Ghosts of Spain Page 34

  Spanish literature has provided us with the greatest honourable fool of all times. Don Quixote de La Mancha, that ‘light and mirror of all knight-errantry’ who is now 400 years old, was a man obsessed by ‘the grievances he proposed to redress, the wrongs he intended to rectify, the exorbitance to correct, the abuses to reform, and the debts to discharge’.

  Aznar, with his willingness to get into a fight and refusal to budge on matters he perceived to be of honour, had more than a few Quixotic characteristics himself. The temptation to draw parallels between Don Quixote turning windmills into giants and Aznar, after the Madrid bombings, turning Al-Qaida into ETA are almost irresistible, though there is nothing humorous about the latter. Don Quixote was deaf to Sancho Panza’s warnings before he charged the windmills. ‘One may easily see that you are not versed in the business of adventures: they are giants; and, if you are afraid, get aside and pray, whilst I engage them in a fierce and unequal combat,’ he said before charging at them and being knocked cold by a windmill sail.

  Aznar’s faithful steed was not a horse called Rocinante, but a government apparatus run on presidential lines. It gave him the results he wanted. Where he was going to see ETA, it too had trained itself to see ETA. That particular trick was not new. British and American intelligence has done the same thing in Iraq, ‘seeing’ weapons of mass destruction that politicians insisted must be there – when they were not.

  Aznar had already outdone both Bush and Blair in his assurances that the weapons existed. His stance then could also have been mouthed by the knight-errant of La Mancha. ‘What I say is true, and you will see it presently,’ Don Quixote said when convinced that a group of monks were really wicked enchanters. That was also the Aznar approach to the 11-M bombings.

  The train bombing story did not end on 14 March. For the bombers had not gone away. Its final chapter was written four weeks later. By that stage the bombers had shown signs of being active once more. An attempt had been made to blow up a high-speed train on its way to Seville. A second failed attempt targeted the high-speed line to Zaragoza.

  But police were getting closer. Eventually the bombers were discovered in the dormitory town of Leganés. Police surrounded their apartment. A gun battle started. Then a special-operations squad was called in to storm the place. It was greeted by a huge explosion that blew out the walls of the apartment building, killing a police officer. The seven men inside had stood in a circle and exploded their remaining dynamite. Their bodies – or body bits – were scattered amongst the ruins. One had to be fished out of the building’s communal swimming pool. Seven corpses were eventually identified.

  One belonged to an Allekama Lamari, a violent Islamist who had been mistakenly released from jail because of a bureaucratic mix-up between Spain’s two senior courts, the National Court and the Supreme Court. Communications between the two courts had, apparently, broken down – though they are barely 100 metres apart. The other bombers were a mixture of petty crooks, drug dealers and pious university graduates.

  The profile of the Madrid bombers was depressingly low-life. They were freelance radicals, only loosely linked to Al-Qaida, but determined to follow the exhortations of Osama bin Laden.

  The gang had a rural hideaway. It was a one-storey house in the countryside outside the town of Chinchón, just twenty-five miles from the capital. The bombers had held a barbecue party at their little retreat a couple of weeks after the Madrid bombings. They had stored their dynamite here and activated the mobile phones that would set them off. Neighbours remembered one of them, a hashish trafficker called Jamal Ahmidan, because he rode motorbikes and would appear with a couple of Spanish girls who had tattoos and piercings.

  Spain, despite Aznar’s obsession with ETA terrorism, turned out to have a lively black market in Goma 2 and other explosives used in the mining industry of the northern Asturias region. Here, it seems, police missed warnings about the traffickers. The dynamite was reportedly paid for with just 6,000 euros and a quantity of Moroccan hashish.

  ‘It turns out that all this was done by a handful of petty crooks who were also police informers, but that police did not have the faintest idea of what was going on,’ commentator Victoria Prego wrote in El Mundo newspaper. ‘The judges must now reveal … the full degree of ham-fistedness and carelessness that we are discovering.’

  Aznar’s government, obsessed by ETA but rattling the Islamist cage with its vocal support for war in Iraq, had been looking the wrong way.

  A parliamentary inquiry was set up. The politicians, however, were more interested in rowing about whether the government had lied or whether the Socialists had brought protesters out onto the street than what had gone wrong. Newspaper editors, even foreign correspondents, were, initially, placed on the list of witnesses to be quizzed. One morning I opened El País to find that I myself had been called as a witness – though the commission members later cancelled all the journalists.

  The inquiry became a laughing stock. Political witnesses competed with one another to see how long they could go without stopping, even to eat. Acebes and Aznar both did more than ten hours. Zapatero lasted almost fifteen.

  The inquiry was evidence of the divided Spain inherited from the Aznar years. The People’s Party sat in one corner uselessly clinging to the idea that ETA must have had something to do with it. The rest – the left and the regional nationalists or separatists – tried to prove that Aznar had deliberately and knowingly lied. Aznar, in the commission, gave wind to the conspiracy theories. He talked about connections between ETA and Islamists. The ‘intellectual authors’, he added mysteriously, were ‘not in remote deserts or far-off mountains’.

  Zapatero, in turn, claimed Aznar had orchestrated ‘a massive deceit’. Both theories are now engraved in stone on each side’s version of events. ‘The political wounds from March 11 are so deep that we may have to wait a generation for them to heal,’ El Mundo columnist Lucía Méndez concluded. The commission of inquiry itself split along the now depressingly familiar lines of the Two Spains when drawing up conclusions. It blamed Aznar for ‘manipulating’ and ‘twisting’ the truth. The People’s Party representatives voted against. The contrast with the US Joint Inquiry report into the September 11 attacks made the whole affair seem even more shameful.

  The victims and their families, meanwhile, looked on in absolute alarm and disgust. Pilar Manjón, who lost her nineteen-year-old student son on one of the trains, accused the inquiry members of behaving like kids in a school playground. The victims, she told them, had become a political football for them to kick around. ‘What have you been laughing at? Who are you trying to cheer on? What victories are you celebrating?’ she asked.

  It took a while for the technicians to repair a videotape found amongst the rubble where the seven bombers had blown themselves up in Leganés. When the tape was finally ready, investigators heard a name some may have recalled from school history lessons.

  ‘The brigades that are in Al Andalus … will continue our jihad until martyrdom in the land of Tarik Bin Ziyad,’ the three heavily armed, white-robed figures threatened in one of the undamaged segments. This was none other than the Berber who had sailed his troops across the Straits of Gibraltar in 711. ‘Remember the Spanish crusade against the Muslims, the expulsion from Al Andalus and the tribunals of the Inquisition,’ the bombers added, claiming Spain was Muslim by right and Christian only by force. They, like bin Laden and Aznar, saw an age-old conflict simply entering its newest phase.

  Spain now has several hundred thousand Muslim immigrants. Many work in the intensive, plastic-tented vegetable plantations of Almería, in the south-east. There, the joint head of Spain’s Islamic Commission, Spanish convert Mansur Escudero, told me that ordinary Muslims thought of Al Andalus as history.

  ‘To argue that this country is impious and in need of a Muslim Reconquista is barbarous,’ he said. The half-dozen Moroccans who stepped out from midday prayer at the Al Tawba mosque, a one-room outfit at Vícar, near Almería, pointe
d out that Al Andalus had a reputation for religious and ethnic tolerance. ‘Al Andalus was a common project between Christians, Muslims and Jews,’ they said.

  Bin Laden would not agree. Nor would Aznar.

  The arrival of Islamist terrorism, however, seemed to bring an unexpected bonus. For the Islamists may have sealed the fate of Spain’s home-grown terrorists, the Basque separatists of ETA. Even the most radical separatists had claimed to be sickened by the 11 March train bombings. How could they now justify meting out more of the same? As this book goes to print an already weakened ETA is thought to be involved in a secret peace process. Even if it does stop killing, however, the scars ETA leaves behind will take generations to heal. In the meantime the Basque Country remains the supreme example of Spain’s longest-running and most intractable problem. Is it really a nation? Or is it several nations squeezed into one?

  10

  In the Shadow of the Serpent and the Axe

  It has the feel of a secret, slightly dangerous assignment – as if I was meeting someone from an underground, illegal movement. I have arranged to see Gotzone at the university, but I do not yet know where. Gotzone, when she is there, often has to hide. She is a lecturer, and has been in this faculty for almost thirty years, but that is no protection. I am to call her mobile phone before I set off. Her instructions, when we speak, are to get to the university and then call again. These are routine safety procedures, she explains. She does not want me to feel offended.

  The campus is a compact, ugly jumble of glass walls and concrete pillars on a hilltop outside Bilbao, the Basque Country’s biggest city. I sit on a raised circular dais in the atrium of the university library and call again. Gotzone tells me to wait. Someone will come and find me. A young man in black casual clothes hisses to me – that Spanish ‘tsss, tsss’ that means ‘look over here’ – from the top of the staircase. He crooks a finger. He is too smartly dressed, and is just a bit too old, to be a student. There is a bulge in his jacket, too, where a pistol sits. This is one of her bodyguards. I walk up the stairs and he signals me to follow. He looks carefully around as we walk off.

  I experience a sadly familiar, depressing feeling. I am back in the Basque Country. Once more I must talk to people about violence and fear. Why is it, three decades after democracy arrived, that this prosperous, northern patch of Spain is still stained by bloody hatreds? Domestic terrorism has, after all, almost disappeared from the rest of western Europe. It is early in 2005. I have been coming here as a journalist, on and off, for a dozen years. I am still, however, writing the same story. The axe and the serpent, symbols of the violent Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) – Basque Homeland and Freedom – separatist group cast a shadow almost wherever I go. Rumour has it that a peace process might be starting. I hope it does. But, for the moment, ETA would still like to kill Gotzone. And, even if peace does arrive, the damage done over three decades of violence is too large for it to be overcome instantly by a few signatures on a piece of paper. ETA, or the violent emotions that drive it, will be present for a long time to come. If it is not here in person, its spectre will be.

  We greet another bodyguard, who is standing in a corridor. He ushers me into one of the hundreds of nondescript offices dotted around the campus. Gotzone is in there with her cardboard boxes. ‘As I change offices, they come with me,’ she explains. Changing offices is part of her life.

  She currently has three offices. One is official, but her bodyguards do not let her go there too often. So there are two other secret ones as well, like this, in different departments. When she gives a lecture, however, everyone knows where she is – even with two bodyguards at the door.

  Gotzone Mora is small, with that neat, short haircut favoured by Basque women above a certain age. She wears frameless glasses over hazel eyes and has two solid gold earrings clamped to her lobes. Basques have more than double the normal incidence of the rhesus negative blood type. This is almost certainly a left-over – along with their remarkable language euskara – from their centuries as one of the most isolated groups in Europe. To me, however, the main physical aspect that differentiates some Basques from other Spaniards – apart from the women’s practical, sensibly short haircuts – are their noses. Gotzone has a fine version of what might be considered the typical Basque nose – large, proud and strong.

  Gotzone is hiding from western Europe’s last significant armed separatist group. As well as lecturing on sociology here at the University of the Basque Country, she is a local Socialist politician and an outspoken ETA critic. Documents found in one ETA member’s home revealed an elaborate plan to shoot her at the university. They contained the following commentary: ‘Gotzone Mora is so far-sighted that she would not see someone put a gun to her head.’ A bomb planted in the faculty lift a couple of years ago failed to go off. Police believe it was waiting for Gotzone or one of two other professors here who have been vocal in their denunciation of separatist violence. ‘They could have brought the whole place down,’ she says. Now she takes the stairs.

  An election campaign for the regional Basque assembly, which elects what is already one of the most autonomous regional governments in Europe, is on. ETA, it is said, has ordered its people to ‘put corpses on the negotiating table’, as it prepares for talks. Gotzone is a prime target. ‘I have been told the more time I spend outside the Basque Country, or even outside Spain, the better,’ she says. ‘The trick is to make sure that, if ETA finally stops, you are not the last one to be killed.’

  The locks to the door on her main office have had to be changed six times because the master-key keeps disappearing from the porters’ room. She suspects colleagues, or university employees, who support ETA and are either prepared to help them kill her or just want her to be frightened. When we visit it, she shows me a bookshelf that had been mysteriously moved from the wall a few days ago, before the latest lock-change. ‘We think they wanted to plant a bomb behind it,’ she said. She now has the only key.

  The high-pitched sound of a txistu (a Basque flute) and of drums floats up towards her temporary office. Somewhere on campus, she explains, there is a demonstration in favour of letting ETA members back to study – from their prison cells – on the university’s courses. It was a right they lost after Gotzone discovered that lecturers were being threatened by their jailed students. A colleague had received a letter from Idoia López Riaño, alias La Tigresa, The Tigress. La Tigresa, accused of twenty-three killings, has been in jail for a decade. ‘You know what to do if you do not want problems,’ the letter said, according to Gotzone. She meant, Gotzone explained, that he was expected to pass her at exam time. That would improve her job prospects when she got out.

  Gotzone tries to avoid walking past the regular demonstrations calling on the ETA prisoners – who can now study at Spain’s distance-learning university – to be let back. ‘¡Puta socialista, vete a España!’ ‘Socialist whore, go to Spain!’ they shout at her if she goes near them. One day she went to the bathroom and found ‘Gotzone Mora; ETA, mátala’ – ‘ETA, kill Gotzone Mora’ – graffitied on the wall.

  ‘The radicals are a minority, but they manage to spoil everything. Campus life is dead,’ she says. Later on I see the two musicians. They are grey-haired, red-cheeked men wearing large, black, floppy Basque berets. They are wandering around the campus, still playing. Music should be pleasure. Hearing it now, with Gotzone’s explanation, it sounds like menace. It reminds me of the Protestant Apprentice Boys on their marches through Catholic territory in Northern Ireland. Or am I just being infected by paranoia?

  As I walk beside Gotzone, I find I have to make an effort to stick close by her side. The natural thing to do is drift away. The chances of anything happening to her, here, with two bodyguards and ETA on what may – or may not – be its last legs, is minimal. But she carries the mark of the hunted. Instinctively, and ashamedly, I am uncomfortable beside her. I notice that other people on campus either blank her out or avoid her. ‘My neighbours at home complain. They worry that i
f my car is bombed, it might affect them,’ she says. The impact on her social life is also devastating: ‘People do not want to be seen out with me.’ Then there is her family. Her husband, a law lecturer, has been sidelined at the university, she claims. Friends say his health has been affected.

  I ask why she puts up with it. She explains that there have been political and trades union militants on both sides of her family. Spanish socialism had its first flowering right here, in and around Bilbao, in the 1890s. Dolores Ibarruri, the Basque communist firebrand known as La Pasionaria, once hid out in her family’s house. La Pasionaria’s most famous phrase was: ‘¡No pasarán!’, ‘They shall not pass!’ It was uttered during the Spanish Civil War and directed at Franco’s troops.

  ‘When I can’t stand it any more then I’ll just leave,’ Gotzone says. She would not be the first to go. There are no reliable figures but lecturers, politicians, journalists and businessmen – those on ETA’s list of targets – are amongst those who have fled. It amounts to a kind of intellectual cleansing, she says.

  Gotzone’s biggest complaints, however, are reserved for the Partido Nacionalista Vasco (PNV), the Basque Nationalist Party. If Basque society is neatly sliced into two halves – one that favours unity with Spain and one that tries continually to either weaken or break the tie – then the nacionalistas are the leading force against the latter. They have, through a variety of coalitions, controlled the Basque Country’s regional government for the quarter century since it was established. Since then, critics like Gotzone claim, the nationalists have set about moulding the Basque Country to their own desires.