SPAIN:Eta's warning of 'war on all fronts' may yet transpire to be a tactical ploy, writes Paddy Woodworth
If the scoreboard for terrorist campaigns could be expressed in purely "military" germs, then the Spanish government could claim a very successful summer season against Eta, which formally ended its 15-month-old ceasefire on June 5th.
Firstly, there have been no casualties, apart from minor injuries to two police officers in a bomb attack in Durango late last month. Secondly, a number of other attacks have been frustrated, and 26 Eta suspects, including the group's alleged explosives expert, have been arrested.
Thirdly, there have been no shootings, and only five bombings, several of these almost purely symbolic, like the explosion of small devices along the route of the Tour de France in Navarre.
Compared with the bloody Eta campaigns of the past four decades, you might think this is petty and ineffective stuff, a skin irritation rather than a wound on the Spanish body politic.
Indeed, supporters of the conservative Partido Popular (PP), Spain's main opposition party, have argued that Eta is engaged in a phoney war, possibly with the government's connivance. The group is said to be deliberately avoiding casualties until the next elections, due within six months.
According to this theory, Eta wants to see the prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, and his Socialist Party (PSOE) returned with an overall majority.
Eta would then call another ceasefire, and Zapatero would renegotiate the status of the Basque Country from a stronger political mandate - breaking up the Spanish nation, according to the rhetoric of the PP.
This is the latest - and the most credible - of a series of bizarre conspiracy theories advanced by the PP since the party lost power in the immediate aftermath of the Madrid bombings in March 2004, in which 198 people died. The PP's efforts to blame Eta - and even the PSOE itself - for attacks clearly carried out by Islamists has brought Spanish politics to one of its lowest points since the transition to democracy in the 1970s.
Anti-terrorist policy, once firmly bipartisan, has become a political football. During the recent ceasefire, the PP's attacks on Zapatero for "surrendering to terrorism" were shrill, almost hysterical. Yet Zapatero was doing no more - and arguably rather less - than the PP had done during previous ceasefires. Yet their accusations found a broad echo in the Spanish public, including a significant sector of PSOE supporters.
However, Zapatero's firm handling of Eta's return to violence has made him a more difficult target for the right. But if the PP's insinuations about a phoney war were accurate, that might not be a bad thing for anyone who wants to see the Basque conflict resolved. Transparent and democratic discussion of the future of the Basque Country, in the total absence of violence, would surely be better than continued blood-letting.
Unfortunately, Eta's actions, and its statement last weekend, which reiterated its June declaration that it would "strike on all fronts", indicates that the group has little intention of abandoning violence. Eta continues to demand a level of independence which the majority of Basques almost certainly do not want, and Madrid is most unlikely to grant.
The large size of the bomb in Durango, another one abandoned in August on the Mediterranean coast, and a third exploded in Logroño at the weekend, suggest a strategy that has no compunction about taking human life. It is only a matter of luck that no one has been killed so far - the impact of the Logroño bomb was only minimal because the detonator failed to ignite the main device.
Moreover, if Eta is responsible for a single killing in this campaign, it is unlikely that any Spanish government, centre-left or conservative, will consider talking to the group for many years to come.
But why does Eta persist in such a strategy? And why do its political supporters in the banned pro-independence party, Batasuna, not distance themselves from the much smaller group who actively support violence? The answers are complex, but Eta appears to be caught in a kind of political time warp. Neither the example of the IRA's decommissioning nor the situation created by indiscriminate Islamist terrorism can persuade its leaders to enter serious negotiations, where they would have to make significant concessions.
The group's support is certainly in decline, as the poor turnout at recent demonstrations for its prisoners confirms. However, some of Madrid's policies may reverse this trend.
The continued banning of Batasuna, and new legal moves against other surrogate political groups like ANV, which did well in recent local elections, persuades a core of Eta supporters that Spain still denies democracy to the Basques.
Towns and villages administered by parties with a minority of the vote give some force to this argument.
Yet any move by Zapatero to remove these restrictions - not on the cards in any case - would probably produce a surge of support for the PP, which would simply reimpose them. The knots which bind this region into conflict seem as tight as ever.
• Paddy Woodworth's new book, The Basque Country, is published this month by Signal Books, and in the US in November by Oxford University Press.