San Sebastian demonstration

Chanting at demonstration

01.00.00.00

Colvin:  Supporters of the Basque separatist army, ETA, parade through the streets of an elegant old seaside town. We're in San Sebastian, in northern Spain, or as the demonstrators would prefer, we're in Donostia, in Euskadi, the Basque country. And this demonstration is a way for ETA and its supporters to defy what seemed a tidal wave of public revulsion against them and their tactics of blood.

Chanting at demonstration

Shots of ETA demonstration

Colvin:  Only a couple of weeks before, Spanish cities has been clogged with people enraged or grief stricken at the death of Miguel-Angel Blanco, a young Basque town councillor from the conservative, Spanish-centred Popular Party.

00.34

Yet now, only a couple of weeks later, an estimated 13,000 ETA supporters were marching through San Sebastian, effectively unopposed by the local population.

Mark Colvin PTC at demonstration.

Despite the backlash against them, ETA's supporters are showing here, that they won't be silenced. This march is, in effect, an act of defiance against the Spanish government and the media.

01.04

Shots of people demonstrating

Among the demonstrators I found Igor Mota, a Basque separatist from the town of Guernica.

Mota at demonstration

Mota:  We are here, as we have been for many years, to demand freedom for the Basque people and we demand that Spanish Fascism crawls back into the hole it came out of, and never returns.

01.23

San Sebastian demo

Singing

Colvin:  It was clear that, regardless of the public reaction, ETA and its political party Herri Batasuna, had no intention of going away.

Singing/Political demo

Igor with marchers

Colvin:  Igor Mota had spent the last few weeks leading a pro-ETA march all round the Basque country - called the March of Liberty.

02.22

Vision March of Liberty and countryside

He's a committed supporter of Herri Batasuna - the Basque version of Northern Ireland's Sinn Fein party.

Mota:  Freedom for the Basque country...freedom to decide for ourselves and to be one country- not split like it is now...freedom for political prisoners...the freedom to be ourselves. To be able to be Basques with our own identity and rights.

Colvin:  Herri Batasuna supports ETA without necessarily being part of its military actions.

03.02

What I wanted to know, in the wake of Miguel-Angel Blanco's death, was how Igor felt that killing could be justified.

Mota:  The answer can bounce back like a squash ball.

Vision Igor Mota

Mota:  You might ask why the Basque country is so important to Spain that they're prepared to kill for it - that people die for that. The Spanish don't concede our right to decide whether we want to be Basque or not. It's just as important for Basques to be Basque as it is for the Spanish to keep us in Spain.

03.18

Street march and demonstration

Colvin:  Igor Mota comes from the Basque city of Guernica. As the March of Liberty entered his home town, he had little but contempt for the thousands of Basques who'd demonstrated against ETA's killing of a town councillor.

Mota:  You have to look at whether the reaction was spontaneous...Was it premeditated?

03.41

Vision Mota

Mota:  You have to take into account that there were cops in the front row of many of these demonstrations.

04.13

... and we on the March have experienced threats from the Basque police, that they are going to kill us on the spot.  A lot of the time, and there are photos to prove it, there have been plain clothes cops directing the attacks against us.  We have the pictures to prove it.

Vision cultural celebration

Folk music

04.47

Colvin:  A folk culture that goes back to medieval times and beyond.

A language whose origins are a mystery, unrelated to any other in Europe.

A cultural identity so old and strong, that some Basques regard the Madrid government, almost literally, as the devil.

Folk music

Colvin on street PTC

Colvin:  Most Basques do not support ETA. The latest opinion polls show its support down from 16 to around 12 per cent. But that's not to say that most Basques are anti-independence. In fact, there's never been more than a tiny minority in favour of strong central government from Madrid. Opinion polls and election results have consistently shown that the vast majority of the Basque people want self government for the country that they call Euskadi.

05.43

Vision church, courtyard

Like independence struggles throughout the world, the Basque conflict is rooted in history. And the centre of Basque history is Guernica.

06.13

Under the sacred tree of Guernica, successive kings of Spain have sworn to respect the rights of the Basques.

Archive footage

Then came the Civil War.

06.37

Newsreel voice over:  First pictures from the Basque Republic of the Holy city of Guernica, scene of the most terrible air raid our modern history yet can boast.

Hundreds were killed here - men, women and children. Four thousand bombs were dropped of a blue sky into a hell that raged unchecked for five murderous hours.

Black and White Archive footage of devastation

Colvin:  On April the 26th, 1937, General Franco enlisted Hitler's help and got the German air force to bomb Guernica.

Izaguirre

Izaguirre:  The day of the bombing was a Monday- market day- Guernica had five thousand inhabitants but that day there were eight thousand.

07.07

Izaguirre and Colvin talking

Colvin:  Pablo Izaguirre was ten in 1937. He had the day off school.

Izaguirre

Izaguirre:  At around three in the afternoon one aeroplane appeared- a scout plane. It dropped one bomb- an explosion one to start things off, and flew around. Then came all the bombers.  They dropped explosive bombs and incendiary bombs starting at about quarter past or half past three, and the bombing ended at around half past six, quarter to seven.

07.30

Archive footage/ Izaguirre

Newsreel voice over:  This was a city, and these were homes like yours.

08.06

Izaguirre:  When I came out it was very sad...it was really tragic. Everything was burning. The water supply was broken. There was no water to fight the fire- even where you could reach the fire many houses burned because they were so close together- so one house would ignite the next. After the bombing, at night especially, it was very sad. Looking for your family- some that had gone...some that might be dead.

08.12

Archive footage/ graveyard

Colvin:  If the bombing was the defining moment in relations with Spain, what followed confirmed and strengthened the hatred.

08.54

Forty years of military rule by General Franco's Madrid based dictatorship.

V/O

Forty years, during which the graves of the bombed civilians of Guernica remained unknown. Because Franco's troops, intent on persuading the world that the Basques had deliberately bombed their own city, removed and hid the bodies.

09.08

Only since Franco's death have the people of Guernica been able to raise a true memorial to their dead.

The resentment against Madrid remains.

Journalist Humberto Unzueta and Colvin in graveyard.

Unzueta:  Very bad feeling in the people, not only in that period, but also now.

09.34

Colvin:  Humberto Unzueta is an independent Guernica journalist who says the memory of the bombing is still fresh for many Basques.

Unzueta:  The Spanish rule pushing the Basque identity. And now is the feeling of the Basque people remembering that bombing.

Unzueta

They didn't recognise the Basque identity. They didn't recognise the Basque language. The music, the folklore, the dance, the typical things of any country is to express identity.

Colvin:  They were banned?

Unzueta:  Yeah, all of them, they were banned.

10.29

Music

Shots of  mural

Colvin:  In the thirties, Guernica was infamous the world over - a symbol much like Hiroshima for us today.

10.38

Yet the original of Picasso's famous painting of the bombing is in Madrid, leaving Guernica itself with this ceramic reproduction.

Many Basques see a parallel with their own demands for a return of political responsibility from Spain. Most want a referendum on independence.

Unzueta

Colvin:  You would consider yourself a moderate? That's not an extremist Basque demand, that's the basic demand of what most of the Basque people.

11.04

Unzueta:  Even the Basque parliament has recognised this self-determination and the Basque parliament is - in the Basque parliament you can't find not only the Nationalist Party, even the Spanish Party. All of them has recognised through the Basque parliament that the self-determination is a right of the Basque country.

Colvin:  Today's Guernica is effectively a new town - the result of sixty years of reconstruction.

Footage town/ children at summer school

The culture is being rebuilt as well. At a summer school, above the city, local children, all fluent Spanish speakers, are learning to speak the Basque language of their ancestors.

11.43

Whatever the repressions of the past, the fact is that Basques today have already achieved a great deal of the autonomy they want.

Guernica Mayor Eduardo Vallejo and Colvin

Guernica's mayor, Eduardo Vallejo, represents the majority PNV - the moderate Basque nationalists.

12.06

Vallejo:  My party and eighty -five percent of the Basques understand that any deal can be defended with words. We have our own parliament. We have our own government. We have our own institutions. We have our own town councils. We have all the elements to defend our own rights. We also elect members to the Spanish Parliament and Senate in Madrid, which is where we have to defend our Basque rights.

Footage tree monument, Colvin in front of monument

Colvin:  The trunk of the old Guernica tree stands as a reminder of historic Basque independence and pride. But there's danger as well as dignity in his historical memory.

12.45

As with so many long-running conflicts, history becomes a double-edged sword. The death of Miguel-Angel Blanco, to one side was simple an outrage. To ETA however, it was revenge for a series of outrages, they believe, were committed against them. The only way to end these deadlocks is to break through the historical cycle. So far there's no sign that anyone has managed to do that here in the Basque country.

Footage Basque flag/ club interior/ Azeri, Mota and Colvin in club.

At the social club of ETA's political wing in Guernica, the sign on the wall says ‘Kill the police.'

13.27

The photographs show martyrs of the ETA armed struggle. Here we found Igor Mota and his friend, Azeri, who served three years in jail for collaborating with ETA.

Azeri/ Mota, Azeri and Colvin in club

Azeri:  We have our deaths too. Since ETA was founded in 1959, I don't know the exact number killed but they've been many. Dead in combat, dead in ambushes, dead in police custody, dead in prisons. So you cannot just speak of the dead from one side, but from both.

13.47

Azeri and Mota in club

Mota:  The armed struggle will continue until there is an agreement with the government to get to a dialogue...a negotiation...and then see what happens.

14.14

Shots summer camp/ scenery/ political demo

Folk song

14.25

Colvin:  At the summer school in the hills above Guernica, young Basques rehearse an ancient folk song form.

Folk song

Colvin:  They sing, in their own unique language, of the beauty of their land.

Folk song

Colvin:  The miseries of the Franco era are gone, but regardless of the moderation of the majority, it's a land that still seems destined not to know peace for some time to come.

ENDS 15.21

Political demo

CREDITS:

Reporter                        MARK COLVIN

Camera             JOHN BENES

Sound               MARK JENVEY

Editor                MARK DOUGLAS

Research           ANNA BRACKS

Interpreter         DAVID PUENTE