Basque Region: Home of Beauty and Insurgents

B A Y O N N E, France, Nov. 27, 2000 -- Claude and Pierre can’t agree on Claude’s 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 France’s 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 France’s Basque country—”the North” to locals—may be as proud to be Basque as their southern cousins, but they also have strong links with the French state.

Claude Assorichipy, one of the debaters outside the bar in Bayonne, speaks proudly of his Basque heritage but expresses anger over recent violence by militants in the town.

“We are a people. We have a culture that has been recognized for ages,” says Assorichipy, a 35-year-old builder. “The violence you see in Spain has nothing to do with life here.”

Pierre, who does not want to give his last name, says a real Basque “likes to work, greet his family, eat well and enjoy his culture.” He is Basque but says he is French first.

While most French Basques agree with Pierre, ETA is a real presence here.

The group may not target French institutions, but members often take refuge in safe houses in France and have weapons stashes. ETA also has a tiny cousin in the long dormant but now stirring French Basque group Iparretarrak.

Given those ties, some analysts worry that bloodshed could spill over from Spain. The fears have been stoked by ETA’s resumption of violence and a growing frustration among young French Basque militants.

Grenet, the Bayonne mayor, thinks the risk is very real, citing recent links forged between radical French and Spanish Basque groups.

“These are revolutionary, separatist and Marxist youths, who have a very xenophobic and restrictive doctrine,” he says.

Ernest Arrambide knows what goes through the minds of such youths. He was released from jail last year after serving a six-year sentence for belonging to ETA. Now, at 44, he runs a restaurant in Bayonne where photographs of imprisoned ETA men and women stare down from a shelf.

“The armed struggle exists. I accept it. Until doors are opened, it is there,” he says. “I need to exist as a Basque, and only ETA can offer me that.”

Arrambide’s demands are a far cry from those of most French Basques, who favor the creation of a Basque department, or administrative region, that would group France’s three Basque provinces under one local administration.

A little over half the 250,000 people in the region are Basques. That compares with about 850,000 Basques south of the Pyrenees, who account for 40 percent of the population in Spain’s Basque country.

For separatists, a Basque department is a tame idea that might be used as a stepping stone to greater autonomy. And that is precisely why the idea is on the backburner, even though opinion polls say two-thirds of French Basques support the idea.

Bayonne’s mayor opposes the idea because he thinks it could act as a catalyst to separatism.

“Some would like the department for reasons of pride, linked to their identity. They do not have any ulterior motives. But there is also a separatist fringe,” Grenet says.

There are signs that the separatist group Iparretarrak, which means “Those of the North,” is stirring. The group declared a cease-fire two years ago, but in mid-October it claimed responsibility for two bombings in southwestern France that damaged buildings without causing injuries.

The attacks came after Iparretarrak said in a statement that it was ready to take up arms again if its demands for autonomy were ignored.

Nationalist Basques say the French government fears creation of a Basque department because it might give the broader Basque country a territorial identity.

Another concern is that granting concessions to the Basques could trigger autonomy demands from other French regions with strong ethnic identities, like the northwestern province of Brittany.

But doing nothing could also play into the separatists’ hands.

A spokesman for Euskal Herritarrok, the Spanish political party generally viewed as ETA’s political arm, does not mince his words.

“The French government’s policies are leading to an armed struggle,” Arnaldo Otegui says. “There are few options left open to the people.”