The Basque Country: fatherless, generous citizens

"Do you think that the victims care who won? Peace is what really matters."

Antoni Bassas
5 min

Bilbao"ETA killed my father in front of me. I was 16 years old. He was taking me to the bus stop to go to school. We were in the car, stopped at a red light. Someone walked up from behind and shot him. From that day on, and for many years, every time I stopped at a traffic light my hands would start shaking. There was a time when I couldn’t even try to get my driver’s license. On the street I would hear footsteps behind me. Those were very hard times.”

After that morning in 1993, José Goikoetxea had to receive therapy. That crime by ETA made a big shockwaves because José’s father was a sergeant with the Erzaintza, the Basque police force, and a member of the Basque Nationalist Party (PNB). José couldn’t understand anything. It got to the point where, one day at school, his girlfriend received a letter with the ETA seal warning her to leave José. It was fake, which meant that, on top of it all, someone was continuing to hurt him with his own pain.

“This was a sick society. We were having lunch and the TV reported that ETA had killed someone and we saw it as a normal thing. I didn’t even let my mother cry. I get mad at myself for having thought that way, but we didn’t talk about those things or ask why. We justified the violence”.

José is a burly man who talks with the tenor voice of a choirboy and with a typical Basque rotundity: "I know that my father’s killer died the following year in a shootout with the police, and his two accomplices went to prison, but I don’t follow it. I don’t want to know more, because ignorance is bliss. Many people ask me why I don’t seek revenge. But you know what happens? That me, with this hatred, I don’t hurt anyone. Because as much as I might hate you, you won’t even get a headache. Once you understand that, you can set the hate aside”.

Eraikiz, mix so as not to mix

José Goikoetxea is 39 years old and, like his father, is also a police officer. Five months ago he signed the document establishing Erakiz (“building” in Basque), a group made up of family members of people killed by terrorism of all types. They are asking society and the political parties "not to have prejudices and to recognize the diversity of the victims as a reflection of the diversity of Basque society". Among the signatories are Marta and Sara Buesa, the daughters of Fernando Buesa —the socialist Basque vice president whom ETA killed with a car bomb in 2000— and Pili Zabala, sister of José Ignacio Zabala, an ETA member who was kidnapped, tortured, murdered, and buried in quicklime by GAL ( in 1983.

"Rather than an apology, what we would like is to hear that everyone admits this violence was bad; and not mix victims and politics”.

But perhaps the ideals that the victims fought for continue to be important in their respective families, I ask. "The important thing is peace. Do you think that the victims care who won and who lost? Ideals don’t come before our children”.

"I don’t need anybody to apologize; it’s enough if they don’t do it again”.

"We had GAL downstairs, watching my father. We saw them. They had already made struck, but if you called the police they would answer that to be standing in the street or sitting in a parked car wasn’t against the law. My father had to flee to Sant Joan Lohitzune, in Iparralde (the French Basque Country), but they travelled there to kill him. He was 40 years old. I was 18". It was March of 1985.

Karmen Galdeano is a lawyer. She works as the secretary of a Basque-medium school (ikastola). Even today she still meets people who talk to her with affection "about my father", Francisco Javier Galdeano, a journalist who had founded Basque newspaper Egin. The aftereffects of her father’s murder are still felt: "Before they killed my father, the telephone used to ring in the middle of the night. When we picked up, they would hang up. I suppose it was the police. Since then, my sister and I can’t stand it when the phone rings at night. I’ve even told my daughter that if she isn’t coming home to sleep, not to call me. Better to text me instead”.

The ideological trench

Karmen admits that she lived in an ideological trench for several years: "It was in order to survive. You know that the other side also suffers, but you live it from your own subjectivity. If they told you "Yes, but ETA kills", you’d answer "Yes, but the Spanish State tortures", and it was a case of “But you kill more! I do not! You do so! … ". In the end it felt like a competition to see who was worse. And at political rallies, in the streets, in the squares, everybody would stand behind their own banner”.

But as years went by and ETA announced the final cessation of all armed activity, in October 2011, relationships changed: "Now I go out with people from the ikastola to sing in a choir, and we say “I can’t believe we wouldn’t look at each other in the face for so many years just because you were a PNB member and I wasn’t..." We’ve lived an absurdity. I’ve even met with family members of ETA victims. The first day is usually dramatic. We went to lunch, and I didn’t think that I could ever do it. Maybe we Basques are surly and it’s difficult for us to open up. But you listen and they listen to you. And you begin to feel respect, from pain. You don’t need to become close friends with anyone, you only need to recognize your counterpart, move forward in empathy, building bridges. Who could deny the suffering on either side?”

There is a word that Karmen doesn’t like at all: “victim”; probably because it has been associated in the media only with the victims of ETA that call for a ending with winners and losers: "I sometimes see victims on the TV and I think: "But how can anyone live with that sort of hatred inside?" I couldn’t do it."

Karmen had a difficult time during the interview: "It’s wearing on me. And there are things that can drag you down. But I don’t want to be like the victims of the Franco era now, who are opening mass graves after eighty years. We can’t cry forever. We don’t have the right to bore the young who didn’t live through it. And I don’t need anyone to apologize to me. It’s enough, if they don’t do it again. We still have a ways to go, but if we have been able to move forward, can’t society do so, too?"

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(1) N.T. Spain’s GAL (Grupos Antiterroristas de Liberación, or Liberation Antiterror Groups) were death squads made up of mercenaries and Spanish police officers who used to murder Basque activists and ETA militants in the 1980s.

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