The ETA: Spain Fights Europe's Last Active Terrorist Group

One week after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001, President George W. Bush marshaled the American people and allies of good will everywhere to a new course through his speech to Congress. In it, he resolutely condemned the attacks and promised sustained retribution. "It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated," he announced.

The world knows that he was speaking of Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network, but shortly thereafter, media commentators posed the question whether all nations on the list that the United States says sponsor terrorism, including Iraq, Iran, Sudan, and Syria, were potential targets. Others wondered whether all organizations that the United States has officially condemned as terrorist, including Shining Path in Peru and the Basque Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) in Spain and France, were included in the president's announcement. ¹ The ETA had again been designated a foreign terrorist organization by the secretary of state on 5 October 2001.

One way to move away from the terrorist label is to negotiate. It may be coincidental, but it struck me that on 26 September, just two weeks after the attacks, Palestinian chairman Yasser Arafat sat down for preliminary talks with Israeli foreign minister Shimon Peres. Furthermore, at least one well-known group took quick pains to disassociate itself from America's potential target list, as the Irish Republican Army (IRA) issued a statement on 20 September condemning the 11 September attacks and announcing an intensification of its dialogue with the International Commission for the Disarmament of Northern Ireland. ² The fact that the IRA's announcement was featured by the website of the Basque provincial government in northern Spain was revealing, as the ETA is thought to have close links to the IRA and may occasionally follow its tactical lead. ³

It did not do so at this time, however. After a period of relative inactivity following 11 September, the ETA hinted in late October that it would stop fighting if its maximum demand was met: that Spain must hold a vote on Basque independence. Prime Minister José Maria Aznar refused, saying that the 11 September attacks on the United States showed that it was "suicide" to deal with terrorists. "They must be defeated," he said, "because the only aim of killers and fanatics is to kill and exclude those who don't think as they do." ⁴ And so the stage was set for the violence to continue.

It helps to personalize the developments in Spain. Otherwise one can be caught up in waves of revenge killings and the logic of retribution. Two incidents seem to have formed the brackets for the ETA's current activities. The first was the kidnapping of Segundo Marey in the French Basque region on 4 December 1983 by an extralegal group of paramilitary thugs in the pay of the Spanish government called the Group Antiterroriste de Liberation (GAL). That incident, and the twenty-seven killings that followed, underlined the brutality of the counterterrorist effort and seemed to illustrate what the ETA was fighting against. The second marker event was the ETA's 10 July 1997 abduction and murder in the Spanish Basque region of Miguel Angel Blanco, aged twenty-nine, an unpaid town councilman and member of the ruling Popular Party, who was looking forward to his wedding soon. This senseless and premeditated murder of an appealing victim that all Spain could identify with seemed to illustrate for many the cruel and pointless violence of the ETA. Taken together, the two events seem to encapsulate the current impasse.

Marey died on 13 August 2001. He was an office furniture salesman who was abducted from his home while watching the Benny Hill program on television. The mercenaries who abducted him thought they had nabbed an important ETA terrorist. They had not. They kept...