By Robert K. Wilcox
If it turns out the Basque separatist group, ETA, is responsible for the terrible bombing in Madrid Thursday, the majority of Basques will be surprised, although not completely. Most Spanish Basques stopped supporting ETA decades ago when it turned communist and began kidnapping Basque industrialists in order to extort money. The ETA, as despicable as it is today, represents the views of only a small number of Basque extremists and has never been known for mass killing on the scale of the numbers dead and injured at Madrid’s Atocha railroad station.
Only a few decades ago, ETA, founded in 1968, was known for its precise, surgical strikes, aimed only at Spanish federal police, the Guardia Civil. ETAs did not blindly throw bombs into pubs or entice suicide killers to obliterate innocents. Their targets were usually military or police individuals, and when they did use bombs, they often phoned in the location before placing it so, at least, potential victims were warned. Their most infamous assassination was that in 1973 of Adm. Carrero Blanco, the hand-picked successor to dictator Gen. Francisco Franco.
It was Franco’s harsh regime that gave rise to the ETA. After the Spanish Civil War in which the Basques fought against Franco’s side, he imposed severe penalties on the Northern Spanish region, including forbidding the use or teaching of the Basque language and extracting much of the wealth from the rich Basque provinces. Basques, amongst the oldest people of Europe and a nation founded long before Spain, resented the loss of liberty and livelihood and started a peaceful political struggle against it. But the struggle got nowhere. The ETA, a military, terrorist branch of that struggle, then formed. At one time, it was said that any ETA needing a place to hide could get it with a knock on any Basque door. But as the killings mounted, popular support waned. And when ETA began targeting Basques themselves, it largely disappeared.
The Basques are little known in most of America beyond wearing berets and being sheepherders. But they have a rich, thriving culture in and around the Pyrennes Mountains of Spain and France. The fact that they are split between two countries is testament to their age. They were there long before either European country. And they had a fierce love for freedom.
The Romans knew them as tough barbarians whom they didn’t want to have to fight for passageways through the Pyrennes so they made deals with them. When the Spanish kings needed help against the invading Moors, the fierce Basques were hired as mercenaries and are generally credited with stopping the Arab conquest of Iberia. In return, the kings swore at Guernica, seat of the Basque government, that the Basques would remain free. But as the centuries passed and Spain unified, the Basques were swallowed up by the new nation.
By that time, the Basques had been converted to Christianity. A Basque, Ignatius Loyola, founded the Jesuit Order, one of the Catholic Church’s strongest. For a long while, Basques were known mainly as priests, sailors, farmer’s and ship captains. Columbus’s ships were largely Basque sailed and captained, as were the Spanish Armada’s ships. The Basque Country has always been rich in resources. Shakespeare in his writings calls a fine sword a "Bilbao," for the iron-rich Basque city in Viscaya Provence from which the weapon’s strong metal came. Tradition is important in the Basque Country, a land of green hillsides, ancient "caserios," large stone houses passed down through generations, and frothy sea towns.
The Basque Country was a democracy a thousand years ago. Women enjoyed unprecedented power within Basque society, as they do today. For instance, first born, women or man, always got the caserio, which is why the beautiful and ancient farm houses survive today. It is tradition that they are not sold but worked as a farm by the inheritor whose first born will continue the tradition. Basques helped many Allied aviators over the Pyrennes to freedom during World War II and it was not by accident that the German Luftwaffe decided to bomb Guernica in order to try and break the will of the Basque anti-Franco forces. Guernica, made famous in the Pablo Piccaso painting of the same name, contained the tree under which the Spanish kings had sworn to uphold Basque freedom.
So when the civil war ended and Basque freedoms were extinguished, what would lead to the ETA was born. With the death of Franco, however, the Spanish government began relaxing Francoist policies. Today the Basque language is freely spoken and taught in the Basque provinces and, unlike under Franco, it’s people share fairly and well in the wealth and profit the region produces. Consequently, the overwhelming majority of Basque people do not support ETA and certainly rebel and recoil at the senseless, horrible terrorism that has occurred in Spain this week.