The Basque Rebellion

...FULL EMPLOYMENT VS...

...This is less an ethnic trait, however, than a tribute to their region's natural and industrial wealth...

...If this is so, the fault is not wholly the Basques...

...It rescued the dictatorship from diplomatic isolation and economic bankruptcy in the 1950s, and is currently negotiating a five-year extension of the Pact of Madrid...

...who frequently criticize individual prelates but not—despite their many disillusionments with it—the Church as such...

...The Basque nationalist organization that the Spanish authorities are trying to suppress has accused the police of ill-treating detainees...

...The present emergency was brought about by a series of shooting incidents...

...In July, eta men shot a member of the civil guard (the armed rural police) who challenged them while they were transporting arms in a stolen car...

...Voltaire, who seems to have thought their survival an anomaly, wrote them off as "a little people that dances at the foot of the Pyrenees...

...and buttress of General Franco's regime...

...It is fertile and prosperous, but also rather secretive: wooded hills and quiet valleys dotted with white villages and gray industrial centers...

...The Vatican turned against the Basques when they supported the Spanish Republic, which gave them autonomy, in the 1930s...

...The Basques are a solid, self-reliant people, sturdier in build than most of their Spanish and French neighbors...

...They saw the Romans, Visigoths and Moors come and go...

...In mid-August a group of them signed a statement deploring the Church hierarchy's indifference to the repression in the Basque country, and accused it of behaving like a puppet of the dictatorship...

...The answer is clearly: Nobody of any political importance...

...The Basques say that they pay more per head in taxes to the central government than the inhabitants of any other part of Spain, but receive less money back in the form of public works...

...They gave Charlemagne a beating at Roncesvalls after he treacherously attacked one of their towns (French schoolbooks still teach that he was ambushed by the Moors following a glorious victory over them), and their instinct for survival has irritated French and Spanish rulers ever since...

...Other civil guards then hunted them down...

...They may be detained or expelled from the region without public trial...

...to maintain a Polaris base at Rota, near Cadiz, and air bases in the provinces of Madrid, Seville and Zaragoza...

...Today the split in the Spanish Church between relatively progressive priests and conservative bishops is nowhere more profound than in the Basque country...

...But at a time when Russia is raping Czechoslovakia, and Russia and Britain are helping the Nigerian military junta exterminate not only the state but the people of Biafra, who cares about the Basques...

...Relations between the mainly Catholic regionalists and mainly anti-clerical Socialists have been surprisingly good in the Basque country for many years, eta has reached further to the Left and established friendly contacts with the anarcho-syndicalist Libertarians...

...Certainly not the foreign tourists sunning themselves on the beaches of San Sebastian, the administrative center of Guipiizcoa, while the police round up and interrogate political suspects only a few hundred yards away...

...A disagreement within eta last year weakened Catholic influence in the group, which is supported by a small number of priests, and brought to the fore activists who have not hesitated to approach other anti-Franco extremists with an offer of collaboration...

...Only a few years ago, the papal nuncio in Madrid described 300 Basque priests who signed an anti-Franco manifesto as "mutineers...

...in a clash between the dictatorship and its opponents...

...The heavy-handed reaction of the authorities to even such mild gestures as painting slogans on walls and hoisting Basque flags on public buildings has driven a minority of young men into eta (the initials are those of the Basque words meaning "Basque country and freedom"), a resistance group that considers the older regionalist movement, with its gentlemanly "Basque government in exile" in Paris, ineffectual and "too bourgeois...

...Franco's asking-price for the extension is a resumption of U. S. investment in Spain, a further billion dollars worth of military aid, support on Gibraltar, and a commitment to intervene "automatically" in defense of Spain—a commitment that could conceivably involve the U.S...

...ECONOMIC GROWTH...

...It is likely to continue concentrating on Spain, and in an increasingly violent manner unless the authorities are more successful in shattering Basque solidarity during the present emergency than they have been in the past...

...A few days later a girl member of eta was captured as she and other activists were allegedly preparing an armed attack on Soria prison in order to free her novio, who is serving a long sentence there on a political charge...

...Many Basque priests denounce the worldliness and political involvements of the Church in Protestant-sounding language...

...But the French have had greater success than the Spaniards in stifling regional cultures, and separatist sentiment is now slight north of the Pyrenees (though there is a growing desire in the French provinces for decentralization...

...Most Spanish democrats, unhappily, consider Washington an ally Ray Alan, a frequent contributor, is a British correspondent who reports from both France and Spain...

...Who are the Basques...

...While most Basques dislike violence, few are willing to denounce the nationalists or to collaborate with the political police...

...Certainly not the United States government (although most Basques are democrats) or the Vatican (although most Basques are Catholics...

...A Basque delegation sent to acquaint the Pope with the facts was told bluntly that the Basques would receive no sympathy from the Vatican unless they broke with the Republic...

...Their food is the best in Spain and their fish and game are among the best in Europe...

...In August, the head of the "brigade for social investigation" (secret police) in San Sebastian was shot dead...

...Washington has never shown any distaste for Franco's repressive policies in the past and seems unlikely to do so now...

...Outwardly, the Basque country might seem to be the part of Spain least likely to be infected with extremist violence...

...Castilian and French officials who deal with them sometimes complain that the Basques are an introverted people...

...Their dances are probably the liveliest in Europe, and Basques have been performing them for longer than anyone can remember...

...This entitles the U.S...

...Basque frustration has sought expression in the defiant gestures of a regionalist movement that has the passive support of the majority of the Basque-speaking population in the Atlantic provinces of Guipuzcoa and Vizcaya, and substantial support in rural Alava...

...After Nazi aircraft destroyed their ancient capital, Guernica, the Vatican's Osser-vatore Romano and Catholic papers in the U. S., Britain and France alleged that the Basques had set fire to the town...

...Moreover, eta possesses a useful base in France and has no desire to stimulate active—rather than the present passive—cooperation between French and Spanish frontier officials...

...Unlike the traditional regionalists, who would settle for a measure of administrative autonomy within a decentralized Spain, eta is working for Basque independence...

...Centralizers in Madrid and Paris have tried hard to disrupt their traditions and culture, and their language (like Catalan, which is spoken at the eastern end of the Pyrenees, in French Roussil-lon and Spanish Catalonia) has been banned from schools and government offices by successive Spanish monarchs and dictators and French republics...

...Secretive, too, is the Basque language, a complex agglutinative tongue, related to no other, that is the despair of philologists...

...Basque folklore records that even the devil, who studied it for seven years, failed to master more than three words, two of which were those meaning "wine" and "women" (there is disagreement about the third...

...Its aspirations extend to the Basque fringe of southwest France...

...Its leaflets listing the Church among the "enemies of the Basque people" have shocked the older regionalists...