SPANISH STATE
out called for closer relations between the populations of the Spanish and French
HB has been very cautious about supporting movements for national rights for the Basque people in France.
The Basque national movement under attack
Such demands are expressly banned by French laws on pain of draconian penal-
The Basque nationalist Enbata was outlawed by the French government in the 1970s simply for stating in a publication that "We Basque are a
The French government could be expected to react drastically
Mitterrand's first extraditions of Basque political refugees on September
26 set the seal on collusion between the rightward moving Social Democratic governments in Paris and Madrid against the Basque national move-
In fact, they were clearly part of an ambitious and eminently political plan.
The escalating moves against Basque refugees in France have gone hand in hand with moves in Spain to outlaw Herri Batasuna, the political organization of the militant nationalist current.
Gerry FOLEY
In May, after many months of parapolice terror against Basque refugees living in the French Basque country and in the midst of a wave of deportations of
Basque nationalists from France to Latin
America, the Madrid prosecutor, Pedro
Claver, filed a formal demand for the illegalization of Herri Batasuna.
What is more, the demand was based on a purely political argument — the refusal of Herri Batasuna to accept the integration of the Basque nation into the state as something sacred and
The ruling on the prosecutor's petition down shortly after the extradited nationalists were handed over to the Spanish-state authorities. Contrary to his expectations, apparently, the judge of
Madrid's Appeal Court No.
Fernando Martinez Ruiz, ruled
Before the judgment, Martinez Ruiz let it be known that "this decision is not going to make people happy, but in any case, my career is already made," according to the September 28 El Pais.
The Madrid daily went on to report:
"In his ruling, the judge stated that he could not accept a petition for outlawing
Herri Batasuna 'that does not say what crimes are connected with its notarized declaration and statutes.' He subsequent-
*Having read and reread the prosecutor's petition, I find that it does not say what part of the statutes repreviolation of the law nor what crime is related to this.' "
Spain's most authoritative newspaper summed up the prosecutor's arguments as
"The prosecutor stated that political parties are the ideal expression of pluralism but that they must be subject to constitutional principles, one of the outstanding of which is unity of the nation. He added that the statutes presented by HB are very ambiguous and did not help to clarify its real objectives.
"The prosecutor went on to say that on repeated occasions during the process of obtaining legal status initiated
March 1983, HB refused to include a
International Viewpoint October 15, 1984 specific acceptance of the constitution in
"In declaring the Spanish nationality of the members of HB, the prosecutor pointed out, rather than saying 'Spanish,, they used the formula 'those who are obliged to claim the civil status of Spanish
On October 3, the prosecutor appealed the judge's ruling, continuing the government's long campaign to outlaw the Basque nationalist organization.
At the same time, the objective of the exercise was pointed up when the governor of the province of Viscaya banned a demonstration against the extraditions called for October 6 in Bilbao by Herri Batasuna. He argued that it did not have the right to organize a demonstration because it was not included on the register of legal parties. Herri Batasuna
In fact, Herri Batasuna is a coalition of a number of political groups that favor an independent Basque state. such does not advance this demand. It has no program beyond the five points of the "Alternative" of KAS (Koordinadora Abertzale Sozialista - Socialist Patriotic Coordinating Committee), to which it belongs. They are the following:
1. General amnesty.
2. Legalization of all political parties. Full political freedom.
Measures to improve the living and working conditions of the working
A statute of national autonomy, the right of self-determination and the power to exercise self-government.
Basque as the national language. A public school system in Basque and the defense of ideological pluralism.
This program is formulated in various
The above is translated from the Basque of Jotake, the magazine of the Abertzale Sozialista Komiteak, the Patriotic Socialist Committees (September
The original Alternativa KAS, made public in September 1977, included more specific points under the above general principles. One of the points left for national rights for the French Basques.
In any case, Mitterrand's stab in the back of the Basque people in the Spanish state did not fail to provoke an outburst of anger in the French Basque country. In its September 28 issue, Rouge, the paper of the section of the Fourth International in France, carried the following report from a correspondent in north Euzkadi (the French Basque country):
"The day after the announcement of the government's decisions on the extraof anger ripped through the Basque country. Jean-de-Luz [Donibane during the traditional festival of the Marmitako, the police violently charged a thousand demonstrators. were erected and the 'abertzak' [Basque Union of the Left slates resigned."
Protests in south Euzkadi were powerful and bitter. Luis Enrique, a leader of the Liga Komunista Iraultzailea, (LKI), the Fourth Internationalist organization in south Euzkadi, described them in a view published in October 5 Rc... :.
"At the start, the collection of signatures for the 'Letter to the Peoples' [see back page of IV] was very important. More than 20,000 signatures were collected, including those of 2,000 elected representatives. tions, ranging from a few hundreds to several thousands developed thoughout south Euzkadi.
"The reactions reached their peak as the news of the extraditions came...On that night, a lot of people went into the especially young people, stopped traffic, built barricades, contronted the police with stones and Molotov
"It was a minority response but a very determined one....The second stage was the general strike [September 26], which has to be considered a success. It was not a total strike, but it was a very tough action. During it also there were forces confrontations with large police
Enrique went on to describe the unevenness of the strike action:
"The strike was total in the Tolosa and Ondarroa regions, and very powerful in Guernica, Marquina, Renteria and Ernani. The participation was weaker in Pamplona and Vitoria. Transport, services and stores were hardest hit, because it was mainly the small and medium enter-
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trial labor force is overwhelmingly made al liberation struggle as of little or no connon-Basque cern to the workers.
prises that went on strike. Pickets played a decisive role in extending the action.
The strike in fact showed both the strength and the limitations of the radical national current. The strike was called by the radical nationalist trade union organization, the Langile Abertzale Batzordeak (LAB - Patriotic Workers Commissions) on its own, without the support of the other unions and without any apparent campaign to get a united action.
The LAB is very much a minority force in the labor movement, with representation ranging from 5% to 10% in the factory councils. It is strongest in Guipozcoa, the least hispanicized of the Basque provinces. All the strong points of the strike that Enrique mentioned are in the largely Basque-speaking mountain and coastal areas.
Ondarroa is a large fishing town in the province of Viscaya not far from Bilboa. It is nearly 100% Basque speaking and a historic fortress of Basque nationalism. The LKI has had representatives on the Ondarroa city council and it still has one on the council in Marquina, also a Basque-speaking town not far away. Nationalism and immigrant workers
In Ondarroa, a well-known revolutionary nationalist leader in ETA, Andoni Arizabalga, recently killed in a mountain-climbing accident, joined the Fourth International in the early 1970s. He was sentenced to life in prison under Franco on the charge of planting a bomb under a police car. He became a local hero.
Andoni was also an industrial worker
"whatever young workers there Miguel Vazquez, an LKI leader in the provincial capital of Vitoria (also capital of the Basque autonomous region) told Pampiona, which also has a mainly immigrant work force. Nonetheless, in such areas, the militant nationalists obviously have a harder time in getting a broad response to their appeals.
Pamplona is in the province of Navarra, which is not included in the Basque autonomous region. In this province, the strike actions were strongest in the mountainous north, according to El Pais. This largely Basque speaking Pamplona lies between the mountains and the vast southern plains of the province,
Basque national diminishes to the vanishing point. the city has had a Basque speaking pop. ulation in living memory and many walls are covered with radical Basque national-
Among the immigrant workers in most Basque areas, the radicals and youth have been attracted to the fighting nationalists. Herri Batasuna has gotten a substantial minority vote in both Alava and Navarra, although considerably less than in Guipuzcoa and Vizcaya. But the mass of immigrant workers in Alava, Juan Ordonana, and LKI leader in Vitoria, told
"indifferent" to Basque nationalism. The same view was expressed by an LKI metalworkers' leader in Pamplona, himself an immigrant from Castile.
The Communist Party, which despite its extreme weakness in the Basque country, controls the other main union, the
Commissions, has held a very negative attitude to militant nationalism, especially since the establishment of parliamentary rule. During the September there was a demonstra-
In fact, in Balbao union militants expelled from the Workers Commissions, including LKI activists, have joined the LAB as an alternative.
The fundamental limitation LAB is the same as that of Herri Batasuna itself and all the other members of the KAS. It does not have a real unitedfront structure or a program for unitedfront struggles. Herri Batasuna and the KAS present themselves as the front, which everyone who supports the principles of the Alternativa KAS should join. But they offer no right of political differences and no means of democratic decision making. HB in an impasse
The inevitable result is that after a first period of growth, the HB and the KAS became firmly confined to a well-defined
In particular, they excluded themselves from areas where there was a strong sentiment for real unitedfront work, as in the women's movement, the environmentalist movement and the peace movement, which have been the main channels through youth have come into political activity.
in one of the small plants scattered through the area.
He explained to me last summer in Ondarroa how his experience and that of other local ETA activists as workers convinced them of the
Statement of the Fourth Internationalist need for a program that would include organisations in North and South Euzkadi workers liberation as well as national liberation.
The LAB, however, has no trade-
Delegations from the signatory parties met in Donostia [San Sebastian] on September 12, 1984. Recognizing the situation faced by the Basque refugees in north
Although its memberunion program.
Euzkadi, they wished to express the following positions:
ship is very radical and includes virtually
1. It is essential that throughout the French and Spanish states and in particuall the organized young workers, it is lar in the Basque country that all working-class and abertzale [militant nationalist] essentially a labor front politically suborganizations and democratic associations mobilize massively and in a united way ordinated to an underground revolutionagainst the extraditions and for the restoration of the Political Refugee Status ary organization, which has only a very supported by Francois Mitterrand when he was a candidate for president in 1981.
limited political strategy. The leaders of
We believe that regardless of the political differences that we may have
Herri Batasuna, its political sister organization, explain that they do not think with ETA and with its methods of struggle, it is essential to reaffirm the need for that anything can be won in immediate defending the democratic rights of the Basque refugees and to oppose all extradistruggles before a breakthrough on the
"until we achieve real
In conclusion, from an internationalist position, this fight in defense of the self-government,"
after another of
Basque refugees is the best way of struggling against the repressive and chauvinist
Defending the democratic rights of the Basque them told me last summer.
This position has probably been hardrefugees is defending the rights of the workers and of the peoples.
Liga Komunista Iraultzailea (Fourth Internationalist organization in ened by the fact that for ten years the major unions have continually capitulated south Euzkadi); Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire (Fourth Internationalist oror accepted defeats. In particular, they have offered nothing for youth.
Since the onset of the crisis there has been very little hiring, and the average age of workers in industry is now well over thirty.
Youth unemployment is almost total.
Even in Alava, a mainly lowland area that is the most hispanicized of the three
Basque provinces included in the Basque autonomous region and where the indus-
4 also pointed out that the overwhelming majority of cadres in the big unions are measures of the governments. ganization in north Euzkadi).
In Alava, the Union General de Trabajadores (UGT, the SP-dominated confederation) has daughter group of the British Militant tendency. It is more militant than the SP or CP on purely trade-union questions. But it regards the problems of the nation-
At the same time, as the largest fighting organization lost its momentum, and under the impact of the crisis, the national enthusiasm of the youth has declined. And rapidly increasing use of drugs has become very worrying to the militant nationalist organizations. the police of promoting the use of drugs on the sly as a means of demoralizing
International Viewpoint October 15, 1984
de Paris crowed in a headline "Les , chauvinist and bloodthirsty right.
Basque young people.
In the elections for the Navarra autonomous parliament in 1983, a coalition that called for a democratic united front against national and social oppression, Auzolan, won a significant vote. It included the LKI and Nueva Izquierda, a group that split from Euzkadiko Ezkerra (Basque Left), a party that grew out of an earlier attempt to develop a militant nationalist political alternative, but which aborted and turned rightward.
The LKI hoped to be able to build such a coalition throughout the Basque country, in part as a means of convincing the HB to accept the idea of a broader and more democratic front. But in the 1984 elections for the Basque parliament, Auzolan got only a modest vote, about 1%.
The LKI drew the conclusion that the current had closed ranks behind the BH in the face of a growing assault on militant nationalism from the Basque bourgeois moderates and the SP gov-
The HB vote of over 14% in these elections was an impressive result in the circumstances. But it also confirmed the stagnation and relative isolation of the militant nationalist current. It showed that the radical nationalists were still being pushed back and were running
Fundamentally, revolutionary nationalists have not been able to develop and organization sufficient to meet the challenges of bourgeois democracy. The first result of this was that they allowed the moderate Basque Nationalist Party (PNV) to regain its position as the main Basque party parliamentary democracy. The PNV was absent from the struggle against Franco dictatorship in which revolutionary nationalists played the leading role. The Basque moderates
The rise to dominance of the PNV was accompanied by a growing marginalization of the fighting national movement on all fronts. The dedicated teachers of Basque were pushed aside in favor "professionals. The volunteer language and cultural organizations found themvastly greater resources. ticipation in the neighborhood committees and local governments faded away as bourgeois parliamentary "normalcy" was
"Unified Basque" that came out of the radical cultural movement, a Basque that could means of expression for a whole society, came under attack. The PNV favored recognizing a whole gamut of understood only in limited local
At the same time, the rise of the SP assault on all forms of Basque nationalism that combined the continuing repression ad the unreconstructed Francoist police
Viewpoint October 15, 1984
Labour Party. past. On the other hand, he said, the LKI found that these issues were precisely the most political ones that could be raised context of local government. "We argue that culture is a right," he said, "not a luxury." War of the flags
In the summer of 1983, for the first time, the SP government attacked the right of the Basques to display their national flag as they chose, something that not even the preceding right-wing government had dared to do. It was the beginning of the War of the Flags, which continued this past summer. attempted to make it illegal to display the Basque flag during the summer fiestas without the Spanish state flag.
In Ondarroa in particular last summer I saw very militant demonstrations against the Spanish flag. They were very popular in composition and quite reminiscent of Republican demonstrations in Belfast.
Similar incidents took place in San
Inaki Sarasketa, a former guderi (soldier of ETA) sentenced to death in the 1970s and a veteran member of the LKI, had this interpretation:
"The military and the Alianza Popular, the main bourgeois party, are putting more and more pressure on the PSOE. When the bourgeois parties were in power not dare do what the PSOE is doing now. So, from the bourgeois standpoint, pressuring is the perfect tactic. They don't have to get their hands dirty, and these Social Democratic idiots are solving their problems for them. they are digging their own grave as well."
thought, moreover, lot of the SP's vote in the Basque country came in fact from the bourgeois right.
"The, centralist bourgeoisie has very little political in the Basque country. So, since it had no chance of getting a presentable vote, it preferred to back a centralist, Spanish nationalist Socialist Party so that it could play the repressive role, so that it could carry out the same Spanish nationalist policy that they would."
In France, at the start, the revived Socialist Party played to the sentiment for more self-expression among the small nationalities incorporated into the French
Their votes were among those that put it in power in 1981. But it has now betrayed their hopes, and sealed its compact with the right by offering the blood
The rightist Quotidien
Socialistes jettent le Basque, " "The Socialists throw out the Basques, " which was a pun on a phrase that means that they "took off the mask."
In both France and Spain, the attempt by the Social Democrats' governments to nail the Basque national movement to the cross in the name of "democracy" is only one aspect of their compact with the right. But it is perhaps the most obviously scandalous. In the Paris daily Liberation, for example, the editor, Serge July, pointed out that the crimes with which the extradited nationalists are charged occurred before what Mitterrand's premier, Fabius, calls a "democratic" government came to power, that is, under the direct heirs of Franco. The SPs are, therefore, trying to settle accounts for the right.
The Basque revolutionary nationalist movement, a leading revolutionary force in the world for two decades, is now fac ing a much more dangerous attack than dictatorship was capable of.
On the other hand, the mass response to this betrayal and unholy alliance is opening up an opportunity for the revolutionary nationalist movement to regain the ground it lost in the late 1970s and make a new advance. By its very nature, this attack has also to be directed against the PNV. In fact, it has been accompanied by statements of government representatives decrying the PNV's "contradictions," since it has been forced by its own base to oppose the extradictions.
The signs of strain in the PNV are reminiscent, in an incipient way, of the cracks in the Catholic moderate party in the North of Ireland that appeared when the movement in support of the H-Block prisoners was on the rise. This mass united front put the revolutionary nationalists in the North of Ireland in a position to contend for the political support of the majority of the oppressed population for the first time.
Moreover, the Basque national movement does not yet face any mass social opposition in its own area. The SP government has offered the powerful Basque working class nothing. And the extent of the support that HB has already won among immigrant workers indicates that there is the possibility for winning these workers to a fighting alternative.
The LKI paper Zutik has reported that the protests against the extraditions have led to the broadest united front campaign in the Basque country since 1977. The Basque national movement •has obviously come to a crossroads. At this point solidarity in the other parts of the Spanish state and internationally is extremely important. A very broad campaign is necessary to expose the "democratic" repression of Mitterrand and Gonzalez and burn the claws off the Social Democratic cat's paws of the
5
BRITAIN.
and made it subject to a ballot conducted under the full pressure of the media rebuff by delegates was a major blow to
Kinnock's efforts to roll back the gains made by the party's left wing in the last