1. Sally Buzbee, “Nations Debate Who Terrorists Are,” Associated Press, 23 September 2001.William S. Shepard, an attorney and retired U.S. Foreign Service officer, served as national securityadviser to Senator Robert Dole from 1982 to 1983. From 1983 to 1985, he was U.S. consul general inBordeaux.The ETA: Spain Fights Europe’s Last Active Terrorist GroupWilliam S. ShepardOne week after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pen-tagon on 11 September 2001, President George W. Bush marshaled theAmerican people and allies of good will everywhere to a new course throughhis speech to Congress. In it, he resolutely condemned the attacks andpromised sustained retribution. “It will not end until every terrorist group ofglobal reach has been found, stopped, and defeated,” he announced.The world knows that he was speaking of Osama bin Laden and his alQaeda network, but shortly thereafter, media commentators posed the ques-tion whether all nations on the list that the United States says sponsor ter-rorism, including Iraq, Iran, Sudan, and Syria, were potential targets. Otherswondered whether all organizations that the United States has officially con-demned as terrorist, including Shining Path in Peru and the Basque EuskadiTa Askatasuna (ETA) in Spain and France, were included in the president’sannouncement.1The ETA had again been designated a foreign terroristorganization by the secretary of state on 5 October 2001.One way to move away from the terrorist label is to negotiate. It may becoincidental, but it struck me that on 26 September, just two weeks after theattacks, Palestinian chairman Yasser Arafat sat down for preliminary talkswith Israeli foreign minister Shimon Peres. Furthermore, at least one well-known group took quick pains to disassociate itself from America’s potentialShepard: The ETA: Spain Fights Europe’s Last Active Terrorist Group 55target list, as the Irish Republican Army (IRA) issued a statement on 20September condemning the 11 September attacks and announcing an inten-sification of its dialogue with the International Commission for the Disarma-ment of Northern Ireland.2The fact that the IRA’s announcement was fea-tured by the website of the Basque provincial government in northern Spainwas revealing, as the ETA is thought to have close links to the IRA and mayoccasionally follow its tactical lead.3It did not do so at this time, however. After a period of relative inactivityfollowing 11 September, the ETA hinted in late October that it would stopfighting if its maximum demand was met: that Spain must hold a vote onBasque independence. Prime Minister José Maria Aznar refused, saying thatthe 11 September attacks on the United States showed that it was “suicide”to deal with terrorists. “They must be defeated,” he said, “because the onlyaim of killers and fanatics is to kill and exclude those who don’t think asthey do.”4And so the stage was set for the violence to continue.It helps to personalize the developments in Spain. Otherwise one can becaught up in waves of revenge killings and the logic of retribution. Two inci-dents seem to have formed the brackets for the ETA’s current activities. Thefirst was the kidnapping of Segundo Marey in the French Basque region on 4December 1983 by an extralegal group of paramilitary thugs in the pay ofthe Spanish government called the Group Antiterroriste de Liberation(GAL). That incident, and the twenty-seven killings that followed, under-lined the brutality of the counterterrorist effort and seemed to illustrate whatthe ETA was fighting against. The second marker event was the ETA’s 10July 1997 abduction and murder in the Spanish Basque region of MiguelAngel Blanco, aged twenty-nine, an unpaid town councilman and memberof the ruling Popular Party, who was looking forward to his wedding soon.This senseless and premeditated murder of an appealing victim that allSpain could identify with seemed to illustrate for many the cruel and point-less violence of the ETA. Taken together, the two events seem to encapsulatethe current impasse.2. “IRA Se Suma A Las Criticas Por El Atentado Contra EEUU,” at www.euzkadi.com, 20 September2001.3. “Letter from Euzkadi: Home Fires, Basque Separatists Are Escalating Their War against Spain,”New Yorker, 12 February 2001, 40, 46.4. Jerome Socolovsky, “Basque Group Lays Claim to Attacks,” Associated Press, 28 October 2001.56 Mediterranean Quarterly: Winter 2002Marey died on 13 August 2001. He was an office furniture salesman whowas abducted from his home while watching the Benny Hill program on tele-vision. The mercenaries who abducted him thought they had nabbed animportant ETA terrorist. They had not. They kept Marey in an abandonedstone farmhouse for ten days until his release. It is not known whether thechronic bronchitis and bone marrow disease that were exacerbated by thecold and the binding of his limbs contributed to his death at the age of sixty-nine. The eventual trial of those responsible for his kidnapping was a majorscandal for the Spanish government of the Felipé Gonzalez era and stillraises questions regarding the ultimate responsibility of those who carriedon paramilitary operations against suspected Basque terrorists across theFrench border.Blanco was murdered in cold blood with two shots to the head and left todie on a hillside near San Sebastian after Madrid refused the ETA’s demandto transfer some five hundred ETA members held in Spanish prisons to pris-ons in the Basque region. In death the young man became a martyr to vio-lence and a national rallying point against ETA terrorism. In Madrid andBarcelona, 2 million people marched in protest, and in Pamplona, where thefamous running of the bulls was under way, festivities were suspended. For awhile, the murders continued, but after each ETA killing, enormous popularmarches throughout Spain memorializing each ETA victim and demandingan end to the violence became a regular feature of Spanish public life, illus-trating the ETA’s lack of mass support, even in the Basque region.How Did Matters Go So Far?The ETA was born in 1952 in response to hostilities directed against theBasque people and region by Francisco Franco both during and after theSpanish Civil War, the most celebrated of which, the bombing of Guernicaby Franco’s Nazi ally in 1937, inspired the world-famous painting by PabloPicasso. The Basque people thought that Franco was trying to root them outas a people