Ghosts of Spain

by Giles Tremlett

  Nationalism in the Basque Country, as in Catalonia, is as much an emotion – or an identity – as a set of political arguments. Its voters are people who put their Basque-ness before any other political desire. Because, like religion, it is based on belief and feeling, other politicians find nationalism hard to battle against. Its most fervent critics tend to be repentant former members of the clan. One of them, the writer and former ETA member Jon Juaristi, has described the dominant emotion of nationalism as ‘patriotic melancholy … though they do not cry for the loss of something real. The nation did not exist before nationalism came into existence.’ This contradiction, he claims, is resolved by inventing a past out of historias rather than historia – stories, not history. Those stories, he says, are inevitably about loss. There is always a victim, too. The victim must be Basque, if it is not the Basque Country itself.

  Gotzone has a deep dislike and distrust of Basque nationalists. She complains that, amongst other things, Basque schoolchildren are now taught that their natural patria extends into the Basque region of France and into neighbouring Navarre. She obviously thinks that, consciously or unconsciously, the nationalists egg ETA on. The pro-nationalist media, she says, paint her as a dangerous madwoman. ‘They are making me a target … If ETA kills me, it will be clear to everybody that I was already an impresentable, a disgrace.’ Few are prepared to raise their voices against ETA – or even Basque nationalism – as loudly as this. ‘I know I scream, but some screaming has to be done,’ she says.

  I do not share all of Gotzone’s ideas about the Basque Country or nationalists, but I cannot help admiring her determination to scream. For it is a dangerous, potentially lethal, thing for a Basque to do. Those who dare raise their voices are, however, privately thanked for doing so. ‘I have cried for you and I have felt terribly frustrated for remaining silent, for not banding together with my classmates and coming to your aid … but we, too, are afraid,’ one student wrote to Gotzone. ‘Thank you for telling us that murder makes no sense; thank you for fighting for my freedom; thank you for being on the side of those who suffer; thank you for being there, day after day.’

  Gotzone is a councillor in her home town of Getxo, which is governed by the Nationalists. She has spent years watching enviously as Nationalist councillors walk calmly out of the door onto the street after meetings while she squeezes into her armour-plated car. Her fellow Socialists and members of the Conservative People’s Party all also have had bodyguards. These have been kept, as this book goes to the printers, although ETA – in a first sign that it is ready to talk – has said they are no longer targets.

  I walk with Gotzone as she prepares to leave. The bodyguards, one behind and one in front, lead her through the campus. They call ahead to their colleagues in the cars. Two Peugeots await in the car park – a blue one with armour-plating for Gotzone to ride in and a silver one to follow her. Gotzone opens one of the doors. ‘These doors are so heavy that they give me cramp,’ she complains. The cars speed off. As I watch them go, I find myself hoping, once again, that this is my last encounter with Basque violence and the fear that goes with it. It may be. ETA has never been so weak. A new government is willing to talk. It may, still, be able to bow out without humiliation. But there have been talks and ceasefires before that were followed by more violence.

  Long ago, when I first came here, I was captivated by the romance of the Basques. There is something deeply attractive, dashing even, about a small group of people proudly defending their culture in a globalising world. That unique language, those strange sports, the food, the steep, green valleys and the wide-open Cantabrian Sea are all captivating. They start to pall, however, if you only ever come here to talk about shootings, bombings and kidnappings. At my regular hotel in San Sebastián, a small, charming, secret place, the owners once told me that they thought I was jinxed. ‘Something always seems to happen when you are here,’ one of the family explained.

  My view is, of course, skewed by the experiences of a journalist. Only a small minority of Basques have shared Gotzone’s daily contact with violence. Even when I have tried to avoid it, however, the violence has had a way of throwing itself into my line of sight. Not even the gleaming Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao – its shiny, sculpted titanium roof picking up the clouds that scud over one of Spain’s rainiest cities – has managed to quite avoid the curse of ETA. The dazzling museum designed by architect Frank Gehry is the glittering new image of a city, and a region, that, like the rest of Spain, has undergone profound change over the last three decades. Its opening, however, was marred by the shooting to death of a member of the Basque regional government’s own police force by ETA gunmen. They had been trying to sneak a bomb into the forty-three-foot-high, flower-clad ‘Puppy’ sculpture (of a West Highland White Terrier) by Jeff Koons that stands outside the museum entrance. So it is that a place which boasts a unique language, euskara, and that has fine traditions in everything from sculpture to sport, to writing and cuisine is reduced to a tale of fear and loathing.

  The Basques have always had their foreign admirers. Hemingway was one. ‘These Basques are swell people,’ says a character in The Sun Also Rises. George Steer, the twenty-seven-year-old Times journalist who told the world that the Germans had carpet-bombed Guernica during the Civil War, warned future visitors to mind their tongues. ‘There are few things the patient Basque won’t tolerate, and one is the suggestion that he is Spanish,’ he wrote in The Tree of Gernika in 1938. Modern Bascophiles soon capture the anti-nationalist mood music arriving from the rest of Spain. This reached a crescendo under Aznar, when nationalism and terrorism were often – and unjustly – treated as one and the same thing. It is easy, however, to swing too far in the opposite direction. Mark Kurlansky’s The Basque History of the World is, in most ways, a brilliant and informed journey through the delights of Basque cuisine, history, navigation, whale-hunting, fishing, music, customs and politics. The failure of a temporary and unilateral ETA ceasefire in 1998 is, however, laid firmly on Madrid. Kurlansky produces the most absurd of reasons. ‘How would Spain justify its huge armed forces, Guardia Civil and police if it no longer had enemies?’ he asks.

  Gotzone Mora is right about one thing. Silence makes the Basque Country different. Spain is, in many ways, a journalist’s paradise. Everybody has an opinion and everybody is prepared to share it with you. It makes the basic task of reporting a simple and enjoyable matter. Approaching strangers in the street in Bilbao or San Sebastián, however, I often find them politely declining to answer my questions. Polls have shown that a quarter of Basques believe they are not free to talk about politics.

  It is not just politics that are dangerous ground. Start discussing anything from Basque history to folklore and you stand a chance of offending someone almost immediately. It is often wise, in fact, to find out which side of the nationalist fence the person you are talking to sits on before opening your mouth about anything other than the weather, food or relative merits of Athletico de Bilbao and Real Sociedad football clubs. Just by starting this chapter off with an avowed anti-nationalist like Gotzone Mora, for example, is to risk alienating a significant number of Basques.

  History is one of the worst areas to venture into. Basques outdo even other Spaniards when stretching their political rows back in time. ‘In conversations with Basques, it is not unusual to hear expressions such as “that only happened 5,000 years ago”,’ Basque anthropologist Joseba Zulaika observes. Another academic expert, Roger Collins, points out that the ‘politicisation of normally abstruse and recherché anthropological arguments about the Stone Age’ underpins nationalist ideology. ‘Few statements relating to people, their history and their language can be treated as politically neutral,’ he warns. ‘Few statements? None at all,’ adds Dirty War, Clean Hands author Paddy Woodworth.

  There is another characteristic at work, however, when Basques stay silent, for they are famously timid. ‘Short on words but long on deeds,’ was the description of Basques given by a character i
n Tirso de Molina’s seventeenth-century play Prudence in a Woman. ‘A Basque, however courageous he is in the wild, is timid and shy when confronted by man,’ agreed the Basque writer and philosopher Miguel de Unamuno more than two centuries later.

  Basques have a reputation as adventurers, sailors and out-doorsmen. Kurlansky claims they made it to North America before Cabot ‘discovered’ it in 1497, but kept quiet about it because of the rich fisheries they found off Newfoundland. The first person to circumnavigate the globe was the Basque Juan Sebastián Elcano – who took over command of Magellan’s ships when he was killed by Filipino tribesmen in 1520. Basque sports are rugged, outdoors stuff, too. They have axe-wielding, log-chopping aizkolariak, stone-lifting harrijasotzaileak and teams for soka-tira, tug-of-war. Broad-shouldered oxen, meanwhile, compete dragging heavy weights in Idi-probak trials. These are as much trials of endurance as they are of strength. Basques bet, too. Sometimes the bets are laid between competitors. In Vacas, Julio Medem’s film of Basque wars, cows and rivalries, the source of one hero’s wealth is his skill with the axe.

  If a Basque is shy when confronted by man, he (or she) is reputed to be even more timid when confronted by the opposite sex. ‘It’s a straightforward choice,’ the Basque comic Oscar Terol explains. ‘Either you can be Basque, or you can have sex.’ This has something to do with what Unamuno once called a ‘puritanical’ Basque approach to religion. ‘Priests have told me that they know, from the confessional, that the exceedingly rare cases of adultery that occur in our mountains are owed, in great part, to the woman’s anxiety to have children, when the husband does not give them,’ he said. Traditionally Basques have often sought the company of their own sex. The cuadrilla – the same-sex group of friends who meet almost daily for a drink or two – can still be seen doing the rounds of bars in the evenings.

  Nationalisms are, by definition, exclusive – despite the loud denials here in the Basque Country and in Catalonia. That makes them unintelligible to most outsiders, a red rag to other Spaniards and a cross to bear for fellow Basques who do not share their creed.

  Many people blame one man for the fear, violence and hatred that runs through the Basque Country. Sabino Arana, the father of Basque nationalism, died a century ago. He had a short but eventful and controversial political life, creating the Basque Nationalist Party along the way. Today, his words and ideas continue to fire both nationalism and ETA. A hundred years after his death he has become one of the most argued over figures in Spanish history. I decided to visit the foundation that honours his name in Artea, a village on the old road inland from Bilbao up towards the regional capital Vitoria and the plains of Alava.

  On the way there, I first looped around Bilbao to look at Neguri, Getxo and Las Arenas – the wealthy outer suburbs of greater Bilbao. Large stone mansions stand on the shores of the Nervión estuary where it opens out to the Bay of Biscay. The mansions look across the water at a south shore populated with dockside cranes, piles of scrap metal and smokestack industries. This is Bilbao’s wealth staring across the water at its own source. In Las Arenas I drove my car onto the wobbly platform that hangs from the vast iron structure of the Vizcaya Bridge. This is the world’s first ‘transporter bridge’, erected in 1893. Only thirteen of them were ever built, with seven of them in Britain. It is a monument to the Basque Country’s – and Bilbao’s – place at the heart of Spain’s (late nineteenth-century) industrial revolution. A platform for half a dozen cars and a hundred or so foot passengers hangs from the 150-ft-high iron structure that spans the murky Nervión. It runs, swaying gently, along rails atop the structure. A dozen cables kept us suspended above the river for the two minutes it took to deliver me into the industrial left bank neighbourhood of Portugalete.

  Locally mined iron ore and timber from Basque forests provided the raw materials of this industrial revolution. Hungry Spaniards from further south provided much of the manpower – for a miserable life of twelve hour days and twenty-five-year lifespans.

  For Spaniards from elsewhere, one of the things that most hurts about separatism and nationalism in the Basque Country is that these are now amongst the richest people in the land. Per capita disposable household income in the Basque Country is the highest in Spain. It is not the poor who seek emancipation, but the rich.

  As I drove on to Artea, I recalled the people I had met several years earlier, when I embarked on a project to make an oral record of Basque violence. Inspired by Tony Parker’s May The Lord in His Mercy be Kind to Belfast, I wanted to give voice to those who lived the violence directly – both victims and perpetrators – letting each speak for themselves in their own words. The project did not prosper, but the research immersed me for a few months in the suffering caused by Basque violence.

  ‘The trouble with the Spaniards is that they have never stopped being conquistadores,’ said the barman in one village near Vitoria as he invited me to a chato, a small glass, of red wine and some slices of chorizo. ‘They think they are better than us.’ The conquistadores he was talking about were just two dozen miles away across the plain in the Castilian province of Burgos. The bar belonged to Blanca, a small, strong-willed and bitter woman in her mid-seventies. The youngest two of her seven children were ETA men. One was in jail. The other was in a niche at the cemetery after a police shoot-out. For Blanca, her sons were wronged angels. ‘Nobody can say my boys are bad,’ she swore. ‘They never tried to harm anybody. Quite the opposite, in fact. When something needed doing here in the village, they always there to do it.’ They were, she insisted, ‘bellas personas’.

  José, an etarra (Eta member) who had been let out of jail with medical problems, told me he was pleased to see a new generation of activists appearing. He had been jailed after being caught taking part in the kidnapping, for ransom, of a businessman. He refused to see this as a form of torture. As proof that a kidnapping was no suffering for the victim, he told me anecdotes about how they had managed to play the card game mus with their captive. Mus requires a certain amount of secret nodding and winking between partners, something that, he admitted, had been complicated by the fact that he and the other etarras were wearing masks. More sinisterly, however, he was against a unilateral end to the violence. Basques, he claimed, had been fighting for independence for five hundred years. ‘We should not give way out of tiredness. We have to pass the baton on to the next generation. There are youngsters now who are ready,’ he said.

  If the stories of those on ETA’s side were hard, those of the victims were simply heartbreaking. In Seville I met María Dolores, the widow of a police officer who had been machine-gunned to death with three other colleagues. A distraught police sergeant, a friend of her husband, had grabbed a pistol from a colleague and blown his own brains out in front of the four coffins. ‘I think it was a coherent thing to do, given the circumstances,’ she told me. ‘It is hard to see something like that, the shot in the head and the pool of blood … Those who practise violence make you live situations that are beyond belief. It is something you don’t even see in the films.’ María Dolores spent the next seven months dressed in black, without talking, almost without eating and with a permanent fever. ‘The doctors did lots of tests, but they could not say why I had that fever. The body is a mystery. I guess it was the fiebre de tristeza, the fever of sadness,’ she said.

  A decade after losing his wife and two daughters, aged thirteen and fifteen, in a bomb attack on Barcelona’s Hipercor supermarket that killed twenty-one people, Álvaro wept as he told me the story of his search for them. He eventually found them, charred black by smoke, in a morgue. ‘I told them it couldn’t be them, that my daughter was white, and my wife too. But eventually I had to admit it. It was my wife and daughter,’ he said. A few hours later he was shown a third body. It was his other daughter. ‘I don’t trust anybody any more. I have made a world for myself, which is me, on my own,’ he told me.

  Some victims fantasised about ways of exacting revenge. A wheelchair-bound former Civil Guard officer – w
hose lack of bodily control meant he wore diapers that needed constant changing – still recalled the hatred in the face of his attackers. He suggested to me that etarras should be hung live on television. He also showed me a photograph of his uniformed daughter – one of the first women to have joined the Civil Guard.

  Rosa, the widow of a murdered ertzaina – a police officer in the Basque government’s own force – had had to cope with the fact that he had been shot while sitting at some traffic lights in his car, with her fourteen-year-old son sitting beside him. Her husband came from a euskaldun – a euskara-speaking – family. His grandmother, Rosa told me, had her hair shaved off as punishment for talking euskara. But even ‘good’ Basques – ethnic, nationalist, euskara-speaking – can be in ETA’s sights. It is not just the españolistas who are targets. Graffiti that appeared on some walls in the Basque Country soon after her husband’s killing read: ‘Cabezón, devuelvenos la bala’, ‘Hard-head, give us the bullet back.’ ‘My only worry is that something might happen to my children … That they might go the wrong way because of what happened, and start fighting from the other side,’ she said. Fortunately, if we except GAL and the dirty war, no one here seems tempted by that last option.

  Taking the valley road up towards Artea, I was reminded that it was not just Bilbao that took to industry. Up and down the narrow, steep valleys of Vizcaya and Guipúzcoa, workshops and small factories, many making machine parts, thrive. A tradition of working iron in small, water-powered ferrerías extended back at least to the fourteenth century – with some three hundred of them in place by the sixteenth century. The Basques had, however, mainly been farming people. Their system of inheritance by primogeniture ensured that property – normally the family farmhouse, the caserío or baserri – remained undivided. The road to Artea followed one of these valleys. Factories, warehouses, workshops and sawmills were dotted along the valley floor. Lone cyclists, wearing the lurid Lycra colours of some local team, pedalled uphill through the truck fumes. Basques are as obsessed by bicycles as they are by balls. The five times Tour de France winner Miguel Induráin emerged from these pedal-obsessed valleys. His imitators continue to risk life and limb amongst the traffic every day.