What the Social Democratic government has brought the Basque country
Under the Social Democratic government of Felipe means for arresting the suspects.
Gonzalez, the Spanish repressive forces have escalated happened in Pasajes amounts to police terrorism."
the Basque national The Spanish government responded with a total
A PNV poster: Even Franco couldn't clear it up on his own (DR)
necessary movement.
What against repression
In the period before the elections to the Basque defense of the police and an attack on even the bourautonomous parliament on February 26, this took the geois Basque Nationalist Party, which has by far the form of murder-gang attacks on militant Basque nalargest electoral support of any party in the Basque tionalists who had taken refuge on the French side of
The Madrid government's delegate to the the border that divides the Basque people.
tacks were well-organized and deadly, and it is inpresident Garaikoetxea of doubt on the democratic character of the activity of conceivable that they could have been carried out without the connivance, and probably the active inthe central government and the police."
volvement, of both the French and Spanish police
The Basque country was, to a considerable extent, forces, both operating under Social Democratic govthe cockpit of the struggle against Francoism, which assumed a particularly militant and massive character ernments.
Within less than a month after the Basque elections,
The Basque country also was the one in which once again the nationalist parties won a big region of the Spanish state where the leadership was majority, the Spanish police seem to have inaugurated not dominated by reformists, not even by the Coma shoot-to-kill policy against members of the Basque munist Party. The Basque country and the Basque nanationalist guerrilla groups. On March 22, in the port tional question obviously remain very important obof Pasajes, four members of a breakaway group from stacles to the Gonzalez government's scheme of re-
ETA were gunned down by Spanish police.
consolidating Spanish bourgeois normality on behalf tion drew strong protests from the whole gamut of the national movement and even from the bishops of
One of the most thorough and systematic books on
San Sebastian and Pamplona, two of the four major the Basque national movement and the rise of the mass struggle in the Basque country is Das Baskische Laby-
Basque cities.
In a pastoral letter, the bishops said: "You cannot rinth by the author of the following article.
Kill an enemy, only because he is an enemy. Not every for 28 Marks from ISP means is justified for carrying out the legitimate de-
11 10 17, 6000 Frankfurt Am Main, Federal Republic fense of society."
Josef Lang's article is from Was Tun, paper of
The bourgeois
Basque Nationalist Party (PNV)
issued a communique saying: "The use of police force section was excessive."
Euskadiko Eskerra, a smaller modernumber 373, March 3, 1984.
ate formation with its origins in the younger genera-
"The police had every tion of nationalists, said:
Josef Lang
With its promise of "change" -
El Cambio
- the Social Democratic
PSOE won a landslide victory in the 1982
Spanish-state parliamentary elections.
There have been changes, but in a rightward direction.
While the PSOE government has taken small steps forward on certain questions, these have been only where even the former bourgeois
UDC government would have had to make concessions.
For example, the abortion law was so amended that only 3 percent of those concerned can freely avail themselves of this right. The Catholic church has blocked reform of the antiquated school system, keeping it from getting beyond the country.
These at-
Basque country, in this region.
The acof the capitalists.
available of Germany.
the
German aben
3tik-11
Ramon Jauregui, accused the PNV
"systematically casting
It is
Verlag,
• Postfach of the
Fourth International,
G.F.
ela kitt
•ere korrika initial planning stages.
The only area where there is any sign of a new wind blowing is the cultural sphere, and there the minority cultures and languages are getting short shrift.
The balance sheet of 16 months of the
PSOE government for the wage earners and the national minorities is an unmitigated disaster. Most scandalous is a level
International Viewpoint 9 April 1984
21
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of repression against the Basques, Andalusian rural workers, the Valencian the Galician shipyard workers and the Asturian miners that has not been seen since the passing of
In March 1980, Anmesty International published a report on torture in "Democratic Spain." Terrorist Law" passed with the support of the PSOE and the CP. argued that this law facilitated the torture of Basque political prisoners.
In the meantime, the PSOE has reinforced this law still further with its Special Plan for the North (ZEN). Accounts of torture regularly make the headlines - even in the bourgeois papers. past year alone, it is estimated that 100 to 150 Basques have been seriously mistreated in state custody. just denies the whole thing. Last fall, the Spanish premier, Felipe Gonzalez said that 95 percent of these "stinking, lying slandese reports amounted to encouraging Civil and the Policia Nacional. So, it is not surprising that the policemen who
ETA member Joseba Arregui to death in February 1981 were exonerated last November.
Working together with the Israeli secret service, the old Francoist torturers developed a new strategy for "combating terrorism." It involves kidnapping or assassinating ETA members and other radical Basques who have taken refuge in the French Basque country.
In October 1983, the Grupo Antiterrorista de Liberacion (GAL), which consists of Spanish cops, French extreme rightists and criminals,
Joxi Lasa and Joxan Zabala were kidnapped and probably murdered. Two days after that, they tried to kid-
Larretxea Goni in Hendaye, closest town across the French border. In December, Franzose Segundo Marey, not a member of any group, was kidnapped but soon released.
At the end of December, the GAL assassinated ETA member Shortly after that, they killed an ETA leader, Mikel Gotkoetxea.
they assassinated two ETA militants, Angel Gurmindo Izarraga and Vincente Perurena Tellexea.
This campaign was given active support by the "left" government in Paris, which shipped off six Basque refugees to Guadalupe, from which they were deported to Panama. Another 11 Basque were deported to northern stepped-up repression can be documented also by other figures. In 1981, 249 Basque defendents were sentenced to 4,100 years in prison. In the last six months alone, 189 Basques have been sentenced to 4,462 years in prison. Gonzales is the first premier since the days of Franco to threaten to ban the radical Basque electoral coalition Herri the Spanish-state government has allotted the equivalent of a
100 million dollars to build up a surveillance system and authorized the building up of files on the 20 to 25 percent of the Basque population who are suspected
Today, there are 12,000 Spanish police in Euskadi, including thousands of secret agents. By way
"reform," an "autonomous Basque police force" of a few hundred has been created. They are used mainly against demonstrations.
The police, supported by the PSOE, are heavily armed and conduct themselves like an occupation army, maintaining conducting raids pushing people around brutally. Repressive tolerance
The Basque language, Euskara, was ferociously by the Franco regime, and thus it became a symbol of national liberation for the non-Basque speaking population also. Today, along with Spanish, it is an official language in the Basque autonomous region, which includes the three provinces of Vizkaya, Alava and Guipozkoa. (The fourth Basque province in the Spanish state, Navarra, was excluded from the autonomous region by the central government.) Nonetheless, very been made in extending the use of Basque.
In daily life, Euskara remains a marginal language. Less than a third of the Basque population understand it, although 90 percent of the non-Basque speaking population - half of them immigrants from other parts of the Spanish state - are in favor of their children learning the language.
The reasons for the poor state of the Basque language are essentially political The Spanish constitution makes it an obligation for every Basque to learn Spanish first of all. It is the language of the police and the courts. Herbert Marcuse's concept of "repressive tolerance" is applicable here. People should learn Euskara, which has been persecuted for cen-
But they have to be able to speak and write its competitor, Spanish.
It is symptomatic that in the 1982 organizations - Herri Batasuna, the Movimiento Comunista and the Liga Komunista Iraultzailea (LKI, the Basque affiliate of the section of the Fourth International in the Spanish state) made extensive use of Basque in their electoral propaganda. The percentage of speeches, leaflets and
Correction
The tally of the vote for Auzolan, the coalition supported by the LKI in the elections for the Basque parlia ment given in the last issue was garb-
It was 10,659 in the three provinces, approximately 1 percent.
posters in Basque for these three groups were respectively 57.8, 50 and 48.
The Spanish centralist attitude of the PSOE is highlighted by the fact that the percentage of its electoral propaganda in Basque was a flat zero.
The capitalist system poses a fundamental obstacle to extending the use of
The long working hours and stress that it imposes on wage earners make learning it an almost superhuman
This is one of the arguments used by the Fourth Internationalists in the Basque country in fighting for the 35-hour week. They are also demanding the right to time off during working hours to study Euskara. A struggle led by them, for example, at the big Cer rajera metallurgical plant in Mondragon forced the company to hire an instruc-
The growth of radical Basque nationalof Basque ethnic origin as well as the youth of immigrant families has a lot to do with unemploy-
In June 1982, 37% of the youth between 16 and 19 years of age were jobless in the Spanish state as a whole. In Navarra, the percentage was 49. in the three provinces under the autonomous Basque authority, 63!
The reason for the depth of the Basque economic crisis is not any strikehappiness on the part of the Basque workers or the revolutionary tax imposed by ETA. The causes are structural - the special weight in the Basque economy of shrinking industries, such as steel, ship. building and household appliances.
The Moncloa Pact in 1977 between bourgeois government, the bosses, the PSOE and CP meant the beginning of the end of the rise of labor struggles that had been in process for a number of years in the Basque country. It had peaked in a dozen general strikes in the years 19751978, in which the working class mobilized very extensively against repression and for national rights.
In 1978, the cause of Basque national rights fell back into the hands of the radical and bourgeois nationalists. This was facilitated by the Spanish centralist attitude of the big workers parties, the PSOE and the CP.
In the context of the big workers mobilizations that have been taking place all-Spain level since the fall of 1983, and which in February 1984 alone led to two strike-type mobilizations in the Basque country, the tide has turned.
How strong the pressure on the leaderships is now is shown by the fact that the UGT, the all-Spain union confederation controlled by the PSOE, itself called for a general strike and that the bourgeois Basque nationalist party, out of electoral expediency, participated in a militant
The attitude of the PSOE government, which is both anti-Basque and antilabor, could once again set in motion the dynamic that gave the Basque resistance of the 1970s its strength and breadth - general strikes, occupations and giant mass demonstrations.
International Viewpoint 9 April 1984
in the workers movement and the PT.
In Uruguay, on the other hand, the situation is very interesting. The dictatorship is utterly discredited and we have seen launched against it what are proportionately the largest mass mobilisations of
The PT in the present political situation the continent The dictatorship has proved incapable of working out and applying any plan for changing the form of bourgeois domination. Furthermore, unlike Argentina, there never existed any sort of Peronism, and today there does exist a class-conscious current in the unions around the PIT (Plenario
On April 15 the Brazilian parliament will vote on the form of the forthcoming presidential elections.
The debate over whether this election will continue to take place through an electoral college or directly from popular suffrage is one of the central political questions in the country. Mass demonstrations of the workers and popular layers have been in the streets demanding the right to decide directly who heads the government.
The Workers Party (PT, Partido dos Trabalhadores) will probably be