Ghosts of Spain

by Giles Tremlett

  At ten minutes to six I took up position outside the PP’s Génova Street headquarters. There were a dozen or more journalists and photographers there and a handful of people, no more than twenty, hanging about. At six on the dot, a protest demonstration materialised out of thin air. Suddenly there were fifty, then 100, then 200 people gathered. The police ordered them to move on. They refused. The police demanded their ID cards. The demonstrators held them out to the TV cameras. ‘We want the truth!’ they shouted. ‘¿Quién ha sido? ¿Quién ha sido?’, ‘Who was it? Who was it?’, began the chant. As the minutes ticked by hundreds more people arrived. Soon there were a thousand, then two thousand, then the street was blocked and the riot squad vans were arriving – always too late for the protesters as their numbers grew.

  A small, determined woman was standing in the middle of the road, ignoring police orders to stay on one side and shouting at passing cars, many of which honked in support. I went up to ask her some questions. ‘We are just people who want the truth. Our pain has been caused by Aznar’s support for Bush,’ she said.

  Within half an hour, 5,000 people were sitting on the road chanting: ‘We want the truth, before we vote!’ Another chant was ‘¡Vuestras guerras, nuestros muertos!’, ‘Your war, our dead!’ Madrid’s notoriously baton-happy riot police looked on, unable to do more than prepare to stop a full-scale assault on the PP building, where only a few lights burned. The blue vans kept tearing up and disgorging their cargo of helmet-and-visored police officers. If the demonstrators had wanted to riot, they could have done. I expected violence and half wished I had one of those helmets disguised as baseball hats that news agency journalists seem to get these days. But nothing happened. The police did not charge. Nor did the demonstrators. One part of the text message was roundly ignored, however. There was no silence. The crowd howled.

  A man walking a large, well-groomed dog started arguing furiously with the demonstrators. He was a university professor who, he told me, had been jailed by Franco. He was livid. ‘They [the left] are doing this because they know that tomorrow they will lose the elections,’ he fumed. The professor’s prediction was one of the worst made that day. He was one of the few people who dared to predict anything at all. Most people thought the Socialists were going to win extra votes, but nobody was prepared to say how many – or whether they might oust the People’s Party. Only at Aznar’s Moncloa Palace residence and at the headquarters of the two main parties – where a select few had access to private polling – did people know that the professor’s prediction was totally wrong.

  The demonstrators kept going all night. It was remarkable, given the tension and the anger, that there was no violence. Spaniards, anyway, do not go in for riots. The only exception has been the Basque Country’s angry, organised, and systematically riotous, separatist radical youths. Later the protesters would move to the Puerta del Sol – Madrid’s answer to Piccadilly Circus or Times Square – and would wander loudly around the streets until the small hours of the morning.

  It seemed nothing could add more tension to the situation. But, as protesters wandered the streets, the drama reached new heights. Telemadrid, the capital’s television station, received an anonymous call. The caller said that a videotape had been left in a waste-paper bin outside what Madrileños called the ‘mezquita de la M-30’, the shiny, Saudi-built mosque perched above the city’s ten-lane M-30 inner ring road. Police picked up the tape. When they put it into a video machine, they were greeted by the sight of three machine-gun-toting, masked men. They looked like they had come from a Hamas suicide bomber’s farewell tape in Palestine.

  We declare our responsibility for what happened in Madrid, just two and a half years after the attack on New York and Washington. It is our answer to your collaboration with that criminal Bush and his allies. It is like an answer to the crimes you have committed in the world, concretely in Afghanistan and Iraq, and, if God wills it, there will be more. You want life and we want death, which provides an example of what the Prophet Mohammed said. If you do not stop your injustices, blood will flow more and more. These attacks are just a little of what might happen in the future with what you call terrorism. This is a warning from the military commander of al-Qaida Europe: Abu Dujan the Afghan.

  ‘You want life and we want death,’ they had said. It was the mantra of angry, violent Islamists – an almost exact replica of what the imam Fizazi had reportedly said in Morocco.

  The delivery of the tape was extraordinary timing. It drove the nation’s political blood pressure to coronary-attack levels, and it did so just hours before Spaniards went to vote. Nobody who stepped into a polling booth the following day could have had any doubt about who had attacked Madrid.

  Or could they? As Spaniards voted the following morning, Foreign Minister Ana Palacio was interviewed by Sir David Frost on BBC television’s Breakfast with Frost. ‘The idea that ETA might be behind [it] is still strong in the investigation,’ she claimed.

  There are many versions of why Spaniards voted the way they did, none of them provable. Zapatero likes to say he was going to win anyway – despite opinion polls which gave the People’s Party a five to seven point lead days before the bombings. Spanish polls are notoriously bad, but that is clearly absurd. The People’s Party blames the illegal demonstrations and rumour-mongering in the left-wing press. Others on the right see the old dark forces of Felipe González’s corrupt Socialists and their friends in the police at work in the shadows. Right-wing commentators in the US and Great Britain saw straight-forward cowardice. They claimed Spaniards had voted out of fear, especially after Zapatero stuck to his long-term pledge to pull Spanish troops out of Iraq. ‘Neville Chamberlain, en Español,’ said one Wall Street Journal opinion piece, commissioned from an angry Spanish right-winger, on Zapatero. A few days earlier his nickname had been ‘Bambi’, because of his look of doe-eyed innocence. Most reasonable commentators, however, point to only four definite conclusions: the bombs produced a larger than expected turn-out at the polls; Zapatero would probably not have won without them; the People’s Party would not have lost had it not supported war in Iraq and sent troops there; its huge error in insisting that ETA had planted the bombs drove the final nail into its coffin.

  Spaniards have a history of rebelling against leaders who take them into wars they do not like. If they feel viscerally suspicious of war, one should not be surprised. Many countries have experienced its horrors. Few, however, are so convinced of its futility. As a child in 1960s and 1970s Britain, I grew up with the moral certainty that a previous generation of Britons – that of my schoolteachers – had fought a just war against Adolf Hitler. If the Auschwitz gas chambers proved they were right to fight, General Franco was proof to my Spanish friends that their grandfathers had butchered one another senselessly. The colourless decades of his rule hung heavily over the past, like a punishment for the bloodbath.

  Spain’s experience of war has been better painted than it has been written. The few hundred metres of central Madrid that embrace both the Prado Museum and the Reina Sofía modern arts centre, contain, within them, some of the most telling pictorial denunciations of war ever painted or etched. In his painting The Third of May, 1808, or The Executions on Príncipe Pío Hill and his Disasters of War series of etchings Goya tells of the Spanish uprising against Napoleonic rule in 1808. ‘Yo lo ví’– ‘I saw it,’ Goya scratched onto one of his copperplates of killing, rape and pillage. In the Reina Sofía, Picasso’s huge, grey-blue Guernica is populated with terrified mothers, dead children, maddened animals and dismembered bodies. It evokes a world numbed by terror.

  The horror of Guernica, blitzed by the German Luftwaffe on Franco’s behalf in 1937, was real, and more so because it was innovative. An ancient human fear was turned into reality. Death rained from the sky. A local artist once showed me around the rebuilt town, telling me his memories of the fateful day. He had run for the hills as a boy and watched Guernica burn. What he saw was the invention of blanket incendiary bom
bing of civilian targets. What was shocking in 1937 became, sadly, commonplace within a decade. Guernica, and nearby Durango, were the experimental laboratories for the carpet bombing of Coventry or Dresden and, ultimately, for the nuclear wastelands of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

  War played its part, but the most likely reason for the 2004 vote was the People’s Party’s obstinacy in insisting on the one version of events that would help them politically – that ETA was to blame. A post-voting poll showed one in five Spaniards had that uppermost in their minds when they voted. It was enough to swing it for Rodríguez Zapatero.

  In the end, it was not Al-Qaida that brought Aznar’s People’s Party down. It was ETA. Or, rather, it was Aznar’s personal obsession with the separatist group. Under his guidance, the People’s Party had been drawn into defining itself in terms of ETA or, rather, in terms of its anti-ETA-ness. If ETA was absolute evil, the People’s Party saw itself as its only true opponent. It was, by extension, its noble, shining opposite.

  The People’s Party, and Aznar in particular, was so blinded by that idea of itself that, when the bombs went off, it was as if a prophecy had come true. ETA had shown its full vileness, further justifying Aznar’s firm stance and shaming those he saw as appeasers. The People’s Party had no need to lie to Spaniards. It was already fully programmed to fool itself. As its thesis weakened, it instinctively dug its grave deeper. Little wonder Spaniards voted it out.

  Ten days later, Aznar, who was still caretaker prime minister, appeared on television for a rare live interview. It had, presumably, been at his own request. For the first time ever, he began to talk about himself as a victim, though a surviving one, of terrorism. A roadside bomb in Madrid had, on 19 April 1995, blown his armour-plated car halfway across the road and caused a nearby building to collapse. Aznar, then the opposition leader, insisted on walking to a nearby clinic and remained icy-cool in the aftermath. ‘I recall the terrible smell of explosive powder, my face was scorching, my hair was singed and, as the whole place was thick with smoke, my first reaction was to feel my own body with my hands, to see if I was injured. On finding that nothing was missing, I asked the driver and bodyguard if they were all right,’ he said later. Aznar, that day, showed both courage and cool. His advisers gloated. ETA, they said, had just blasted him into the Moncloa.

  I had always been impressed, however, by his refusal to make political capital out of his status as the survivor of an ETA attack. It was a card he could have played many times, but did not – until it made no difference. Suddenly, stripped of power and personally responsible for his party’s defeat, he seemed to be seeking sympathy. Not that he was admitting he had done anything wrong. He, and his party, still refuse to admit that.

  Long before terrorism became one of the dominant preoccupations of global politics, it was the personal bugbear of José María Aznar. It overlapped, at least in his mind, with his other main dislike, Basque and Catalan separatism. Aznar always had a black-and-white view of terrorism. The only thing negotiable with ETA, his party liked to say, was ‘the colour of the bars on their cells’. Terrorism was not a political problem, but a moral one. Terrorists were evil – and that was all there was to it. They had to be defeated. Little wonder that, even before 9/11, he saw eye-to-eye with George W. Bush. On a first, and somewhat fraught, visit to Europe, the US president made Madrid his first stop. Aznar blushed with pleasure when Bush rewarded him by pledging ‘our government is committed to stand side by side with the Spanish government as it battles terrorism here in Spain.’ He even dared to become Spain’s first-ever out-and-out Atlanticist premier. General Franco had signed deals to give the US bases in Spain. He had done so, however, more out of geopolitical, Cold War expediency than out of admiration for the country that humiliated Spain in 1898. ‘It causes me some anxiety to see the world in the hands of the North Americans,’ Franco once said. ‘They are very childish.’

  Fighting ETA’s terrorism was an obviously noble cause. It did not occur to me that there might be something personal about Aznar’s determination until, during his term in office, I went to the Moncloa Palace to interview him. I did this twice, spending an hour with the man on each occasion in a room decorated with tapestries made at Madrid’s Real Fábrica de Tapices from tapestry cartoons drawn by Goya. The first time I met him, he walked into the room in a jolly, back-slapping sort of a way – a man determined to make a friendly impression. He pretty soon returned to the dour, serious individual he really was. On one of these visits I asked him about the ETA attack against him. ‘Son gafes del oficio,’ he said. ‘It is a downside of the job.’ It was a good reply. Then I told him I had met a lot of ETA victims – those wounded in attacks or those who had lost loved ones. All had told me that each fresh attack felt to them like a reliving of the first, definitive attack. Did he feel like that?

  Aznar’s reaction has stuck in my mind ever since. It is not what he said, trotting out a line about how it was important to maintain a calm, clear head, but the strange look he shot in my direction. When I said I had met lots of victims – which I had, as part of a book project – it was as though I had intruded on a private domain. Aznar, dubbed el Sequerón because of his dry, dour personality, is not the sort of person to let emotion show. It was the first time, in fact, that I had seen him at all ruffled. It was as though I could not possibly understand. I felt I was being told, in fact, that it was none of my business. It was impossible to guess what psychological cogs were turning behind the Aznar facade. This was, however, clearly not a run-of-the-mill political topic for him.

  I had approved of Aznar when he was first in power. He got rid of a Socialist government that, because of its multiple corruption scandals, had long forfeited the right to govern. He was also the first professed right-winger to be democratically elected to power since 1934. He showed Spain that the political right was not just Franco, but that it could exist perfectly well in a democracy – that, in fact, it was a necessary part of one.

  With no absolute majority in his first term in parliament, Aznar had also had to broker deals with Catalan and Basque nationalists of Convergència i Unió and the Basque Nationalist Party, respectively. They supported him in parliament, thus showing not only that they are conservatives at heart but also that the ‘nationalist’ centre and the ‘nationalist’ periphery could get along and make the country work. It was, again, something many had thought impossible. His rowdy supporters, believing opinion poll predictions of an absolute majority, had gathered outside the party headquarters on election night and shouted: ‘¡Pujol, enano, habla castellano!’, ‘Pujol [the Catalan nationalist regional premier], you midget, speak Spanish!’

  Aznar kept his hands out of the till, and, with a few exceptions, made sure his party did too. He was rewarded, at the 2000 elections, with an absolute majority. Aznar, the Sequerón, shed tears as he waved at the crowd of supporters in the street. It was a strange sight. This man had always been accused of lacking charisma, of being unloved even by those who voted for him. There was more emotion behind the Aznar facade than met the eye.

  Years before the September 11 attacks in the United States, Aznar had been ploughing an unfashionably hard line on terrorism. It was, he said, his first priority. He would be tough. Although he played host to Tony Blair and his family on a holiday in Doñana National Park in the days after the Good Friday peace agreement in Northern Ireland was signed, there could be no such deal with him. Each People’s Party councillor killed by ETA was another twist on the screw that tightened his resolve.

  The funerals he attended cannot have been easy. I once sat in an apartment in San Sebastián, talking to a young, attractive woman while a three-year-old boy called Javier rushed about in his dressing gown playing boyish games. Ana Iríbar’s story was yet another tale of tragedy in the Basque Country. She was the widow of Gregorio Ordóñez. He was a city councillor shot at point blank range, in front of three lunch companions, as he ate lunch in La Cepa. This restaurant sits on the short Calle 31 de Agosto in the o
ld part of San Sebastián, where ETA has now killed three times. One of the assassins had walked down the street from his own parents’ restaurant. The killers walked straight up to him and put a bullet in his head. When I met his wife, Ana, she had been widowed for barely a year. But, recently a father myself, what stuck in my mind was the little boy. Those sort of thoughts must have been a constant in Aznar’s political life.

  There was one ETA death, however, that intrigued me especially. The victim’s name was Margarita González Mansilla. She had been born seventy-three years earlier in Badajoz but had migrated to Madrid and raised a family in a modest little house. When she died there were no mass marches. Nobody took to the streets. Her death, three months after she went into coma, occupied only a few paragraphs in the newspaper. Even that much space was due to the fact that the bomb had been the one that, on 19 April 1995, had been aimed at Aznar. I always wondered how much her death – which had, after all, meant to be that of Aznar himself – might have affected him. It could, of course, have left him cold, but somehow I doubted that.

  Aznar’s obsession with ETA grew. The police worked harder, the US pledged some kind of help – though numerous government officials I spoke to were unable to say how. The French police, above all, cracked down on them. By the time he left office, ETA had, for the first time, gone almost a whole year without managing to kill. It was not defeated, but it was close to it.

  Aznar’s friendship with non-violent Basque nationalists soured as soon as he gained an absolute majority. The old pacts fell apart, or at least became inoperative. The nationalists moved in the opposite direction. They ate up some of ETA’s territory by loudly defending the right to self-determination and threatening to hold a referendum of their own. This was an attempt to split the difference, and push ETA and its Batasuna ally off the political map. It was also scrupulously democratic. For Aznar, it was close to treason. He even legislated so that he could lock up the Basque regional premier if he did call a referendum.