Basque Region: Home of Beauty and Insurgents

ByABC News
November 27, 2000, 11:04 AM

B A Y O N N E, France, Nov. 27 -- Claude and Pierre cant agree on Claudes nationality. I am Basque, Claude says. No, you live in France and you are French, answers Pierre, jabbing him in the chest to make his point.

Welcome to Frances Basque country, a corner of southwestern France where history, culture and geography fuse to turn the simplest question into convoluted argument.

Looking out from the surf-perfect beach at the tourist town of Biarritz, you can see the Spanish coast in the distance, and beyond that the sometimes violent Basque country of northeastern Spain.

It is this nearness to the operational base of the Spanish separatist group ETA that gives resonance to growing fears of renewed militant tendencies in this corner of France.

The risk is the contagion of violence, imported from the Spanish Basque country, says Jean Grenet, mayor of Bayonne, the French Basque capital.

The Basques, a people of unknown origin speaking an orphan language, settled thousands of years ago on both sides of the Pyrenees, the mountains that divide present day France and Spain.

Although the Basque country has never existed as a political entity, its people have always had a sharp sense of their uniqueness and fierce pride in their language and culture. Even the Romans were content to let the Basques alone while part of the empire.

The region is a hotbed of nationalist sentiment, although passions run much deeper and hotter in Spain, where Basque culture was repressed for decades under dictator Francisco Franco.

ETA, the Basque initials for Basque Homeland and Freedom, has waged a violent campaign for independence from Spain that has resulted in hundreds of deaths since 1968. Although Spanish Basques have been granted broad autonomy and despite increasingly vocal opposition across Spain, including within the Basque region, the group recently ended a 14-month cease-fire.

The people in Frances Basque countrythe North to localsmay be as proud to be Basque as their southern cousins, but they also have strong links with the French state.