As Spanish elections loom, a conference in the Basque Country this week is intended to move the once-unlikely peace process into its final phase
EVEN seasoned Swiss peace professionals thought the lawyer Brian Currin was “mad” when, in 2008, he initiated a new peace process in the Basque Country with the pro-independence terrorist group Eta. The previous process had collapsed less than two years earlier, buried in the rubble of a lethal Eta bombing at Madrid airport that shocked even the group’s supporters.
The Spanish centre-left government felt badly burned after risking a peace initiative that had been fiercely opposed by the right-wing opposition. Since 2006 the Madrid parties have insisted that there is no political conflict to resolve on Basque independence. Eta, they say, is simply a criminal group that the police are dealing with more successfully every year. That remains the official position.
In the meantime, however, Currin and a group of international colleagues, including Irish figures ranging from Mary Robinson to Gerry Adams, have been quietly advancing an unlikely strategy that has helped to bring a de-facto peace to the Basque Country after decades of violence.
Eta’s 13-month unilateral ceasefire remains solid. The group’s former supporters in the nationalist party Batasuna – and many other Basque voters – have strongly supported a new pro-independence group that explicitly and repeatedly rejects all political violence, a development few could have imagined until recent times.
Currin helped to set up the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in his native South Africa and chairs the Sentence Review Commission in Northern Ireland. He gives considerable credit to Irish influences for contributing to the remarkable turnaround in the Basque Country.
Fr Alec Reid, the Belfast priest who was influential in the Northern Ireland peace process, has been visiting the region since the late 1990s. Some observers have dismissed Reid as too partisan, too close to the radical Basque nationalists who supported Eta’s terrorism, and unsympathetic to the Basque and Spanish majority who oppose them. Currin disagrees.
“Reid played a significant role,” he says. “He developed a relationship of trust with Batasuna when they were distrusted by everybody. He offered them empathy and good counsel.”
Years later, Currin says, when he was arguing the case for peace with the same people, he heard them say again and again that Reid had prepared the ground for their shift away from the bomb and bullet.
He believes that Sinn Féin, too, made an important contribution, consistently getting the message across to the radicals that they needed to form a credible political party and sign up to something along the lines of the Mitchell principles in rejecting violence. (Batasuna had been banned by the Spanish courts in 2002 because of its alleged links to Eta and its refusal to condemn terrorist attacks.)
Subsequently, Currin brought together a number of very different Irish figures, including Mary Robinson, Nuala O’Loan, John Hume and Albert Reynolds, who, along with foreign luminaries such as Desmond Tutu, signed the Brussels Declaration of March 2010. The declaration called on Eta to declare a permanent ceasefire and requested an appropriate response from the Spanish government to such a move.
Currin’s thinking was that Eta would feel much more committed to a ceasefire requested by an international group than it would to any deal with a Spanish government it distrusted.
With the exception of O’Loan, who continues to work with Currin in an international contact group, the rest of the Brussels signatories have had no further role in the Basque peace process.
A big hurdle remains. There has been, in Currin’s view, no appropriate response from Madrid to the ceasefire. (Currin himself has no official status in Spain.)
There are still 800 Eta prisoners in Spanish jails and Currin believes it is unlikely that Eta will take the next and final step in the process, its own dissolution, without some quid pro quo from Madrid. But he also knows that Madrid will not negotiate directly with Eta. It is hard to see how this circle can be squared.
As Spain approaches a November general election that the conservatives are very likely to win, anything resembling even a partial amnesty would still be deeply unpopular outside the Basque Country.
This is the context for an international peace conference in the Basque Country next Monday, which Currin hopes will “direct the energy that has gone into the Basque conflict towards exclusively political and democratic channels”. There are rumours, which Currin will not confirm, that Bertie Ahern and Tony Blair will attend. But Blair’s close aide on the Irish process, Jonathan Powell, is definitely attending.
This week Ahern told The Irish Timesthat he had been to the Basque Country several times this year and last year to discuss peace issues, "with the permission of the Spanish government". This would be a remarkable development, as Madrid insists it does not welcome any international mediation. Currin says he knows nothing about these talks.
Currin is also tight-lipped about how precisely the conference delegates might advance matters. But he seems optimistic, and he has squared a few circles before. And he has proved that he is far from mad.
Paddy Woodworth is the author of Dirty War, Clean Hands: Eta, the GAL and Spanish Democracy(Yale, 2003)
