The Basques: 'No One Is Neutral'

ANGEL YOU HAVE NOT DIED IN VAIN. So reads a crude sign on the side of a furniture plant near Nuarbe, a mountainside hamlet deep in Basque country 220 miles northeast of Madrid.

The sign refers to Angel Otaegui, 33, a Basque terrorist who was executed by a firing squad a week ago for his part in the killing of a Spanish policeman.

The return of his body to Nuarbe, where it was buried at night in the local cemetery by the light of lanterns, transformed the village into the focus of a small, poignant political pilgrimage.

Hundreds of Basques struggled up a steep slope to the burial place every day last week. Women left flowers, young peasants took photographs, priests led small groups in prayer. None of the 100 policemen occupying the town--"the Spanish," residents called them--dared remove the red, white and green Basque flag that covered the rocky grave.

Otaegui, who worked as a mechanic in Azpeitia, had been a clandestine member of the E.T.A. for five years. This terrorist organization has not only spearheaded resistance to what Basques call "Hispanicization," but also won a deserved international reputation as the most violent and daring Spanish group opposing Francisco Franco's regime. Six E.T.A. terrorists were sentenced to death in 1970 for kidnaping a West German consul in San Sebastian, but were reprieved at the last moment.

It was an E.T.A. cell that assassinated Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, Franco's last Premier, in Madrid in 1973.

Currently, 15 E.T.A. members are under detention for a wide variety of capital cases.

Though not all of the 2 million Basques inhabiting four provinces in Spain's northeast corner agree with the group's methods, the E.T.A.'s aims reflect a centuries-old aspiration of the Basque people for independence--or at least greater autonomy. The organization's initials stand for Euzkadi Ta Azkatasuna--which means "Basque Land and Liberty"--in the region's unique, highly inflected language. The origins of the Basques, who have lived in their present Iberian habitat for at least 5,000 years, are unknown; they seem to have no ethnic connection with any other tribe in Europe.

Basque warriors managed to keep successive invading waves of Carthaginians, Romans, Visigoths and Franks out of their fastnesses in the Pyrenees, and they were the only tribe in Europe that ever defeated the Prankish King Charlemagne. A Basque independent republic flourished briefly in 1936 during the Spanish Civil War, but Hitler's Stuka dive-bombers crushed it in the rubble of Guernica thus assuring the dictatorial control of all Spain by Franco.

Since then, Basque resentment of Madrid has not been merely an emotional reaction to cultural imperialism.

The Basques want restoration of the right to set their own tax and economic policies that they lost after the Civil War; they are also seriously underrepresented in Madrid's government councils. The fundamental grievance of the Basques is symptomatic of Spain's political malaise: too much control from the center.

Now, that control is once again in question--and it is the Basques who have done most to bring it about. "For the first time since I got here, people are openly and seriously comparing this to the pre-Civil War situation in 1936," said one diplomat in Bilbao, the Basque country's thriving commercial center (shipbuilding, banking, chemicals, paper, furniture). Adds an official of the conservative Basque Nationalist Party:

"There is a feeling that we are at the end of Francoism. We must hurry and prepare for the succession."

Yet the E.T.A. itself is going through one of the roughest periods in its 22-year history.

At least half of its top leadership has been jailed or killed in shootouts with police, and a split has developed between moderates, who stress political and diplomatic action and the more violent "military" wing.

The sign that the military wing is winning the debate came last week in a promise issued by E.T.A. officials in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, just across the French border, that the E.T.A. would avenge the executions of its members by striking back at "political leaders of the Franco regime." Silent support for such a bloody strategy seems to be rapidly growing among the Basques. "No one is neutral any more," said one Basque lawyer to TIME Correspondent George Taber in Bilbao last week. "Franco has polarized everyone here. You're either pro-E.T.A. or pro-Franco, and there aren't many of the latter."

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