How Eta went to war over the environment
The militant Basque separatist movement has its traditional strongholds in urban centres such as Bilbao. But as it seeks to display its eco credentials – by sabotaging a new high-speed rail link – a bloody battle is being fought in one of the region’s most beautiful locations. A project director has already been murdered and now his colleagues fear they may be next
In the Herriko Taberna, a bar in Bilbao’s working-class area of Santutxu, a new picture hangs on the wall this weekend: the face belongs to Garikoitz Aspiazu, a local boy who was, police claim, the military chief of the Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, the armed Basque nationalist group long known to the world as Eta. In a necklace and a pink T-shirt, Aspiazu, linked to at least four deaths, smiles out at the drinkers, the slices of tortilla, the posters and the prizes for the Christmas raffle. ‘A very good guy,’ said Josu Telleria, who helps run the bar. ‘We played football together. He was a great striker.’
Aspiazu, who was arrested a month ago, is lost to the struggle for the time being. But there are plenty of others to carry on the fight. In the same bar Carlos Ruiz, a former steelworker and member of a campaigning group close to the extremist Basque nationalists, argues that the violent confrontation with Madrid stems from its refusal to allow the Basques to decide their own future.
‘No one wants the deaths,’ he said, ‘but when there is a wall and there is no way round it, then there are people who choose violence.’
This is standard talk from an Eta sympathiser, but the current target of the group’s activities is anything but conventional. The organisation to which Ruiz belongs specialises in environmental campaigning. And this year Eta has declared war on a high-speed rail link to be built through the heart of some of the most beautiful countryside in Europe. Two weeks ago the new cause claimed its first victim – Ignacio Uría, 71, a businessman shot dead by two Eta gunmen as punishment for his involvement in the railway project. Eta has gone green, in characteristically deadly fashion.
Fifty miles to the east, high in the stunning mountains that are the heart of the Basque Country, Asier Agirre, the mayor of the small village of Aramaio, unfurled a detailed map showing an unnaturally straight black line drawn through the cramped contours of the snow-flecked hills. It marked the high-speed rail link that the national government in Madrid, the Basque regional authority in Bilbao, and Brussels hope will be built at a cost of €4bn (£3.57bn). Work has already started and one slope near Agirre’s home, where a tunnel will emerge, is now a slough of mud and gravel.
Agirre, 34, does not care that the lines will allow trains to travel from Madrid to Paris at 180mph and are part of a new high-tech vision for an interconnected, environmentally friendly transport system for Europe. He rejects the argument that the project will bring the three main cities and the 2.1 million people of the ‘Basque Autonomous Community’ closer together, generate economic activity and cut down lorry traffic on the busy roads. The mayor, who belongs to the party accused by Madrid of being the political front of Eta, faces eight years in prison for his campaign against the rail link. He has refused to sell his land, where sheep and tough little ponies with bells round their necks graze, to allow its development. The railway is the latest episode in centuries of ‘the oppression of the Basque people’, he says, and ‘any violence has to be seen in that context’.
In Azpeitia, a town half an hour’s drive away, the family of Uría, gunned down while walking from the offices of his construction firm to a restaurant for lunch and a game of cards 11 days ago, are not worrying about the ‘context’ of his death. They were, said cousin Luis Mendizábal, ‘sad, but not angry yet’.
In the Kiruri restaurant itself there was an empty space at Uría’s favourite table, not far from the roaring, warming fire. ‘He was a lovely man, very hard working. He’d been coming in here for 40 years,’ said the owner, who requested anonymity. ‘This is a very, very quiet town. We just hope it’s an isolated incident.’ The local mayor, like Agirre from the party linked to Eta, refused to comment.
Uría died because he was one of the contractors for the rail link – known as the Basque Y after the shape of the new routes which come from south east and south west to run through the narrow strip of Pyrenean foothills along the Bay of Biscay joining the cities of Bilbao, Vitoria and San Sebastian before heading into France. In August Eta, considered a terrorist organisation by Britain, the US and the EU, said they would kill businessmen associated with the project. Uría was the first.
The rail project is likely to go ahead despite the violence and significant local opposition – ‘They are going to do it,’ said Judith Arriolabengoa, an Aramaio villager – so more are likely to die. The increased police patrols, the bodyguards, the anti-sabotage and anti-assassination security precautions planned by the local authorities for the 590 construction workers and their bosses will not necessarily help. ‘Each day Eta is weaker, but it is still capable of carrying out serious attacks,’ said the Basque regional government interior chief, Javier Balza. ‘It will not be easy to guarantee individual personal security.’
For this is far from a normal rail project. The Basque Y runs through more rugged country and sharper sentiments than anywhere else in Europe, cutting across fault lines based in historic grievances, cultural identities and political agitation that have few parallels on the continent outside Ireland, Corsica and the Balkans. It also runs right through the middle of a vicious low-level conflict.
Eta, founded in 1959 and responsible for more than 820 deaths, is at its lowest point for years. With another half dozen militants arrested last week and more than 80 picked up this year alone, the group is suffering from a two-pronged security and judicial offensive launched by Spain’s judiciary and Socialist government after a truce broke down last year following a bombing at Madrid airport that killed two. Early last week, the group’s new military chief, who succeeded Aspiazu only four weeks ago, was arrested in France, another example of reinforced co-operation between Madrid and Paris.
Cash flows to the group are drying up as donations fall and the ‘tax’ on local businesses becomes harder to enforce; recruitment through the banned youth groups is down and, according to Anna Garbati, a veteran Bilbao reporter, there is a generalised growing fatigue with the violence that has scarred the Basque region, one of the richest parts of Spain, for decades. Recent general strikes, once a key demonstration of the Basque extreme nationalists’ hold on the region, have been relatively weak and few expect a turnaround at local elections next year.
All this explains why the rallying call of the environment suits the armed Basque extremists now. ‘Eta is not interested in ecology. The social movement around Eta is strongly left-wing, anti-globalisation and so on, but Eta itself does not have any ideology that is not strictly pro-Basque independence,’ said Garbati.
However, there are two previous examples of such activism: the campaigns against a local nuclear power plant in the 1980s, in which five died, and a motorway in the 1990s, in which four were killed. Both are seen as historic victories for the movement.
The Basque Y train project – which the local transport minister says will create 6,900 new jobs and has been designed so that nearly two thirds of the track is underground – has allowed Eta and allied political and social groups of the Basque National Liberation Movement to exploit new terrain and old cleavages that pit the urban against the rural, the wealthy against ‘the workers’ and the Basques against the Spanish state.
‘This is the biggest economic investment ever in the region. It will take away from education and health, and it will be used just by the upper classes, not the general public, and it is going to favour people from the cities, not from the country,’ said Agirre. ‘We are paying the price here, in our valleys, while the Spanish state benefits.’
In the nearby town of Mondragón, where a Socialist councillor was shot dead by Eta in March, graffiti cover every wall, calling for sabotage against the railway or proclaiming that ‘the Basque country will not be sold out’. The daughter of the dead councillor, who appeared on every TV channel to castigate her father’s killers as cowards, works in a motorway toll gate outside the town and, bouquet of flowers in the cabin beside her, cheerfully gave The Observer precise directions to Aramaio, a nationalist stronghold, when asked.
In the Herriko Taberna, Ruiz is keen to rationalise the deaths of men such as Uría. ‘A death has to be seen within the political context,’ he says. ‘There are people like us who chose the non-violent struggle and there are those who have another vision and other tactics.’
On the walls of the bar were posters calling for a boycott of Israeli-made goods and for support for Kurdish claims for a state.
Ruiz took a paper napkin decorated with the map of ‘Euskal Herria’ – the greater Basque country stretching into France and across seven provinces – to contrast the claims of the nationalists with the current reality of the three provinces of Euskadi, the semi-autonomous Basque region. ‘The struggle has been going on for 200 years,’ he said.
But many other groups campaigning against the Basque Y project are deeply unhappy about Eta’s role as self-appointed defender of the environment. Others, such as the local ruling moderate nationalist party, reject its attempts to establish monopoly on Basque identity politics.
‘We would just like Eta to disappear from this fight,’ said Mikel Arana of Izquierda Unida Bilbao, a moderate socialist and green grouping that forms part of the moderate nationalist dominated regional coalition government. ‘The Eta activity is very damaging. The killing just makes it harder for those who oppose the train.’ National ecological leaders wrote last week to major newspapers denouncing the violence.
Arana’s group believes there is a need for a rail network as an alternative to roads, but is sceptical of the benefits for the Basque region of high-speed train project. From within the government they have negotiated a reduction in speed and an extension to the coast to boost freight traffic on the new 110-mile line.
Workers on the railway take a more pragmatic view. ‘Do they want us to stop working?’ asked one on a site near Legutiano where Eta killed a policeman with a bomb earlier this year. ‘This is how we feed our families.’ Another spoke of how he was ‘caught in the middle’.
Gauging overall sentiment towards Eta and the extremist position it represents is difficult, but such a ‘plague on both your houses’ attitude is common. In Azpeitia, only a few hundred yards from where Uría was shot, one shopkeeper cursed Eta – despite the sticker on his door calling for the return of the 700 prisoners linked to the armed group who are held in Spanish jails, often hundreds of miles from the Basque country. ‘On the one side, it is Eta; on the other, it is the Spanish government,’ said Balverde Uriko, 31. ‘No one is willing to stand up for human rights. That’s why there is a problem. From one side, you get a punch; from the other, a kick.’
Graffiti calling for those jailed to be held nearer ‘home soil’ is everywhere. Every Friday evening in Bilbao, scores of protesters parade slowly through the centre of the city. One 70-year-old with a son and a daughter imprisoned in Cádiz, 600 miles and 11 hours’ driving away, said he wanted to live another 10 years ‘to see them free’. Last week the government was reported to have moved 10 prisoners who denounced the Basque separatist groups current violence nearer their homes.
In the Herriko Taberna, which sits among the rainswept tower blocks of Santutxu, Ekina Estibaliz held her eight-month-old daughter in her arms and pointed to another recently hung portrait on the wall: an image of her husband and the girl’s father, imprisoned four months before the child’s birth. She had come to the bar to be among ‘family’, Estibaliz, 34, said. ‘I am proud of my husband. He was doing a political job. He was just a left-wing militant. He was doing nothing wrong.’
And if her daughter ends up in prison, with her picture on the wall, too? ‘I would be proud of her, too,’ Estabaliz said.
Well, this is just stupid. I believe that this fight is one of the least important things that these countries have done in their long exsistance. The Basques just need to learn that things are moving on and even despite their efforts things will never go back to the way that they want them to.
Seriously though, this is sad, she needs to get a new job and fast. 
