Irish peace process, in 1998/1999. The quid pro quo was a radicalisation in the PNV position, which now demanded self-determination for the Basque Country.
The ceasefire was very popular in the Basque Country. ETA supporters in Batasuna, in coalition with other radicals, enjoyed a peace dividend, taking nearly 20 per cent of the regional vote.
Unlike the IRA, though, ETA showed no real intention of serious negotiation with the Spanish government. In any case, Madrid was totally opposed to any concessions on Basque sovereignty. ETA returned to terrorism in late 1999.
However, its new campaign has been a disaster for the organisation, and its political support appears to be collapsing. This means that there are important differences between ETA's situation after the Bidart arrests in 1992, and its position today. In both military and political terms, the group was a great deal more powerful then than it is now, though the size of the arsenal seized in France suggests how great a threat may still remain.
In the decade before the Bidart raid, ETA had been killing about 40 people a year. Its killing rate in the 1990s averaged about half that, but was still enough to make an grim impact on Spanish public opinion. After the ceasefire, ETA briefly achieved a similarly brutal tally. Since then, however, its terrorist capacity has nosedived, with no killings at all in the last 16 months.
Improved police efficiency, and, especially, improved collaboration between the French and Spanish security forces, has hit the group very hard. Numerous ETA "commandos" have been arrested before they could carry out a single attack.
Then the September 11th attacks in New York transformed the international and domestic climate in which the group operated. The then Spanish prime minister, José María Aznar, was quick to use the Twin Towers outrage to claim that "there is no difference between ETA and al-Qaeda". Absurd as that statement is in objective terms, he succeeded in persuading both the Spanish judiciary and parliament, and the US and the EU, to support a series of draconian measures, including banning Batasuna.
The response in the region to this move, which many observers thought would add fuel to the Basque fire, was remarkably muted. Previous elections had already shown the party's support plunging by 50 per cent since 1998. Even among those still loyal to ETA, there was a widespread feeling it was time to take the gun out of politics. The response on the Basque streets to the recent police raids has also been decidedly lacking in militancy compared to earlier periods.
In this situation, ETA may indeed be in terminal decline. But neither the French nor the Spanish are dropping their guard. Whoever does take up Albizu's bloody mantle, he or she may feel an urgent need to assert that ETA is, in fact, still alive and still capable of dealing in death.
One positive factor may be the recent change in government in Madrid. Aznar's policies had created a paradox: ETA and its supporters became much weaker, but the PNV became both stronger and much more radical, and continues to demand a referendum on self-determination. The rather more flexible approach towards a new status for the Basque Country by Zapatero could facilitate dialogue with moderate Basque nationalists. Between them, they have the opportunity to create a context in which there will be no significant social space left in the Basque Country where ETA can find oxygen.
Paddy Woodworth is the author of Dirty War, Clean Hands: ETA, the GAL and Spanish Democracy (Yale 2003)