The arrest of an alleged Eta leader this week is a coup for the Spanish authorities, but peace in the Basque country remains elusive, writes PADDY WOODWORTH
THE SPANISH government has been commendably cautious in its response to the arrest earlier this week of the man who is alleged to be both the military and political leader of the Basque terrorist group Eta.
"The 'end of Eta' is a prospect we cannot put on the table at the moment," the interior minister, Alfredo Peréz Rubalcava, told reporters on Tuesday. He went on to warn that the apparent weakness of Eta following this latest blow to its leadership might make the organisation even more dangerous in the short term.
Miguel de Garikoitz Aspiazu Rubina, aka Txeroki ("Cherokee"), was captured in a small French Pyrenean village near Lourdes in the early hours of Monday morning. The police claim they found two pistols in his rented apartment, along with two laptops and six USB keys with compromising information - and 100 grammes of hashish. That latter stash is a curious detail, given that Eta has taken a ruthlessly hard line against drug use by young Basques, on the grounds that getting high stops them from getting militant. Rubalcava could not resist a comment on the "double morality" of the alleged Eta leader, before adding that the pistols were indeed rather more significant than the marijuana.
Aspiazu should of course be regarded as innocent unless and until charges against him are proved in court. Those charges will probably include shooting two Spanish guardias civileson French soil last year, as well as killing a Spanish judge near Bilbao in 2001. French and Spanish intelligence sources claim he has been the commander of Eta's military units since 2003. They say he became political leader as well when his predecessor in that role, Francisco Javier López Peña aka Thierry, was arrested last May.
Information from these sources should always be treated with some scepticism. It may be generated as black propaganda, or simply express the tendency of police forces to exaggerate the significance of their achievements. And it should also be noted that Eta has probably learned the lesson of its near-collapse in the early 1990s, when its entire leadership was arrested, and that the command structure is now more diversified than the police and Spanish media generally acknowledge. So Aspiazu's detention may not have damaged Eta as much as first reports suggested.
But there is no doubt that Aspiazu, with his penetrating gaze, crooked fringe, mullet haircut and conspicuous earring - for some reason de rigueurfor Basque radicals of either sex - had become an icon for those young militants who opposed the 2006/2007 Eta ceasefire.
It is widely believed that Aspiazu and López Pena had successfully undermined both José Antonio Urrutikoetxea aka Josu Ternera, a veteran Eta leader, and Arnaldo Otegi, leader of the banned pro-independence party Batasuna. Both these men had appeared willing to compromise on key issues during peace talks in early 2006, but when López Peña replaced Urrutikoetxea at a secret meeting with the government, his unrealistic agenda dashed hopes of agreement.
This pattern, where hardline militants upstage wiser counsel in the Basque pro-independence movement, repeats a sorry pattern from failed negotiations in the 1980s and the 1990s. As the saying goes, when there is a debate in Eta between the pistols and politics, the pistols always win. Unlike the IRA, Eta has never produced a united leadership committed to serious negotiations, which would have to involve sacrifices of core principles if they were to succeed.
So the Spanish government's policy at present is based on military defeat of Eta, using all the security and judicial weapons at its disposal. José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero's Socialist Party (PSOE) administration got its fingers badly burned by launching a peace process which was deeply unpopular with conservative Spaniards. Since that process collapsed, it now firmly rules out any prospect of a negotiated settlement.
This week the interior minister's tone was broadly optimistic. "We are completely on top of Eta, they are going to feel the pressure more and more," Rubalcava said on Wednesday.
ON THE FACE of it, the statistics, grim as they are, seem to justify his confidence on the security front. Since its last ceasefire ended in May last year, Eta has killed seven people. Following the end of the previous ceasefire in 1999, there were 33 victims in 12 months.
The horrible fact is, however, that had any of several botched attacks in this last year been successful, those figures would be much higher. The real question is whether the government strategy will actually bring the end of Eta's terrorism nearer, or help prolong it for another generation. There are particular concerns that the so-called "judicial offensive", which employs draconian powers to ban radical political parties and NGOs and imprison their members, may backfire, giving valuable ammunition to Eta's propaganda machine.
One expert, who cannot be identified, but who has worked as a highly respected professional mediator in peace processes from Cambodia to Northern Ireland, told me he has grave doubts, both about the government strategy and about Eta's capacity to enter serious negotiations.
"We agree that Eta can be quelled for a couple of years," he says, "but then the movement could rise up again. It will take time. We'll probably be looking at another generation of politicians by then."
I found his analysis echoed again and again on a recent visit to the Basque country. There is a daunting sense of Groundhog Day, of an endless cycle of violence which no one has the courage or imagination to break. While recognising that Eta's terrorism is unjustified, many democratic Basques still feel that Madrid's refusal to consider some form of self-determination for the region underpins the conflict. And many express grave concern about the human rights implications of the "judicial offensive".
"There can be no immunity for the very serious human rights abuses committed by Eta," says Andres Krakenberger, the co-ordinator of Amnesty International in the Basque country and Navarre. "But human rights abuses committed by the security forces must also be investigated." Torture by the security forces, he says, is not "systematic", as Eta suspects claim, but it is "persistent".
He introduced me to Sabino Ormazabal, who told a story which should raise serious concerns in any democracy. Ormazabal has been found guilty in the long-running "18/98" super-trial against Basque radicals allegedly associated with Eta. He was sentenced to nine years in prison and a heavy fine for collaborating with terrorists. He claims, however, to be a pacifist and to have written articles condemning attacks by Eta since 1991. The evidence against him and several of his co-defendants seems, on face value, to be extremely tenuous. It is based on a kind of extended principle of guilt by association, linking a civil disobedience discussion in which he participated to statements by Eta along similar lines. He has appealed his sentence to the supreme court.
"Eta should have abandoned armed struggle long ago," he said. "Eta has become the excuse for this to happen. But when the judiciary casts such a wide net against Eta, they are bound to catch people who have nothing to do with violence."