In Europe

one speak here of the classic drama of a forgotten ethnic group divided by the relative capriciousness of a national border, doomed foreverwithin the Spanish nation to play the role of ‘national minority’? Is this where the old conflict between ‘national’ and ‘people’ rears its head, marked by the same wounds as those borne by the Hungarians, the Laps, the Frisians, the Welsh, the Scots, the Irish and all those smaller European peoples who woke up one day to find that, for whatever reason, they had ended up behind the wrong dotted line on the map of Europe? In some ways, yes; in other ways, no. Historically speaking, one has never been able to speak of ‘the Basque provinces’ rising in unison against France or Spain. The inter-regional conflicts were at least as serious, and every bit as numerous. Almost all of the great conflicts, including the Spanish Civil War, were also internal Basque wars. Ethnically speaking, it is equally tenuous to speak of ‘the Basques’: due to waves of migration, particularly those of the last fifty years, the Basque Country has become an ethnic potpourri in which one can recognise the ‘real’ Basques at best by their Basque surnames. Basque nationalism, therefore, bears telltale signs of a last-ditch movement: too late, too weak, dreaming of a country that never existed and that probably never can or will exist.
    None of this detracts from the fact that the Spanish nation is faced with a problem. During the final decades of the twentieth century, ETA – second only to the IRA – were responsible for the most victims of terror in all Europe: some 800 in all. (By way of comparison: the Italian Brigate Rosse killed approximately 400 people in the 1970s, the German Rote Armee Fraktion killed 28.) What is more, the group is not isolated, its supporters are numerous, and even the pacifist nationalists are prepared to hitch a convenient ride with ETA's ‘successes’.
    The result is a painful, extremely complicated situation that no government can safely ignore. The legitimacy of any democratic state is called into question when it has such a militant separatist movement operating within its territory. Any sensible government will then do all it can to negotiate longer-term solutions. That is what Charles de Gaulle did with the terrorists of the OAS, and what the British have done with the IRA. One does not seek terms of peace with the people one likes, but with one's enemies.
    For years, Spain ignored that rule of thumb. It wanted to be a modern, forceful nation, with its pronouncedly autonomous regions, but deep down, the Spanish mentality still seemed to bear the mark of feudalism.Seemed, I say, because this apparent brutality may be the product of fear, of the feeling that the country will fall apart once the final bonds are cut. The process of nation-forming, which every country in Europe has gone through at some point, has in a certain sense never been completed here. Madrid is Madrid, Catalonia is Catalonia, and the Basque Country is the Basque Country.
    A similar internal confusion can also be noted within ETA. Bit by bit, one sees that there are almost more attacks carried out in the Basque Country and against Basques themselves than against Spanish targets. Some authors therefore conclude that the Basque conflict is no longer one between Spain and the Basque Country, but between the Basques themselves, based on the question: to which fatherland do we belong, anyway?
    In the museum at Guernica hangs a page from the
Heraldo de Aragón
, a daily newspaper sympathetic to Franco, dated 30 April, 1937: ‘After heavy fighting our troops took Guernica, where our soldiers were dismayed to find entire neighbourhoods destroyed by the Reds.’ The
Diario de Burgos
of 4 May, 1937 bore the headline: ‘The horror of Guernica, the work of Red arsonists’. In the late 1960s, when a German bomb was found in the mud, soldiers quickly cordoned off the area and the bomb was never heard of again. That bomb was not supposed to be there.
    ‘Right after the bombardment, my mother ran into one of Franco's officers,’ Asunción Garmendia told me. ‘“Who destroyed Guernica?” he growled at her. She acted as though she had not seen a thing. “The Reds did it, the Reds, you know that!”’ Asunción's mother said nothing. She carried the key to their bombed-out house in the pocket of her apron until the day she died.
    These days Asunción is a professional survivor of the