Growing pressures in the Basque country IN JUST A FEW months major changes have occurred in the Basque country, which were reflected in the results of the November elections for the Basque autonomous parliament. The following article by a leader of the Fourth Internationalist organization in the part of the Basque country in the Spanish state, the Liga Komunista Iraultzailea (LKI •/ Revolutionary Communist League), takes stock of the new situation. IOCH RIKIT A tar attack on the Ministry of Defence!
These military actions were a stinging rebuff to a government that regularly boasts of having dismantled the revolutionary nationalist organization. They were no doubt greeted with sympathy in Euskadi itself, which is subjected to emergency, so-called anti-terrorist laws, and a veritable police occupation.
On the other hand, ETA's execution on September 10 of Maria Dolores Catarain, known as "Yoyes," a former leader of the armed organization who had accepted the government's offer of "rehabilitation," (1) caused profound social and emotional shock in Euskadi. (2)
Nonetheless, the HB's gains in these last elections show that the radical rejection of Spanish centralism and its institutions renresented hu FTA ic
JOSE BIKILA
One of the key developments in these last months was undoubtedly the split in the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV), which occurred shortly after the June 22, 1986, general elections. In this poll, the PNV lost 80,000 votes by comparison with the 1982 elections that put the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) in power in Madrid, and 150,000 votes by comparison with the February 1984 elections to the Basque autonomous parliament.
One explanation for this sharp setback has to be sought in the legislative pact the PNV signed with the PSOE branch in the Basque country in December 1984. This was correctly seen by the party's traditional voters as representing an alliance with Spanish centralists at the expense of the interests of the Basque people.
The new organization that emerged from the split, • Eusko Alkartuna (EA - Basque Solidarity), led by the former president of the Basque government, the "lendakari" Carlos Garaikoetxea, made a spectacular appearance on the electoral scene in the November election, getting 15.85% of the vote and 14 seats.
While the PNV remains the leading party in the Basque country, it now represents only 23.64% of the vote, as against 41.70% in 1984, and it has lost 15 seats. This party was founded 90 years ago by Sabino Arana, who is considered the father of Basque nationalism. In view of the weight it has exercised in Basque society, it is clear how major a development this was!
The second feature of these elections was evidently the advance of Herri Batasuna (HB — The People United), the public and legal expression of the armed organization Euskadi ta Askatasuna (ETA - Basque Homeland and Freedom). The latter consolidated the score it achieved in the June 1986 general elections, winning 14
231,000 votes, as against 210,000 in 1982, and electing five deputies and one senator.
It was on the basis of this increased political strength that HB launched a proposal for negotiations with the Spanish government in order to seek a political solution to the Basque crisis. Obviously, ETA would be an integral part of such negotiations.
This political offensive made a significant impact in the Basque country, as shown by the demonstration of support for it organized by HB on October 25, which brought out more than 25,000 people.
This success of this demonstration was all the more striking in view of the following two facts. On that very day, ETA assassinated the military governor of Guipuzkoa, Rafael Ganido Gil, right out in the open on a San Sebastian street, also killing his wife and his son and wounding 12 passers by. ETA military actions stepped up
On the same day, the PNV held another demonstration to protest against the kidnapping of one of its best known members, the industrialist Lucio Agerinagalde Aizpurua, who was seized by ETA to press demands for payment of the "revolutionary tax." But this demonstration brought out only 10,000 people.
In recent months, ETA has stepped up its military actions, showing that it could strike in the capital of the Spanish state itself. On July 14, it exploded a bomb in a Guardia Civil bus right in the heart of Madrid. And a week later, on July 21, ETA's "Spanish Command" launched a morits institutions represented by ETA is a factor in the Basque question. What is more, it would be wrong to think that this rejection is limited to the most radical strata. It should not be forgotten that in the referendum over Spain staying in NATO, Euskadi voted 65.17 per cent "no," a result that cannot be compared with that in any other part of the Spanish state.
Today, in Euskadi no party holds a majority. The PSOE's Pyrrhic victory has obliged it to try to negotiate with the PNV, for the moment without success. The crisis is continuing.
Imitating the expression of the Russian revolutionists about Czarist Russia, Claudio Maurin, a Catalan communist, the founder and leader of the Workers Party of Marxist Unity (POUM), called Spain a "prison house of peoples." (3)
One of the first Basque communists, Larranaga, wanted to find a proletarian internationalist answer both to the Spanish centralist right, which said that a "red Spain" was better than a "dismembered one," and to the nationalist right, which said "all Spaniards are anti-Basque, regardless of whether they are on the right or on the left."
Larranaga deliberately chose a
The rehabilitation operation consists of offering exiled or imprisoned ETA activists a chance to get out of prison or return to the country if they pledge to respect the law and renounce the armed struggle. It is an operation designed to break organized resistance at a time when the government says that it is unwilling to negotiate with ETA or grant the right to self-determination.
Nonetheless, HB got 23.79% of the vote in Yoyes own village, … in Urdizia, becoming the leading political organization in the locality.
3. The POUM, a Spanish revolutionary organization, was formed in 1934 out of a fusion of the Workers' and Peasants' Bloc led by Maurin and the Communist Left led by Andreu Nin, who was murdered by the Stalinists in 1937.
International Viewpoint 26 January 1987
provocative answer: "A red Spain would be a dismembered Spain, because a socialist revolution must put an end to the reactionary alliance of ruling classes that created a state oppressing workers and nations alike under its despotic yoke."
Both of these communists were right. The Spanish state is the product of the alliance of ruling classes, both those that grew out of feudal vestiges and those thrown up by the fitful first starts of capitalist development on this peninsula.
This alliance includes Basque big capital, which had an interest in the "Spanish national" market for its products and capital and in the protection it could get from the central government against financial or military powers regarded as foreign.
The longstanding backwardness of the Spanish economy closed off the possibility for a transition from the old power structures inherited from feudalism, which occurred in other European countries when national states were formed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centruries. Partly as a result of this, the weak Castilian bourgeoisie abandoned the idea of creating a nation state, either in the Jacobin centralist way of revolutionary France or through a federalist solution, which could have been achieved through a junction with the Catalan nation.
The Catalans had in fact a history and consciousness of their own, but also a national economic development more advanced than that of the Basques.
The result of the Castilian bourgeoisie's incapacity was reflected by the forced assimilation of various peoples, who found their special characteristics, their culture and their own institutions being liquidated in the name of a fictitious "Spanishness," an imperialist oppressor mystique.
The subsequent evolution of this state in the form of Francoist dictatorship violently aggravated this problem. After the end of the dictatorship, the setting up of autonomous authorities in 1979 by the bourgeois democratic state - reflecting the modernization of Spanish capitalism and its integration into the international capitalist market - did not eliminate the problem of national oppression.
The so-called national reconciliation, on which the post-Francoist transition has been based, has never existed in Euskadi, since the legitimacy of the Spanish nation and the institutions on which it is founded are challenged. Out of this denial of legitimacy to a Spanish nation has developed a distinct alternative conception, a consciousness of different natioghood.
The Basque working class has grown both out of waves of immigra. tion from other parts of the Spanish state and from the proletarianization of extensive layers of the original Basque population. In this complex and sometimes contradictory process, it been remolded in a way that at the moment is not reflected by a single identification with respect to its national consciousness.
This phenomenon is still more prominent in its political expressions. There are unions that justify their existence on the basis of the national question. (4) No radical changes after fall of dictatorship
Since the working class is at the center of the national question in Euskadi, its unity and class independence are linked to its taking a revolutionary position in favor of the emancipation of the Basque people, whose social and political vanguard it must aspire to become.
The so-called Spanish transition has aroused a deepgoing frustration among all those who saw the fall of the dictatorship as meaning radical social, economic and political changes. From the standpoint of the bourgeoisie, this operation was conducted in a masterly way. It is an object of admiration now to all the ruling classes that have to face the problem of carrying through a major political change, or a transition from dictatorship from parliamentary democracy.
But from the standpoint of the workers, of those fighting to end the manifold oppression of bourgeois mill society, the Spanish transition should serve as a lesson about the policy of the traditional working-class leaderships, and especially social democracy.
The PSOE has never understood anything about the national question. It has always regarded it as an irritant to be neutralized by political concessions. Today, it is shamelessly taking up the most rancid values of a bourgeois nationalism scarcely refurbished from the days of Francoism.
"The interest of Spain" proclaimed by the PSOE is nothing more than a bare-faced defence of the interests of the ruling class, of its rapaciousness both at home and abroad. This is shown both by the PSOE keeping Spain in NATO, its policy of austerity and its repression of the revolutionary Basque patriots.
In some respects, the PSOE has gone further than the Center Demo. cratic Union [UCD, which led the government that made the transition from Francoism] in its Spanish nationalist language, in attacking
Basque revolutionary nationalism and even in steadily cutting back the margin of autonomy previously granted to the bourgeois Basque nationalists. (5)
To understand what is happening in Euskadi, it has to be remembered that the Spanish constitution, the Carta Magna - which put the final stamp of legitimacy on the pact and consensus of all Spanish political forces with the system - was not approved in Euskadi, while it was adopted in the rest of the Spanish state by a "yes" vote of 59.4%.
At the time of the referendum to ratify this constitution on December 6, 1978, the PNV called for abstention, saying that this con stitution ignored "the historic rights of the Basque people." The left nationalist forces and the revolutionary communist forces called for voting "no." The results of the referendum were very clear - the Basque people rejected the constitution.
Shortly after this, revealing their basically weak-kneed character, despite occasional gestures of rebellion, the bourgeois nationalists and the moderate nationalist left, that is, the PNV and Euskadiko Ezquerra [EE — Basque left, a group originating in ETA that evolved to the right] concluded a regional autonomy pact with the central government within the limits of the constitution. (6) In so doing, they hoped to acquire a certain margin of maneuver in assigning and using the powers to be transferred from the central state.
Thus, the Gernika Statute of Autonomy, ratified by the October 25, 1979, reterendum, came into being, as the product of a post-constitutional pact between the UCD and the PNV. It was backed by the rest of the forces in parliament, but not by HB. This alliance gave its assent to the transfer of certain powers within the strict limits of the constitution.
The results of the recent trade. union elections in Euskadi are significant. LA-STUV (close to the PNV, moderate Basque nationalist) got 31.8%, as against 26.54% in 1982; the UGT (dominated by the PSOE) got 20.8%, as against 22.28%
1982; the Workers Commissions (in which the Communist Party has historically been the dominant force) got 17%, against 17.58%; and finally the LAB, (close to HB) got 10.4%, against 6.79% in 1982, which now gives it the right to participate in collective bargaining discussions.
The UCD is the party of Adolfo Suarez, the politician who carried out the transition after Franco's death in 1975 and signed the Moncloa Pact in 1977 with the PSOE and the Spanish Communist Party, the pact that sounded the death knell for hopes of radical changes in Spain.
Euskadiko Ezkerra (EE) was formed initially by former ETA activists, the "politico-military" wing, who abandon. ed the struggle. This organization has subsquently evolved more and more toward reformism, absorbing a large part of the Basque Communist Party.
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International Viewpoint 26 January 1987
The actual extent of these powers was to be determined by the vicissitudes of politics and the evolution in the relationship of forces between the central power and the Basque people. What cannot, however, vary because it is inscribed in this statute is acceptance of the Spanish state, the monarchy, the "indivisibility" of Spain -that is the denial of the Basque people's right to self-determination.
Coming to power in mid-1982, in the wake of the attempted • coup d'etat of February 23, 1981, by Tejero and Milans del Bosch, the PSOE began to take on the task of slowing down the extension of powers autonomous governments, interpreting the statute in a restrictive way. This centralist tightening up was to touch off a crisis within the PNV, which had pinned its strategic identity on the statute and on the development of autonomous authorities. Radical nationalism gains strength
The PNV staked its political future on the autonomy statute. For the PNV, the pact was a path that could lead to growing powers for the autonomous government. By following this course, it thought that at the same time it could head off any overly turbulent national awakening.
Unfortunately for the bourgeois nationalists, the history of the statute became a tormented one. The problems started right after it was signed, even though for some time the PNV was able to maneuver skillfully and thereby gained prestige among very broad • sections of the Basque population.
With the passage of the Basic Law on the Harmonization of the Autonomization of the Autonomous Authorities (LOAPA), the social democratic steamroller started to roll (7). The process of autonomy started to flag, along with the conviction that this transfer of powers could last for very long. Parallel to this, radical nationalism gained strenth, occupied more ground and appeared as leader of anti-centralist and nationalist resistance actions.
Malaise grew and sharpened in the PNV inasmuch as while it was showing itself incapable of responding to the centralist encroachments, it was also encountering frictions between contradictory political and economic interests engendered by the provisions of the statute itself.
The Historical Territories Law, which legitimizes the powers of the Basque government and the provin16 cial authorities, assumed its full importance. It was this law that determined the division of powers between the government of the Basque autonomous area and its component provinces. This brought on a split between the party and its representatives in the provincial authorities' apparatus and in that of the Basque autonomous government.
This gave rise to many political zig-zags and personal clashes and finally led to political paralysis leading finally to a split and the formation of the EA.
Nonetheless, it would be wrong to conclude from this that there are now two parties with two distinct political lines and occupying different political spaces. One of the features of both organizations, the PNV and EA, is that they have a very hard time putting forward distinctive strategic perspectives of their own, other than verbal clashes or votehustling rhetoric,
ETA was formed in 1960, during the dictatorship, in reaction against the paralysis and conservatisim of the PNV, which left the field open for a new young radical nationalism.
Rapidly, ETA's radical message and its forms of armed resistance came to be influenced by a working class that was very active in that period and put forward the whole range of social and political demands. This working class action made it possible for class-struggle tendencies to develop within ETA, some of which led to the splits. (8)
At the end of the dictatorship in 1975, ETA enjoyed an indisputable and deserved prestige, a broad social and political influence, although it was divided into several branches. The political transition that led to the dashing of the workers' aspirations enabled ETA, through continuing the armed struggle and at the same time creating political instruments such as the Patriotic Socialist Coordinating Committee (KAS) and HB, to organize and give political and electoral expression to the broad mass movement that followed it. (9)
With the ebb of the working class and its political atomization after 1977, the role that ETA played, not only in the national but also in social and political resistance, increased.
Today, around ETA we find a mass current that upholds radical positions of opposition to the present constitutional process, which has experience in social, environmentalist and workers' struggles and which exercises a strong power of attraction for vanguard activists of various origins.
Of course, the resistance to centralism is not limited to HB and ETA. There are revolutionary communist working-class organizations such as our party, the Liga Kommunista Iraultzailea and the Communist Movement of Euskadi (EMK). (10) There are also social movements that have arisen out of the fight against women's oppression, the struggle against NATO and the working-class opposition to the bosses' plans for restructuring.
However, it is an objective fact that HB forms the basic backbone of nationalist resistance. The same phenomenon operates on the electoral level, where HB represents the resistance to the system, a practical option for casting an effective radical vote.
Another question seems important. All the forces in the regime accuse ETA and HB of lacking any mandate to be the standard-bearer of the "Basque people's interests" and to use methods of struggle - armed struggle, among others - that they consider incompatible with democratic conditions. As we all know, democracy must be based on dialogue and the rules of democratic behavior, of which of course only the ruling bourgeoisie is the judge! This charge has no validity from the standpoint of elementary democracy.
The facts that the constitution was not ratified in Euskadi and that the Autonomy Statute was presented as "a first step toward progress" remove all doubt about the legitimacy of the struggle for the right of self-determination. The debate then has to be over the political means to be employed.
Furthermore, it is absurd to claim that ETA is unrepresentative. Everyone knows that it is the spearhead of a mass current that can carry out successful general strikes when necessary, as it did at the time of the murder of Santi Bruouard, an HB leader; as well as after murder of Zabalza, who "disappeared" while in the hands of the Guardia Civil. It is the third largest electoral force in Euskadi, and with the crisis of the PNV it is certainly the biggest in some
Under the pretext of "levelling out" the various autonomous authorities, this law, passed in 1982, was designed to reduce the powers of the Basque and Catalan autonomous governments. It was clearly a concession to the cle attempt to sessi them that are ed ages, armed forces of the February 21 attempted coup had been understood.
8. The result of one of these splits, the one in 1970, was ETA-VI, which later fused with the Liga Comunista Revolucionaria (the section of the Fourth International in the Spanish state) to form the Liga Komunista Iraultzailea (Revolutionary Communist League), our party.
9. The KAS is a political program that HB put forwara in that election. Its three most important points are the following: self-determination, reinclusion of the province of Navarra in the Basque area, and amnesty.
10. The Spanish Communist Move.
International Viewpoint 26 January 1987
Basque provinces.
However, above all, ETA is a genuine political-military force, to some extent a counterpower. With its armed capacity, it combines mass actions and electoral campaigns, thereby gaining a far greater weight than would be indicated by each of its activities taken separately.
All of this makes ETA a rare phenomenon in Europe, one that presents similarities with the IRA. It has nothing to do with the typical terrorism of small armed groups -such as the Red Brigades in Italy or the Red Army Faction in West Germany - that have attempted to apply tactics of urban guerrilla warfare in the hope of having an impact on social resistance movements, or of becoming catalysts.
Organizations anchored in processes of national and social liberation - in the case of Europe, in Euskadi and Ireland - have managed to root themselves in a complex process combining manifold forms of resistance, including armed resistance. Sentimental and social ties have formed that create a special consciousness.
It is no accident that for the thousands of people who support ETA the activists of the Basque organization are seen as gudariak, Basque soldiers continuing the fight that their forbears waged in 1936, and successors as well of those who in their own way, even if it was wrong, defended Basque liberties during the Carlist wars. (11) This is a whole melange of patriotic traditionalism and anti-capitalist revolutionary ideas, incomprehensible if viewed through the narrow spectacles of prejudgements. But they constitute an original revolutionary experience, if communists can understand its potential and introduce their own point of view into this general process of national and social liberation. For us in Euskadi, this is at once a challenge and a hope.
I already pointed out that the present situation is characterized not only by the forms of bourgeois centralist aggression and the role of revolutionary nationalism but also the working class losing its social and political leading role. The Basque working class has been pushed back into its strongholds of resistance, having dissipated its strength by relying on a vote for parties that offer less and less of an alternative. (This of course is not true of those workers who vote for HB on their own or in response to the appeals of revolutionists.)
It is in the context of this resistance struggle precisely that some of ETA's strategic limitations show up most clearly, in particular certain tendencies to put military considera-
International Viewpoint 26 January tions above political ones. This is particularly striking when the question arises of the relations, both inside and outside of Euskadi, between the Basque revolutionary nationalist organization and strata of the population that are not in principle either for or against negotiations. Every time ETA carries out attacks that are hard to understand or provoke negative reactions, such layers become vulnerable to government manipula tion.
The execution of Yoyes was a typical military response to a delicate and complicated problem - how to combat politically the lure of "rehabilitation'? Moreover, the assassination of the military governor of Guipuzkoa on the very day when HB had called for a demonstration for negotiations favored the development of a psychological climate that threatened to reduce the size of the demonstration. Basque people need solidarity
In fact, a whole series of specifi eatures of ETA's ideology impe it to subordinate the needs of social struggles to its military strategy. It is this subordination that is the fundamental problem, not any so-called substitutionism for mass action, because ETA has always sought to mobilize the masses, in which it has a compelling interest.
Today still, as in the dark days of Francoism, the Basque people need solidarity. Some 500 Basque militants are in the prisons of "Spanish democracy." The refugees in France face a desperate situation. Stepping into the breach opened up by the French Socialist Party when it was in power, the right-wing Chirac government is trying to expel all the refugees from northern Euskadi (wrongly called the French Basque country by some) and from French territory in general.
The refugees are being expelled to Africa, to Latin America, where more than one has been interrogated by the Spanish police, and above all extradited them to the Spanish state. Following a plan drawn up long ago, the Spanish government treated the first refugees to be extradicted well. It even made a show of relatively fair trials and released some unimportant prisoners in order to show that human rights would be respected. But now this policy is over.
Today nobody is getting out of prison. Being brought before a judge is a mere formality. And all the prisoners without exception are suffering ill-treatment, if not torture. One 1987 of the last to be extradicted, Augustin Azkarate, told the judge that he was "on the brink of death during his interrogation." In view of his lamentable physical state, the judge ordered his transfer to the prison hospital. At first, the police tried to prevent this but they were finally forced by the judge's insistence to accept it.
Torture, this violation of the most elementary rights of the person, is common in the Spanish jails. It is, moreover, creating a lot of tensions among the Basque population and the majority of Basque judges. (12) The latter are faced with this reality every day and cannot avoid it.
One of the most recent conflicts was over the fact that Judge Elisabet Huertas noted that the Guardia Civil command was obstructing an inquiry into a complaint of torture lodged by the father of a Basque refugee. The judge then resorted to citing 60 members of the Guardia Civil. This challenge touched off a resounding scandal in police circles. The colonel in command of the Guardia Civil, the minister of the interior and the minister of justice all sought to get the judge's order quashed. This attitude aroused the unanimous opposition of the judges, who saw it as a violation of the independence of the judiciary.
The government responded by pushing through a bill that limited the powers of the regular courts by creating a special tribunal for the forces of order. This law is deemed unconstitutional by the Basque autonomous government.
Such is the real face of the "democracy" offered by a government that enjoys the support of all the European bourgeoisies. It is important that the working people of Europe understand that this government is loathed by many thousands of Basques because of its undemocratic character. For the majority of the Basque people, it is suspect, because if it represents anything, it is only state centralism and certainly not the Basque people. D ment's organization in the Basque Country. Our comrades of the ICR have consistent relations with this organization in the rest of the Spanish state.
11. The Carlist wars were nineteenth century civil wars, waged with particular persistence and violence in the Basque country, in opposition to modernization of the Spanish state. An aspect was the defence of local particularisms accepted within the feudal system but unacceptable to those who wanted to build a state on the model of the bourgeois nation states. - IV.
12. The demonstration for negotia. tions was initially banned by the civil government of the province of Vizkaya. HB opposed the ban, and the judge concerned granted its petition, arguing that this ban was in violation of freedom of expression. This case was interpreted as a new clash between the executive and judicial branches over the Basque country.
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