Ghosts of Spain

by Giles Tremlett

  The moriscos, and the Moors themselves, had always seemed to me just another quaint, if important and romantic, part of Spanish history. Their presence in modern Spain (except in language and place names) was solely architectural. Here, after all, were the splendid Alhambra palace, the vast mezquita in Córdoba with its 580 columns and the hilltop Alcazaba fortresses overlooking Málaga and Almería. They had left, too, some uniquely Spanish architectural forms, where east and west overlapped to produce the hybrid mudéjar and mozárabe styles in churches and monasteries.

  Occasionally, Al Andalus would reappear in the news. Muslims, for example, tried to gain access for themselves and other religions to pray at the Córdoba mezquita – which now houses the city’s cathedral – but were turned down by the Vatican. Those who prostrate themselves before the mezquita’s sparkling, golden mihrab can still be thrown out. In Granada, meanwhile, a group of European converts eventually got money out of the United Arab Emirates to build a smart, gleaming new mosque on top of the Albaicín. It symbolically overlooks the Alhambra from a charming barrio of winding lanes and cypress-filled gardens that once boasted twenty-eight mosques. That, I thought, was it. Al Andalus was a great tourism draw. Granada, with its Moroccan gift shops and restaurants offering couscous and tajines, had even become something of a Moorish theme park. Here was one piece of history that Spaniards were not about to argue over.

  I could not have been more wrong. Late in 2004, José María Aznar, the former prime minister whose Conservative People’s Party (PP) had been ejected from power in favour of the Socialists of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero at elections that March, gave a lecture at Washington’s Georgetown University. His party’s defeat had come three days after 191 Madrid railway commuters were killed in the west’s worst Islamist terror attack since September 11. It had been the most traumatic moment in recent Spanish history. To understand the circumstances surrounding that defeat, Aznar told the Georgetown students, they should wind the clock back to 711. This, Spanish schoolchildren are meant to know, was the moment when a Berber called Tarik Bin Ziyad crossed the Mediterranean with a small army and began a swift invasion of Iberia (whilst also leaving his name behind at the large rock known as Jabal-al-Tarik, the Rock of Tarik, now Gibraltar).

  ‘Spain’s problem with Al-Qaida starts in the eighth century … when a Spain recently invaded by the Moors refused to become just another piece in the Islamic world and began a long battle to recover its identity,’ Aznar said. ‘This reconquista process was very long, lasting some eight hundred years.’

  Aznar was widely ridiculed for his words. They were an attempt to relate the train attacks to Al Andalus. Christian Spain, he meant, had long been a target for Islamic crusaders. An old enemy, in other words, had returned.

  Few people agreed. One who might have done, however, was a bearded and robed man then believed to be hiding out somewhere in Pakistan. Osama bin Laden had shown a personal interest in Al-Andalus, signalling it to his followers as an apostate territory and lamenting its loss to Islam. On the day in October, 2001, that the United States began its campaign against the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Al-Qaida founder issued one of his famous videotapes. He was followed by his number two, the Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri. ‘Let the whole world know that we shall never accept that the tragedy of Al Andalus should be repeated,’ al-Zawahiri said. Two months before the Madrid attacks, Bin Laden himself returned to the theme, lamenting the weakness of the Arab world. ‘It is enough to know that the economy of all Arab countries is weaker than the economy of one country that had once been part of our world when we used to truly adhere to Islam. That country is the lost Al Andalus,’ he said on a tape broadcast by Al Jazeera.

  A newspaper editorial summed up the feelings of those Spaniards who had angrily rejected Aznar’s policies and his disastrous handling of the bombings at the polls that March. ‘In their reinvention of the past, and their vindication of the crusades between Islam and Christianity, there is a disturbing similarity between Aznar and Bin Laden,’ huffed El País. Spain’s Muslims, be they immigrant Moroccans or local converts, agreed.

  Aznar was not the only outraged Spaniard talking of a conspiracy to turn the clock back several centuries. A few weeks earlier, Spain’s leading clergyman, the arch-conservative Cardinal Antonio María Rouco, had trodden a similar path. ‘Some people wish to place us in the year 711,’ Cardinal Rouco said. He was complaining about rumours that the Socialist government planned to put other religions or denominations, be they Islam, Judaism or the Protestant churches, on the same footing as Roman Catholicism – which, amongst other things, has a near stranglehold on religious teaching at schools. ‘It seems as if we are meant to wipe ourselves out of history.’

  Once again, I found, Spaniards were bickering over the meaning of their own history. Only this time it was about a period that stretched back, in British terms, to even before the days of the Vikings. It seemed that the country’s self-image was somehow at stake. Should Spain be defined as a proudly Roman Catholic nation that emerged, or re-emerged, from a valiant eight-century battle against Islam? Or should it, as the historian Américo Castro first proposed decades ago, think of itself as being forged from a historic encounter between religions and cultures, including both Islam and Judaism? For a country of inevitably intimate relations with a Muslim world that is clearly visible across the Mediterranean from its southernmost shores, these are important questions.

  This latest row had been sparked by the tragic, dramatic events of those four bitter, yet historic, days in March 2004. These were the four days bracketed, at one end, by the train bombings and, at the other, by the surprise ousting of Aznar’s party from power.

  Early on the morning of 11 March, Luis Garrudo, the doorman of a small block of flats close to the railway station in Alcalá de Henares, a Madrid dormitory town, noticed a white Renault Kangoo van parked across the street. It was a bright, spring morning. Three men busied themselves around the van. They seemed dressed for the coldest of winter days. Their heads and faces were all but hidden behind scarves, hats and hoods.

  ‘When I saw them I thought they looked like armed robbers or something like that, though it didn’t make much sense at that time of the morning,’ Luis told me when I went to see him twenty-four hours later. ‘They were all covered up around their heads and necks, and it wasn’t even cold.’

  At just before 7 a.m. Luis walked the 200 metres to the railway station to pick up a copy of Metro, a free daily morning newspaper. He found himself walking behind one of the men from the van. ‘He seemed to be in a hurry,’ he told me. ‘He was walking very quickly, carrying something and, again, I could hardly see his face at all.’

  Luis thought, from the white scarf tied high across his neck and chin, that he might be a Real Madrid fan. ‘All I could see was the scarf and something covering the top of his head. You could only really see his eyes. By the time I got back, the other two men had gone. The van was still there.’

  Luis was walking behind one of the worst mass murderers in recent European history. For this was one of several young Muslim radicals and small-time crooks equipped with thirteen bombs. A few minutes later they started hopping from carriage to carriage, and from train to train, across platforms packed full of early morning workers – builders, office cleaners, electricians and schoolteachers. This was the 8 a.m. start crowd, those who had to be at building sites and warehouses well before most office workers had even left their homes. Many, more than a quarter, were immigrants, attracted by the cheap rents this far out of the Spanish capital. The man Luis Garrudo followed would place at least one of thirteen cheap sports bags in at least one of four different trains. Each bag contained a mobile phone, a copper detonator, nuts and screws to act as shrapnel, and some twelve kilos of Spanish-made Goma 2 Eco explosives.

  The bombers targeted four separate trains which passed through Alcalá de Henares between 7.00 a.m. and 7.15. In some cases they may have ridden them for the first few stops as they headed in towards
Madrid’s Atocha station, distributing the bombs amongst the packed carriages. Within half-an-hour, Europe’s initiation into the new tactics of radical Islamist terror was complete.

  The bombs were detonated by the alarms in the mobile telephones. They started going off at 7.37 and had wrought their full destruction by 7.43. In some trains those who went to help the wounded from the first bomb were caught by a second or third. By the time they finished exploding, there were four trains each with immense, jagged holes blown through several carriages. The smoking hulks were strung along the line between Atocha, where one train had just arrived, and the working-class barrio of El Pozo del Tío Raimundo. The latter’s name was once synonymous with the poverty of immigrant workers arriving from other parts of Spain. One bomb had exploded in a wagon known as ‘little Romania’ because it was where immigrants from that country gathered every morning. Fifty-four of the dead were immigrants.

  There were Muslims, too, and schoolchildren, babies, pregnant women, young couples and parents with their young children. All of these, and more, would die, their bodies peppered with shrapnel or the breath squeezed out of them by the blow and suck of the blast.

  Those who survived recall the ghastly silence that followed immediately after. Some will never forget. ‘It still flashes through my mind continuously … The silence, the dust and the things I saw that I can’t bring myself to describe to you,’ Clara Escribano, a survivor from the train at Santa Eugenia, told me months later.

  The first emergency workers to arrive were also struck by the stillness of this tableau of horror. ‘It was the silence that made it so different from other attacks,’ Dr Ervigio Corral, a veteran of ETA attacks, told me. Dr Corral was the man in charge of Madrid’s ambulance services. He had rushed to Atocha station and was the first to enter some coaches. The dead, or their remains, were everywhere. ‘The only living people left inside were those who could not move. They were almost all suffering from burst eardrums, which meant they could not hear you. When you asked what was wrong with them, they did not answer. They asked you for help only with their eyes.’

  Europe had only seen one attack on this scale before, in 1988, when 270 people were killed by a Libyan bomb on Pan Am Flight 103, forcing it to crash into the Scottish town of Lockerbie.

  Dr Corral would see some eighty corpses in that first hour, in Atocha and 500 yards up the track where a second bombed train had ground to a halt after bits of carriage had been blown into apartments overlooking the track. Over the next thirty-six hours he would personally give the news of death to some 130 bereaved and distraught families.

  The death toll could have been higher. Of the thirteen bombs, only ten exploded. Madrileños found out that day, to their surprise, that they had one of the best-equipped ambulance and emergency services in Europe. Two field hospitals were set up, hundreds of volunteers called in and, of the 400 injured rushed to hospital, only one died on the way. Fourteen more died after they got there. The timing of the attacks helped, too. Hospitals were just changing shifts, so had twice the normal number of staff at hand. Operating theatres were empty. ‘If it happened again, I would just ask that it happen at the same time,’ a doctor who treated the injured told me.

  My apartment lies just a block from the Gregorio Marañón hospital, which took most of the injured. That morning my children waited ten minutes to cross the road on their way to school. The stream of ambulances tearing past made their usual zebra crossing impassable.

  Spain had not lived a moment of such enormous drama and tension since Civil Guard lieutenant colonel Antonio Tejero and his men stormed parliament in their failed 1981 coup attempt.

  A massacre of this kind was simply of a different scale to the Basque separatist ETA bombs that had killed and maimed with frustrating regularity on Madrid’s streets for three decades. Madrileños had marched in their millions to protest against some ETA killings. They were rarely, however, touched by them directly.

  There was nothing anonymous about the death and carnage on what soon became known as 11-M or ‘el Once M’. Everybody, it seemed, had been directly or indirectly affected. If they had not seen it, survived it or had to work in the middle of it, they knew someone who had. My own, not terribly large, network of friends and acquaintances soon turned up half a dozen ‘somebody who’ stories: a schoolteacher lost a former pupil and spent the day trying to prevent her teenage pupils rushing home to see if parents, relatives and friends were okay; a psychologist worked all night as a volunteer helping families identify bodies at a huge morgue set up in the city’s exhibition centre; a fireman long ago retired into an office job put on his helmet once more, went to Atocha, wept, pulled himself together and got to work; and a doctor, arrived at the gates of Atocha to catch her morning train, saw the crowds running, threw up and fled in terror.

  Perhaps I should have expected it, but it was shocking to see how quickly the narrative of what had happened that day – and over the next three days until the general election – split into separate, conflicting and angrily confrontational strands. If Spaniards can argue over historic events of thirteen centuries ago, perhaps it is inevitable that they should do so over history as it happens. El 11-M, with its horror and the chain of political events it set off, now looks set to be one of those events on which Spaniards will never agree. The division, unfortunately, is on sadly familiar political lines. On this matter, las dos Españas, the two Spains, of history are once more at loggerheads. The twin versions often rely on putting belief above proof, on turning to those you trust rather than the evidence presented.

  There was nothing casual about the timing of the attacks. It was two and a half years to the day since the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers in New York. It was also, more importantly, three days before a general election. If the bombers aim was to influence the course of those elections, they were highly successful. Even they, however, could not have foreseen exactly how, or why, over the next three extraordinary days, they would do so.

  It took just a few hours to add political confusion to human catastrophe. Most people immediately suspected ETA. The magnitude and style of the attacks, however, left sufficient room for doubt. ETA, after all, had never acted on this scale, or with this degree of wanton, arbitrary barbarity. The first authoritative voice to publicly point the finger, however, came from the Basque Country itself. Basque regional premier Juan José Ibarretxe denounced the work of ‘vermin’ and ‘murderers’. ‘ETA is writing its last, disgraceful, pages,’ he said. If Ibarretxe said it was ETA, it was reasonable to believe he would know. The Basque government’s police, after all, had its own units specialised in fighting ETA. Nobody realised at the time that this was simply one of the first knee-jerk political reactions of a day laden with them. For his own political reasons, Ibarretxe wanted to be the first to heap shame on ETA.

  The government soon followed suit. Their front man for this was Interior Minister Ángel Acebes. The strings, however, were being pulled directly from the Moncloa Palace where Aznar had set up a crisis committee. This excluded the political opposition. It also, to begin with, excluded the country’s intelligence services, the Centro Nacional de Inteligencia (CNI). If any minutes or notes were taken at that committee, they were later destroyed. Aznar’s team at the Moncloa Palace prime minister’s office wiped computer records, including security copies, of their eight years in power before leaving a few weeks later. Aznar only left paper copies of official, legal documents – and the 12,000-euro bill for erasing the computers.

  ‘The government does not have any doubt at all that ETA is responsible,’ Acebes said. ‘ETA was looking to commit a massacre in Spain and it has managed it.’ It was a line that, with only slowly waning levels of insistence but rapidly evaporating levels of credibility, the government would stick to for most of the next four days. ETA’s favourite explosive, Titadyn 30 AG had, they initially said, been used. Basque terrorists had, three months earlier, been caught smuggling bombs onto trains into Madrid. Just a few weeks earlier an ETA va
n-bomb packed with explosives, apparently heading for the same Madrid suburbs where the bombs were planted, had been captured. One of the terrorists arrested that day said there had also been a failed attempt at planting thirteen rucksack-bombs at a ski resort. These were all reasons to suspect ETA. They were not, however, proof.

  Before Acebes spoke there came a denial from those normally damned as ETA’s mouthpieces – the leaders of the banned Batasuna party. ‘This attack is not the work of ETA. This is an action carried out by the Arab resistance movement,’ said Batasuna leader Arnaldo Otegi. Otegi, who left jail in 1990 after serving half of a six-year prison sentence for his part in an ETA kidnapping, had never before condemned the group’s attacks. This time he publicly expressed ‘absolute repulsion’ for a ‘massacre … that was indiscriminate and affected mainly working-class people’.

  ‘We want to make it absolutely clear. The izquierda abertzale (the patriotic left) does not even consider as a hypothesis that ETA is behind what happened in Madrid. Neither the target nor the modus operandi allow one to say ETA is behind it,’ he said.

  His denial acted like a red rag to the government bull. Aznar harboured a blind hatred for ETA. He was now convinced they were trying to wriggle off the hook. Aznar personally rang the most important newspaper editors, the first time some had received a call in eight years. ‘What Otegi is trying to do is pass the blame onto the Islamists in order to gain time,’ he told Pedro J. Ramírez, editor of El Mundo.

  ‘He guaranteed to me that it was ETA,’ Jesús Ceberio, editor of El País, said afterwards. ‘It was an assurance given in absolute terms.’

  Aznar’s calls produced opposite reactions. Ramírez, realising Aznar had failed to give concrete evidence, took the word ETA out of the headline of his special mid-afternoon edition. El País, by contrast, added it in, declaring ‘ETA slaughter in Madrid’. ‘I clearly made a mistake,’ a bitter Ceberio admitted later.