Live targets
By Natalia Martin Cantero Posted Sat, Sep 1 2001
The Basque terrorist group ETA, which has killed 800 people since 1970 in its proclaimed “war for an independent Basque state,” has recently turned against journalists in its activities. As ETA stated in its spring newsletter Zutabe, a zealous propaganda pamphlet, all unsupportive journalists “should be eliminated.”
The ETA threat is a thorn in the side of the administration of conservative Spanish President José María Aznar, who won his second term last year. With the campaign slogan España va bien (Spain is doing great), Aznar’s center-right party, Partido Popular, tried to inspire a sense of well- being, boosted by Spain’s revitalized economy and its stabilized position on the international stage.
However, the resurgence of Basque terrorism after a 15-month truce has already done a good deal of damage to the recent spirit of optimism. According to the latest poll of the Spanish governmental social-research center, CIS, 75 percent of Spaniards perceive terrorism as the country’s biggest trouble.
Before the truce, which expired in December 1999, ETA’s major targets were policemen, army officers and politicians. Now, journalists are added to the list of ETA’s foes. In the past year and a half alone, ETA has killed 31 people, including city officials, a Supreme Court judge, two journalists and a history professor. The organization has also planted bombs on university campuses, in Basque businesses and outside the homes of two journalists reporting on the Basque Country for the newspaper El Pais and the television network Antena 3.
At least 80 journalists covering the Basque Country are currently under 24-hour police protection. Some keep their families in provinces, away from the region, for fear of retaliation. According to El Pais, another 30 journalists have chosen to leave their jobs in the region in the past couple of years. Among these professionals are famous journalists Carmen Gurruchaga, a political reporter for El Mundo whose apartment was bombed, and José María Calleja, a producer and anchor for the Basque TV.
President Aznar ad-mits the gravity of the situation for the press. “They [ETA activists] tell journalists to shut up and leave or else they will be killed,” Aznar said in a March meeting with the World Association of News-papers (WAN), an organization that represents 17,000 newspapers and is based in Paris.
Since last March, the parade of journalist killings has continued relentlessly. The latest victim, Santiago Ole-aga, was shot dead on May 24 in San Sebas-tian. Oleaga was the marketing director of El Diario Vasco, a newspaper that defends the Basque Country’s links with the rest of Spain.
In response to Oleaga’s murder, the federation of Spain’s press clubs, FAPE, organized a protest demonstration in Madrid last June. Journalists from all over the world expressed support to their Spanish colleagues. FAPE’s general secretary, José María Torre, thinks journalists abroad were not aware of the gravity of the situation in Spain until recently. He complains that some media, such as The Washington Post and CNN, keep calling ETA terrorists separatists.
The Spanish ambassador in Washington, Javier Rupérez, recently asked a Washington Post editor why that paper avoids the term “terrorists” when referring to ETA members. Rupérez emphasizes that separatist activities per se are not a reason for concern; use of violence, however, is.
In the Basque Country, avoidance of ETA-related stories is the only way for some journalists to escape death. Many reporters refuse to cover ETA’s activities or even talk about ETA. Alejandro Fernandes Pombo, a writer and FAPE’s director, says the Basque Country is the only place in the European Union where press freedom doesn’t exist even as a concept.
The courage of some threatened journalists, however, provides a reason to hope that things might change for the better. A few weeks after he was wounded by ETA terrorists, writer Gorka Landáburu said he would keep living and working in the Basque Country despite the consequences. “I’ll go back to my work,” he said. “I am convinced that the right way of fighting against terrorism is through information.” According to Landáburu, keeping the public informed is journalists’ responsibility. It is also their way of working toward bringing peace to this turbulent region.