“We don’t come from anywhere”, said our Basque friend and host, Jose, in the five star (my rating) Urepel Restaurant in the old part of Spain’s Basque enclave, San Sebastian. Jose and his colleague, Niaki (my spelling since my computer has no Basque letters … his name is derived from Ignatius), then gave us a lesson in Basque history, explaining that there are many theories about where the Basques came from, but no proof that the Basques came from anywhere but where they live today. There are 2 million of them in the northwest corner of Spain at the westernmost junction of France and Spain; there are several million Basque diaspora, mainly in Latin America, but especially in Chile where Basques at one point constituted nearly half the population.
There are traces in the surroundings of Basque country that date back 150,000 years. Cave drawings have been found that were created 12,000 years ago. Their language has no obvious connection with any other ... certainly not Spanish (my ear sensed a touch of Finnish, or Georgian, or one of those other unintelligible languages .... and their machine-gun rapidity of speech suggests they evolved with extra-large brains and neural canals). Ethnic homogeneity has doubtless played a role in Basque insularity and independence; while dictator Franco favored the Nazis over the allies, Basques helped downed allied aviators escape over the Pyrenees.
Our friends further described how the Basque separatist and terrorist group, the ETA, had all but disappeared through a combination of amnesties, international police actions, and laws passed by the Spanish government, aimed specifically at the ETA, prohibiting violence to achieve political ends.
ETA, infamous for its terrorist tactics from the late 1950s up to the present, had originally been cited as the organization responsible for the Madrid train bombing in 2004; subsequent investigations, however, led to the indictment and conviction of a single Moroccan nationalist with no known ties to either ETA or al Qaeda). Earlier this year, ETA signed a permanent peace treaty with Spain ending its 60 years of assassinations, kidnappings and bombings which resulted in the deaths of nearly 1,000 people.
ETA was not, of course, an international terrorist organization. It was established to achieve political autonomy from Spain. Religion was not even a factor (as in Ireland, say) as the Basques are also largely Catholic. It was simply a small group of people who were determined to break away from Spain. For a time, they did attract some measure of sympathy from other Basques and various socialist/communist groups around the world. What they wanted, in short, was to be left alone (though their terrorist tactics were reprehensible).
Such was not to be. The Spanish Government held the line and played a good game of carrot and stick, combined with spies and patience, to wear the dissidents down. The ranks of ETA dwindled over the past ten years. Terrorist acts and deaths caused by the ETA all but vanished. They began to fight amongst themselves. Their funds dried up, in large part the result of international police cooperation and confiscation. Finally, by early 2011, there was only a handful of ETA leaders left to surrender and receive amnesty, to be released from prison with full rights returned, and to sign a permanent peace treaty.
As we sit here in the Hotel Mont Igueldo, on a 500 foot promontory looking almost straight down into the Atlantic and with an unprecedented view of the entire city and harbor of San Sebastian, we see a small country within a country that is very self-satisfied today, with unemployment half that of the rest of Spain and a prosperous regional economy. It is questionable whether ETA served any useful purpose, and certainly caused harm: as a minimum, it gave the region a bad name for decades. ETA may also, however, have given Spain its king, Juan Carlos, and the amazing story of how he converted a dictatorship into a democracy ... a story that heads of state in, say, Morocco, Egypt and Jordan might well wish to re-read.
