"We have to isolate the violent elements and their followers who live among us. We should not salute anyone we see with Egin [a newspaper] under their arms. We should boycott their businesses."
Egin is close, as it is put in Ireland, to the thinking of the Basque terrorist group ETA. This quotation comes from a series of anonymous pamphlets scattered in the picturesque streets of Hondarribia (Fuenterrabia), a prosperous village in the "elbow" of the Bay of Biscay.
The pamphlets represent a radical reversal. They are a response to ETA supporters who have attempted to impose such boycotts on "Madrid" newspapers in recent years. But the revulsion provoked by ETA's cold-blooded murder of Miguel Angel Blanco last July has turned many things upside down here.
Some of the language in these pamphlets has the ugly whiff of the Inquisition. Among their targets is the village bookshop, run by two elderly women who are known not to support ETA but who do, like most newsagents in the region, sell Egin and some "radical" books.
Intolerance has many faces. One of the sorriest campaigns by ETA supporters has been the repeated vandalising of a fine bookshop in nearby San Sebastian, run by veterans of the antiFranco movement who have been equally courageous in opposing ETA's terrorism. Ironically, being pluralists and democrats, they still sell many of the same radical books for which the village bookshop is being vilified.
Apart from the sheer nastiness of a tit-for-tat social and economic boycott campaign, it is undoubtedly counter-productive from a democratic point of view. It only confirms ETA supporters' perception that they live intolerable oppression.
So far, the pamphleteers are not making a serious economic impact, though they signal a new social atmosphere. Much more significant is the abiding shift in the political climate on the streets.
For years, "people-power" had been monopolised by the broadly pro-ETA coalition, Herri Batasuna (HB). The turnout of many tens of thousands of people in protest against ETA's killing of a Basque policeman at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao two weeks ago shows much of the momentum of the Blanco protests was maintained. Before Blanco's death, anti-ETA protests were much smaller.
The following morning, a couple of hundred people demonstrated on the same streets for the not unreasonable demand that ETA prisoners should be held in jails in their own region. They looked uncertain and demoralised, and the contained hostility of many passers-by was palpable. The relatives' demand may be fair in itself - they now have to travel many hundreds of miles to visit their sons and daughters - but few people will ever forget that ETA shot Blanco in the back of the neck in pursuit of the same claim.
Yet no one should imagine that the "Basque problem" is resolved, and that ETA will fade away. Ambiguities abound. A nationalist who has publicly opposed ETA at some personal cost told me he would be demonstrating with the relatives tomorrow if his own son was in prison. The pendulum has swung very far one way in the last three months, but it could swing right back again.
The issue currently most likely to provoke a pro-ETA backlash is an unprecedented court case now taking place in Madrid. The entire central committee of Herri Batasuna is facing years of imprisonment on charges of "collaboration with terrorism", largely because it tried to broadcast a video expounding ETA's so-called "Democratic Alternative". No doubt because of the Blanco factor, there has been remarkably little mobilisation in their support in the Basque country so far. But the jailing of 22 political leaders could still strike another spark in the tinderbox in the next couple of weeks, boosting ETA.
This may explain why a seemingly extraordinary initiative was taken in the historically symbolic Basque town of Guernica 10 days ago. It was organised by ELA, the moderate nationalist trade union to which, as it happens, the last ETA victim belonged. On the 18th anniversary of the autonomy statute which gave the Basques extensive selfgovernment within Spain, ELA invited all nationalist groupings, including Herri Batasuna, to the launch of a purely non-violent campaign to replace the statute with full Basque self-determination.
Many observers were horrified to see HB leaders, who have been ostracised politically since Blanco's death, shaking the hands of constitutional nationalists. The campaign itself is naturally deplored by antinationalists. But, by leading HB on to a democratic platform where ETA was repeatedly told it was an obstacle to progress, ELA might claim to have brought the radicals in, while leaving the terrorists outside.
It is a high-risk strategy, but anything that moves in a new direction in a land long caught in very vicious circles deserves close attention.