Basque History of the World

by Mark Kurlansky

  The combination of amnesty and elections had brought many Spanish Basques home from exile. Dolores Ibarruri, La Pasionaria, still dressed in black, returning from the Soviet Union, held her first political rally in Bilbao to the tune of “Eusko gudariak gera” and, at the age of eighty-two, won back her old seat as a deputy from Asturias to the lower house of the Cortes. Born in 1895, only three years younger than Franco, she had outlasted him. “I said they shall not pass, and they haven’t,” the octogenarian Communist deputy insisted defiantly.

  Even Sabino Arana was back, his body returned to its grave in Sukarrieta.

  Telesforo de Monzón was also back. In 1971 he and Txillardegi, along with thirty-five supporters, had taken refuge in the cathedral in Bayonne and began a hunger strike. After three days, the sixty-seven-year-old Monzón suffered a heart attack and was hospitalized, but he still refused to take nourishment. In 1977 he was still alive and back on the Spanish side, as militant as ever.

  THE TIME HAD arrived for what Madrid thought of as the next step toward democracy and what the Basques thought of as the next battle: the drafting of a new Spanish constitution. The hard history of Spain, the divisions of the nineteenth century, lingered on. When Felipe González said that Spain had the “best opportunity” in a century, he was referring to recapturing the opportunity the Liberals had missed after the Second Carlist War to build a liberal democracy. But to the Basques it was the best opportunity in a century to restore the autonomy that the Carlist Wars had taken away from them.

  When work began in Madrid on a new constitution, two things became clear very quickly. A broad consensus existed that for Spain to have a peaceful future, it had to allow regions—especially Basqueland and Catalonia—a measure of autonomy. But it was equally clear that the Basques were not going to be left to choose the nature of that autonomy. There would be no return to the autonomy of the Foral system. The constitutional committee did not include a sampling of the parties in the Cortes, but rather a group of seven parliamentarians, including one Catalan and no Basques.

  In the language of the 1978 Spanish constitution, Basque or Catalan is referred to as “a nationality,” but only Spain is a nation. It states: “The Constitution is founded on the indissoluble unity of the Spanish nation, the common and indivisible fatherland of all Spaniards, and recognizes and guarantees the right to autonomy of the nationalities and regions of which it is composed and solidarity among them.”

  Spain has had numerous constitutions since the one General Espoz y Mina placed on a chair and ordered shot in 1812. But the 1978 constitution was the only one that ever declared the Spanish language the sole official language of Spain.

  The constitution was to be ratified by popular vote. Arzalluz and the Basque Nationalist Party called on Basques to abstain from the vote. But Monzón believed it would make a stronger statement if Basques showed their disapproval by voting no. He argued, “We cannot accept the Spanish constitution because we are not Spaniards.” But to most Basques, this was an argument for abstention rather than the participation of casting a negative vote.

  The constitution was approved by a majority of Spaniards, but not by Basques: While only 11.3 percent of Basques followed Monzón and voted no, more than 40 percent of Basque voters abstained and others cast blank ballots. The constitution was not approved by a majority of voters in any of the Basque provinces. But against the will of the Basque “nationality,” the new constitution became the law of the “nation.” Any further discussion of Basque independence would be questioning “the indissoluble unity of the Spanish nation” and therefore would be unconstitutional.

  With the breakup of the state declared unconstitutional and the military given the right, in fact, the constitutional obligation, to intervene if a government violated the law of the land by compromising the indissoluble unity of the state, lawmakers believed that they had given enough assurances to the military to be able to proceed with demands for regional autonomy.

  The constitution called for the establishment of seventeen regional entities including Ceuta and Melilla in Africa, which have a combined size of thirty-two square miles. The next smallest is the Balearic Islands in the Mediterranean, and the third smallest is the Autonomous Basque Community of Euskadi. The constitution did not specify the nature of regional government. Each region proposed, subject to Cortes approval, its own idea of what a region should be. New Castile, which includes Madrid, was not interested in autonomy. To no one’s surprise, the Basques and the Catalans wanted more autonomy than anyone else.

  To the dismay of many Basques, Navarra became a separate region. Conservative, pro-Spanish elements in Navarra had pushed for a region apart from the three Basque provinces, but whether or not this was the will of the general population was a longstanding debate. In 1981, the so-called politico-militar wing of ETA made a Navarrese referendum on rejoining the Basque region one of its conditions for a cease-fire. Madrid never responded to that item.

  The many differences accrued from several historic periods have separated Navarra from the other three Basque provinces in Spain. Going back to Roman times, the Romanization of the Ebro Valley had made Navarra, by most definitions, only half Basque. The area south of Pamplona is not culturally Basque, and “Spanish” political parties—what the Basques call, not without a slight sneer, Españolistas, Spain lovers—win a far higher percentage of the vote in Navarra than they do in the other Basque provinces. The split over the Kingdom of Navarra, the split over the Carlist Wars, the split over Franco and the Civil War—two separate histories have driven these people apart.

  Opinion polls in Navarra indicate that only a minority of Navarrese consider themselves Spanish, but a somewhat smaller minority consider themselves Basque. The majority of modern Navarrese think of themselves as simply Navarrese. But the Navarrese speak Euskera and fit almost any definition of Basque—except theirs. If the seven provinces were to be united today, a separatist movement might emerge in Navarra.

  The Basques and the Navarrese in their separate regions, the Autonomous Community of Euskadi and the Foral Community of Navarra, had the same reference point: the Fueros. They each wanted something as close to that ancient condition of semi-independence as they could get. This was far more than anyone else was asking for. Even the Catalans hesitated at the kind of fiscal autonomy the Basques demanded.

  The Basques and Navarrese did not get the kind of separate Foral state they wanted, but they did get their own local governments, their own parliaments, their own school systems and highways, all of which were paid for by their own taxes. The only tax restriction was that the total tax package be the same as that in the rest of Spain. The statute of autonomy for the three provinces barely passed, getting an affirmative vote from only 54 percent of eligible voters. It is impossible to say how many Basques would want complete independence from Spain, since such a plebiscite would be unconstitutional and has never been held. But within the Autonomous Basque Community, a clear majority votes in every election for nationalist parties that proclaim as a goal more independence from the Spanish state.

  Carlos Garaikoetxea became the first lehendakari since Aguirre. Like all of the subsequent ones, he was handpicked by the Basque Nationalist Party. The party, both conservative and nationalist, has been able to dominate elections and control the Basque government, making Xabier Arzalluz, the party boss, the single most powerful Basque in the Autonomous Basque Community. Part of Garaikoetxea’s appeal was that he was a Navarrese from Pamplona, and his leadership was supposed to bring the two Basques together. Ramón Labayen said, “We thought it would be a good gesture for the people of Navarra, but it turned out that the people of Navarra didn’t give a damn for the gesture.”

  Still, for the Civil War generation, there was a sense of triumph in March 1980 when Garaikoetxea stood under the oak tree in Guernica and took the same oath as Aguirre: “Humble before God, standing on Basque soil, in remembrance of our ancestors, under the tree of Guernica . . . ”

  For an
instant, those who had been there in 1936 could almost feel that the terrible four decades that followed had never happened, had been reversed, somehow erased. Except that Garaikoetxea did not speak mother-tongue Euskera as Aguirre had. An entire generation had grown up under Franco not speaking Euskera, and the Basques were very aware that one of the great challenges before their government was to bring back the language of the Basque people. Garaikoetxea was an Euskaldunberri. He had grown up speaking only Spanish but was now learning Euskera. In his four years as lehendakari, he achieved fluency.

  The first time the Spanish army was officially to meet the lehendakari, the officers initially said they would not salute him. They were persuaded that the salute was all in the name of upholding the constitution with its sworn loyalty to the king. But then Garaikoetxea had to be persuaded to salute in return.

  TO BASQUES WHO wanted autonomy, the “autonomous regions” were a parody of their dream, and, once again, many young Basques were blaming the Basque Nationalist Party. In 1978, the year of the constitution, Monzón had broken with the Basque Nationalist Party to form a new, more militant group solidly behind ETA that attracted young Basque voters. It was called Herri Batasuna, Popular Unity. In 1979, Monzón was arrested, along with most of the principal figures in Herri Batasuna. The Basque public reacted with a strike that virtually closed down Guipúzcoa. The leaders were all released except Monzón, who was charged with “apology for terrorism.” Telesforo de Monzón, his spirit unchanged but his body feeling the wear of almost fifty years of nonstop political resistance, went on another hunger strike which almost killed him. But that same year, there was another round of parliamentary elections, and this time Herri Batasuna won three deputy’s seats and one in the Senate at the expense of the Basque Nationalist Party. Monzón had to be released to take the seat he had won in the Cortes, the same seat he had occupied in the 1930s for the Basque Nationalist Party. To be precise, he was released to reject his seat, since it was the policy of Herri Batasuna candidates to refuse to take the Madrid seats to which they were elected.

  Only months later, a prosecutor ordered Monzón arrested after he outlined the Heri Batasuna position to the foreign press. His health deteriorating, he fled to France to avoid arrest, and in March 1981 he died in Bayonne. Many of his poems, although not of great literary value, became popular songs that are still sung. Herri Batasuna, the only party that is openly supportive of ETA, has consistently garnered 15 to 20 percent of the Basque vote, though the parliamentarians elected to Madrid always refuse to take their seats.

  Telesforo de Monzón could have lived a comfortable aristocrat’s life in Vergara, eating with his own silver. But that was not the life he chose. He managed to be arrested one last time, when his funeral procession from St.-Jean-de-Luz was briefly stopped by Spanish police on its way to the family home in Vergara.

  AFTER MARCH 1980 the Basques had a government and a legal flag, and signs went up along the Ebro to tell motorists when they were entering and leaving the Autonomous Basque Community of Euskadi. But establishing regions did not silence the demands of the Basque Nationalist Party, nor the guns of ETA, which grew even more active while support for Basque nationalist political parties remained solid.

  All of this perplexed, frustrated, and infuriated the Spanish military. The military, and particularly the Guardia Civil, tend to be family careers passed on from father to son, and after more than a generation in power, the transition years were not happy ones for those military families. Their power had been greatly reduced, hemmed in by a Ministry of Defense that was part of a popularly elected government. The 65,000 Guardia Civil were taken out of direct military command and made answerable to the Ministry of Interior. They were also badly demoralized by ETA attacks and their complete isolation in Basque country. Increasingly, they asked not to be stationed in Basqueland, and each year hundreds of those who were stationed there requested transfers.

  From the military point of view, the politicians had given away far more than they should have—and still the Basques were not satisfied. The prime minister, Adolfo Suárez, was called “a traitor.” By 1980, rumors of a military coup d’état, persistent since the resignation of Arias Navarro, were one of the main topics of political gossip in Madrid. Many leaders, including Felipe González, warned of the danger.

  Between 1978 and 1980, ETA killed as many as eighty people in a year, the most violent period in its history. In the same period, police and Guardia Civil broke up demonstrations almost 600 times and in the process killed forty-one people. In 1979, Amnesty International sent a team to Spain that reported on the use of torture in Madrid, Barcelona, and Bilbao.

  The increasingly restless military was acting in odd and troubling ways. Groups of right wingers, popularly known as incontrolados, attacked Basque nationalists, killing thirty-five people during this period. But were they really uncontrolled as their name suggested? In November 1980, someone walked into a small, dark, crowded bar, the Bar Hendayais, on a narrow street that dropped down to the bay in central Hendaye, and sprayed the drinking customers with machine gun bullets, killing two, both French citizens, and wounding ten others. The bar, said to be popular with Basque nationalists, was only a few minutes from the border, the St. Jacques Bridge, and three Spaniards were intercepted at the crossing by Guardia Civil. After a phone call to Madrid, they were taken to Irún and released. The attack was claimed by an unknown group called the Basque-Spanish Battalion.

  Felipe González’s Spanish Socialist Workers Party joined with the Communists and the Basque Nationalist Party in demanding to know if the government was sponsoring this Basque-Spanish Battalion.

  The atmosphere became even more tense in January, when Suárez suddenly resigned from the government without explanation. Was he trying to pacify an angry military that had turned against him? He wouldn’t say.

  On the same day as the resignation, ETA kidnaped José María Ryan, an engineer at the Lemóniz nuclear power plant. During the nuclear power controversy of the 1970s, no proposed nuclear plant anywhere was more bitterly opposed than the one in Lemóniz. In 1977 an ETA commando was killed attempting to attack the construction site. In 1978, ETA blew a twelve-inch hole in a steam generator at the site, killing two workers. By the time the project was abandoned in 1982, it had been the object of not only constant demonstrations, several with more than 50,000 participants, but also 250 attacks, primarily by ETA.

  Lemóniz was part of a project undertaken by the Franco regime to provide power for Basque industry. A series of three reactors had been planned on the Deba River, none of which was ever completed. Given the unpopularity of nuclear energy in Europe at the time, only a military dictatorship could have contemplated a nuclear power program in Basque country. Lemóniz, which was dangerously close to Bilbao, a city too large to evacuate in the event of an accident, was begun in 1972, but the new democracy had to face the combined forces of ETA and a suddenly liberated ecology movement with thousands of backers. Though Arzalluz and the Basque Nationalist Party supported the plan, which was contracted to companies controlled by the old families of Vizcayan industry, their stance was always unpopular.

  In addition to the distrust of the technology itself, which was common to many Europeans in areas where plants had been installed, there was a political issue. Basques were supposed to control their own energy system, but no one believed the Spanish would let them run a nuclear plant autonomously. Nuclear power implied centralized authority, and not only Basque but Galician, Catalan, Breton, Wallonian Belgian, Scot, and Welsh nationalists were among the fiercest antinuclear activists in Europe.

  At the time of the Ryan kidnaping, the Spanish king and queen were scheduled to visit Basque country, and, in keeping with tradition, they were to meet with the Basques at the Batzarretxea, the meeting house by the oak of Guernica. The royal couple flew to Vitoria, which had become the capital of the Autonomous Community. Defying protocol, the Basque government organized no official welcome. While the king reviewed Spanish
troops, Herri Batasuna activists sang “Eusko gudariak gera.”

  When the king delivered his speech in the Batzarretxea in Guernica, he was again outvoiced, by the elected Herri Batasuna delegation singing the Basque hymn. The Basque Nationalist Party disapproved and wanted the Herri Batasuna delegation silenced, but it also made it clear to the king that the only relationship with the monarch that interested the party was not the one in the constitution but the Foral relationship which was now unconstitutional.

  The mood in Spain was growing darker with each event.

  Three days later, Ryan’s body was found in Vizcaya, blindfolded and shot dead. The killing of the engineer was deplored by most Basques. But instead of capitalizing on a tragic public relations victory, Madrid reacted the way it always did to ETA violence. An ETA militant, José Arregui, held incommunicado for ten days in prison, died. The gruesome wounds on his corpse testified to the ten days of torture that had killed him. So instead of widespread condemnation of the Ryan killing, Basqueland mobilized a general strike to protest the military’s killing of an ETA member. Five policemen were arrested and several government figures resigned over the Arregui killing.

  To a few extremists in the military and the Guardia Civil, the insult to the king followed by the government turning against them, arresting defenders of Spain’s honor, was too much to endure. In December they began to work on a plan of action.

  IN THE GENRE of horror movies, a common ploy at the end of the film, after the monster has been vanquished, is for it to suddenly rise up one more time from the muck. That was the role of Guardia Civil lieutenant colonel Antonio Tejero in the history of Franco’s Spain.

  On February 23, 1981, while the Cortes in Madrid was installing a new government, twenty armed Guardia Civil entered the legislative chamber, fired rounds into the ceiling, and ordered everyone to the floor. There was Tejero, the officer who, in 1977, had been relieved of his command in San Sebastián for refusing to accept the legalization of the ikurriña, up on the speaker podium, pistol drawn, in his Guardia Civil uniform with its tri-cornered nineteenth-century hat and his long, full, nineteenth-century mustache, giving orders. The old Spanish monster was back for one more try. It was the twenty-fifth attempted military coup d’état in Spain since 1814.