Alberto Spektorowski
10 years away of the Aiete conference that culminated years of huge efforts to end violence in the Basque country is an unavoidable moment to summarize and look at the whole process from the perspective that only time can give.
I must start by emphasizing what obviously comes without saying, and that is great honor I feel for having been part of the International Contact Group that contributed to the process leading from Aiete in 2011 to the end of ETA in 2018.
I m writing based in my own impressions, which maybe do not necessarily coincide with other experiences of my group’s friends. However, this is my reality and hopefully, my personal experience could help others in consolidating the process of reconciliation in the Basque country.
The mandate of the group was to encourage confidence building measures such as: overcoming special measures of restrictions on political activity and adapting the penitentiary policy to the new transformed political situation. To encourage and assist the parties, for an agenda for political dialogue. To encourage, facilitate and enable, an all-inclusive multi-party talks and negotiations, which would be subject to the Mitchell Principles, without conditions and with no pre-determined outcome. The idea was that a multi-party talks and negotiations would hopefully achieve an all-Inclusive agreement to overcome the political conflict. All to all what we had in mind thus, was the attempt to build confidence in the minds of the public that a successful peace process is indeed possible.
From the scratch, I understood the difficulty of this task. Apparently, the mandate looked as minimalistic, but understanding the past experience in the Basque country in which all dialogues has failed, the ensuing question was why this time would be different.
I understood the difficulties of the process, during the preparations days for Aiete. Brian Currin asked me to meet with Rubalcaba’s group in Madrid to get a sense of how the Spanish government led by the Socialists would react to the great event. We knew already that although the government would not participate in the event, it would not obstruct it. However, the meeting in Madrid opened for me a wide variety of questions about the future of the process. My first intention was to try to convince my interlocutors that this time the end of violence is serious, and it is much more than a cease fire. ETA indeed, is ending violence and the International Community is a guarantee to it. I expected a harsh response from the government, and imagined them explaining me, how naïve we were, while stressing the fact that we had no understanding of the reality of terrorism violence. I imagine a response such as Spain could not make any concessions to terrorism and to its collaborators, because that would bring more terrorism. What I did not expect however, is that the Spanish government confirmed me that they were confident that the end of violence is a fact. To their minds ETA was already defeated and, that in the hypothetical case of negotiations, they won’t even pressure for a definition on the question of self determination. As we all know that was the contentious issue that in most cases disarrayed negotiations between ETA and the Spanish government. At that point, I believed that if the Spanish government was confident about this new situation, the rest of the problems, including the question of prisoners could be easily resolved. Since I was a veteran on Israeli Palestine negotiations, I assumed what any Israeli negotiator would have conclude in a case like this. This is the end of conflict, and amnesty for prisoners would be accepted. However, to my surprise, that was hardly the case with Spain. The fate of ETA prisoners would be hard to resolve. The Spanish government would be neutral and would not obstruct the Aiete conference, but it will not be eager to collaborate. That negative impression worsened after the new conservative government run by Rajoy assumed power.
Although Aiete represented a moment of hope, the aftermath did not promise much good results. I was aware more than ever that the possibilities to have a dialogue with Spain despite any concession from ETA would be fruitless. The Spanish government would not even consider relocating ETA prisoners into the Basque country. Each case would be dealt by the law under a harsh interpretation, and my first impression was that even the Nanclares program would hardly prosper. Despite the hope opened at Aiete, I noticed at those days that the future still looked grim.
When the Social Forum was founded and became a determinate serious player in the political game, Paul Rios and I had an interesting conversation in Bayonne about the benefits of changing the frame of negotiations. That was not necessarily unilateralism, but a shift in partenaires.
The idea of unilateral negotiations, which obviously is an oxymoron, was already in the air. However, the question was why insisting to negotiate with a partenaire that rejected all type of political contacts. We knew that ETA always strove to negotiate directly with Spain, however, it was clear to all of us, that this will not happen. However, the Social Forum proved indeed, that given the fact that there is no partenaire for a peace process, the real negotiations would be between ETA and the Basque people represented by its institutions and civil society. That was exactly what we had in mind.
We started to imagine an idea that I believed it could work. We knew that that this new imagined track would hardly resolve the prisoners’ situation, since that was a competence of the state. We knew as well that the question of self determination, was out of question. However, we had a feeling that the process of self determination begins when a regional autonomy, undertakes certain prerogatives and competences that the state does not want to overtake. That was the case with the decommission process. We believed that the International Verification Group that was assisted by Inigo Urkullu, but not recognized by Spain, was a step forward into that kind of policy that could be defined as evolving to sovereign acts, by default. We thought that the presentation process that was run by the Verification group was a missed opportunity. It should have been much more impacting, with much major involvement of the Basque government and with much more important covertures of the international press and international personalities. That moment should have been prepared as a constitutional moment into which a regional government assumes and takes prerogatives that belong to a sovereign country.
The PNV indeed, did not want to immerse itself into a “possible confrontation” with the competence of the state, which is the one that must surveille a process of decommission. Yet, in reality although the verification act was a missed opportunity, still the whole process fitted well into the labor of the Social Forum. The real debate was how to administer the end of ETA vis a vis, the Basque people for whom ETA believed it fought for, but which for a lot of it (probably a majority) ETA damages were impossible to heal. That was the real dimension of the conflict. Not vis a vis Spain but vis a vis the Basque people and institutions with the end of violence, and the dismantling of the organization, we understood that out labor had reached an end. When we entered the process, the Abertzale left party SORTU was outlawed and when we finished our labor it was part of the political process again. We were proud that we have collaborated at least in a minimum in a process which contributed to enriching hopefully the dialogue between parties and movements. We are glad to see at least attempts of reconciliation between foes. We know that this healing process is enormously difficult especially when the parts still stick to their basic truths and feelings. But there is no other way that understanding the sensibilities of all those that have suffered directly or collaterally during the times of violence.
For all those that lived and experience that epoch of bitter violence, the nowadays daily life in the Basque country despite all what it remains to resolve, and despite all type of painful acts of welcoming returning home prisoners, still look like a beautiful dream. There is still a long way to go to reconciliation, and the scars of the violent conflict are still here, well within the Basque country.
I vote and pray for the successful effort to heal those wounds. This can be done in current times precisely because of the absence of political violence. There is a huge difference between a state of violence and a state of nonviolence as it is the current one.