Suicide of the Basque left
N OT so much in terms of the "quan-
tity" of assassinations carried out -of a total of 792 victims in the course of the last 30 years, "only" 12 have died since the breakdown of the ceasefire -as to their "quality". If we put quotation marks around this word "quality", it is because it is very inappropriate when we are talking of human lives. However, not all deaths have the same political meaning.
When, in its early days, ETA selected its targets among the servants of the state apparatus (civil guards, police and soldiers), it was easy for it to benefit from a political support or at least a critical understanding among significant sectors of the Basque nationalist movement. Now that the sole objective retained is the "socialization of pain" through indiscriminate attacks, nobody in Euskadi, even among its fiercest partisans, accords it any legitimacy.
### Objectives
The "selected targets" since the end of the ceasefire are in their majority civilian objectives: elected representatives of the Popular Party, leaders of the Socialist Party, entrepreneurs who are members of the Basque nationalist party (PNV) -Korta, who was president of the employers' association in the province of Gipuzkoa, had openly supported the search for solutions negotiated in the framework of the Lizarra pact - critical journalists -Lacalle had been imprisoned during the Francoist dictatorship — and the civil governor of the province of Gipuzkoa -Jauregui, another old left militant who had been distinguished, in the ministry of the interior, by his determination to uncover the crimes of the GAL and who supported the quest for a negotiated solution to the Basque problem.
Basque society understands neither ETA's reason for acting nor its acts, and the majority are perplexed by its political degeneration. The bad consequences for all the people are more than evident and this political folly is still less understood. It is clear, however, that the breaking of the ceasefire stems from the fact that the PNV, not without reason, refused to submit to ETA's demands, in the event the creation
ETA has surpassed itself. The campaign of assassinations this summer has been the most bloody and arbitrary in all its history.
JOSÉ RAMÓN CASTAÑOS of a national Assembly in the totality of the seven territories of the Basque country without taking account of the majority opinion of the citizens concerned. It is also clear that the assassination of representatives of the PP and PSOE shatters any possibility for establishing roads of dialogue for a negotiated solution of the Basque problem; that the resumption of armed actions revives the movements hostile to Basque nationalism; that public opinion in the Spanish state will identify Euskadi and Basque nationalism with terrorism and violence; that the close network of political alliances knitted from the signature of the Lizarra pact in order to win a majority of society to the right to self-determination has shattered in pieces; and that the process of renovation of the Basque left has become a pure chimera.
### Suicide
ETA's assassinations also represent the suicide of the Basque left, because they pervert the political objectives in whose name they supposedly act to such a point that one must ask questions about the true nature of ETA itself. Is it an organization of the left? Nobody doubts that it was so in the past, but everything would appear to indicate that the political culture of the new generation in the commandos today cannot be unreservedly related to the values and traditions of the left.
The ETA leaders who have broken the ceasefire are not those who had decreed it. The old cadres, forged in the struggle against Francoism and the first years of the democratic transition, have given way to a generation of youth immersed in another culture. Its credo is that in politics all is permissible and that the unfavourable relationship of forces can be overcome through recourse to terror.
They do not seek to win a majority of society to realize their political pro-
Euskadi * gramme, but rather to neutralize by fear the majority which rejects them. This generation is educated in the struggle of the masked urban commandos, the "kale-borroka" , and in the veneration of ETA. It considers itself as the self-proclaimed vanguard of the Basque people, which would give it the right to act against the majority of society in the name of an imaginary Basque people. Its ideology, often a reactionary mixture of Stalinism and fundamentalist nationalism, poses the problem of the political character of this organization, a component of a Basque left where indisputably left values are embodied in trades unionism and the alternative social movements.
### Complicity
The complicity the leaders of the Basque left have maintained with ETA is the most negative element of this situation. In private, they do not hide their disagreement, but they do not voice their criticisms so as not to "play the game of the enemy" and so end up adopting an attitude of adulation as "there is no other alternative". They have yet engaged themselves in relation to their social base and the whole of Basque society to bring an end to the cycle of armed struggle, open a new process and refound the Basque left.
We militants and leaders of Zutik (the organisation in which Basque supporters of the Fourth International participate), with other components of the social and political left, have been involved in the opening of this process. Today the complicity of the leaders of the Basque left in ETA's process of degeneration stops us from working together to build something new. Why do they bend to the diktats of ETA? Again, the reference to Stalinism gives us the answer: fear; fear of an organization that confounds enemy and critical partner; fear of being considered as a "traitor"; fear of the division of the movement.
All that leads to a terrible crisis of political leadership which empties the organizations of the Basque left of their militant base. A terrible lassitude also, with those who would like to put an end, once and for all, to the problem of violence feeling the impotence of a Sisyphus. * International Viewpoint #325 November 2000 19