Our Basque Country is hurting María Del Mar Grandío IN SPAIN, THE Basque country is always news. It opens the daily newscasts, it fills pages and pages of newspapers and it is the central theme of talk shows every day of the year. The first week of July, Juan José Ibarretxe took possession of his post and was named, for the second consecutive time, lehendakari, that is to say, president of the autonomous community of Basque Country. And on the same week in July, the terrorist band ETA imposed its own law, the law of violence, to this political situation. The group killed a policeman named Ortiz de la Rosa, an official who died in the line of duty: protecting the Spanish people. Ortiz de la Rosa is one more victim, among nearly 900 now, of this barbaric terrorism that is as old as the democracy. As a Spanish writer said, “Spain is in pain,” because nearly all Spaniards are feeling the pain of the Basque Country, and we feel it as Spaniards. To explain the Basque conflict is a fairly difficult task because it is a very complex issue. Nevertheless, I must say, to the discouragement of the readers of this article, it’s even harder to understand it. It is sad, but not even the Spanish people understand what is happening to us. And the result of this lack of understanding is a wave of hopelessness and a feeling that this has no solution. I believe that the worst enemy to democracy is ignorance, and that is why I am going to try to explain, in a simple way, the first concern of the Spanish people. This is not meant to be a political treatise or a lecture; this is just a description of the situation as perceived by a recent graduate in the field of journalism. But let’s start at the beginning: What is the Basque Country? The Basque Country, or Euskadi in the Basque language, is one of 17 autonomous Spanish communities, as stated in the current constitution in force in Spain. The Basque Country is made up of three provinces: Álava, Guipúzcoa and Vizcaya. Since the creation of the Spanish state, back in the times of the Catholic kings, the Basque Country has belonged to Spain. In fact, never in the history of this people has it been an independent state, or has it even had a historic reign like that of the Foral Community of Navarra. Nonetheless, despite having never been a separate country, in Basque Country there exist several nationalist parties that want total independence of this region, together with other historic territories. And according to the nationalists there are seven, not three, Basque provinces. To the three provinces that make up the Basque Country currently, the nationalists add Navarra and three French provinces: Lapurdi, Zuberoa and Lower Navarra. That is, the concept of a complete Euskadi would be more extensive. It would be called Euskalerria and it would embrace the current Basque Country of Spain, the Foral Community of Navarra and the French Basque Country. For the nationalists, Euskalerria must be independent. But let’s go back to the Spanish Basque Country. As we said, it is an autonomous Spanish community in which there are various independent political parties, such as the PNV, EA, EE and HB. These parties work on a daily basis with the big state political parties, PP and PSOE. The most immediate problem of the Basque conflict is that, at the margin of the political debate between the nationalist parties and the non-nationalists in Euskadi, there exists an armed band of terrorists. Its name is ETA, Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, which in Basque means Euskadi Liberty. It formed during the dictatorship of Franco and has struggled since then to achieve self-determination of the region. In the first place, it must be noted that the Basque nationalist parties are not the same as the terrorists of the ETA. One mustn’t confuse nationalism with terrorism. In fact, those who support the ETA are in the minority. For example, the PNV, the Basque Nationalist Party, has always condemned the violence of the ETA. Now, in addition, there exists an independence party that openly supports the terrorists. The political group Herri Batasuna, which now has begun calling itself simply Batasuna, is the political arm of the ETA. Herri Batasuna has never condemned the violence. The only ones who have condemned the violence have abandoned the political group and have created Aralar, with the Navarran Patxi Zabaleta at its head. This happened in June. Now, Batasuna has been left in the hands of the most radical members and is more in favor of the ETA than ever. In this way, we could say that Batasuna is the political face of the ETA. They are the ETA, even though they don’t directly take up arms. So, then, is the ETA the big problem behind the Basque conflict? Of course; but it’s not the root of the problem. As I already said, the ETA is a symptom, but not the illness. Even though the direct problem is the ETA, the key to this issue is the exclusive nationalism. And the fact is that the ETA and the PNV, even though they are not the same, are the head and the tail of a nationalist project whose enemy is Spain. What do all the nationalist parties have in common — the Herri Batasuna, as much as the Basque Nationalist Party? All of the parties are fed by the same mother, which is exclusive and independence-oriented nationalism. For me, this is the key to the problem and it explains much of the ambiguity of the Basque Nationalist Party, the party that claims power, and of the current situation of the Basque Country. Basque nationalism was born in the 19th century with the ideas of Sabino Arana. He said that to love the Basque Country, one must hate Spain. Such that the journalists José Díaz Herrera and Isabel Durán in their book “Arzalluz: The dictatorship of fear”: “Arana proclaims the superiority of the Basque race above all others. Despite his accused Catholocism, he created a reactionary nationalism, forged from the hate and the contempt of like-minded people. He gave ideological support and spiritual sustenance to all the would-be freedom fighters forged by the PNV and the confrontations between Basques and Spaniards during the 20th century, including the ETA. These are the roots of what is happening. The problem is that Sabino Arana turned a cultural entity, the Basque culture, into a political ideology. He invented nationalism and this was the principle behind the whole Basque conflict. For Arana, the Basques, because they spoke a different language and had a different tradition, should be a separate nation. And because of that, anything that seemed at all Spanish was bad because it contaminated the Basque essence. Nevertheless, the reality is otherwise. It’s not only the Basque Country that has its own culture. Spain is a pluralist nation full of different cultures and histories. This is the grand treasure of our peoples. Galicia, Andalucía, Catalonia, Aragón ... each one of the Spanish regions has its own traditions that enrich all of the Spanish people. Why deny this richness that history has given us, when we can add instead of subtracting? Behind the assassination of Ortiz de la Rosa, the Basque parliament added to the condemnation of the crime, saying that the ETA was the enemy. Nonetheless, the enemy of the nationalists keeps being the same as always: Spain. The Lehendakari Ibarretxe already said so at his inauguration. He wants to create a model of self-government. He has committed himself to the social construction of Euskadi being the “spine” of his legislature’s program. The nationalists keep thinking that the end of the ETA and the attainment of peace will arrive through the normalization of the historic Basque conflict — that is, their self-determination. In this way, the pacts of the PNV and the HB and the other collaborators of the armed band can be understood. And so it is that for all nationalists, independence is first, then the end of the ETA. Even though the priority must be the reverse. The first thing is to do away with the ETA, and then to talk about self-determination and sovereignty within the political framework, if they want to. Even believing as I do that nationalism is no more than an invention of Sabino Arana and that it destroys the real concept of Spain, I also respect the free decision of the Spanish Basque citizens. But one thing must be made clear. The enemy is not Spain, as Arana said. The enemy is the ETA. And the ETA must be stopped — by the police, and even more so, through public opinión. The ETA must be isolated, eliminating the tiny but still strong social support that it has — above all, the ambiguous support that comes from the democratic nationalist parties. And it is here that the journalists come in. They are the ones who must understand their work as one of moral duty and as a cornerstone of a democratic society. The ETA has the arms, the journalists the power of words. And the ETA itself knows the power of the “warriors of journalism,” and that is why now journalists have become the target of their bullets. One time, on television, I heard a young girl in a city of the south who was asked by a journalist upon hearing the news of an assassination: “How do you feel about this new crime?” And she answered, in tears, “More Spanish and Basque than ever.” I believe that that is what must unite all of us, solidarity with this problem even though we are not Basque. The Basque Country is also ours; it is part of Spain, and like the Spanish people, our Basque Country is suffering.