Authors: Giles Tremlett
Fighting ETA’s terrorism was an obviously noble cause. It did not occur to me that there might be something personal about Aznar’s determination until, during his term in office, I went to the Moncloa Palace to interview him. I did this twice, spending an hour with the man on each occasion in a room decorated with tapestries made at Madrid’s Real Fábrica de Tapices from
tapestry
cartoons drawn by Goya. The first time I met him, he walked into the room in a jolly, back-slapping sort of a way – a man
determined
to make a friendly impression. He pretty soon returned to the dour, serious individual he really was. On one of these visits I asked him about the ETA attack against him. ‘
Son gafes del oficio
,’ he said. ‘It is a downside of the job.’ It was a good reply. Then I told him I had met a lot of ETA victims – those wounded in attacks or those who had lost loved ones. All had told me that each fresh attack felt to them like a reliving of the first, definitive attack. Did he feel like that?
Aznar’s reaction has stuck in my mind ever since. It is not what he said, trotting out a line about how it was important to maintain a calm, clear head, but the strange look he shot in my
direction
. When I said I had met lots of victims – which I had, as part of a book project – it was as though I had intruded on a private domain. Aznar, dubbed
el Sequerón
because of his dry, dour
personality
, is not the sort of person to let emotion show. It was the first time, in fact, that I had seen him at all ruffled. It was as though I could not possibly understand. I felt I was being told, in fact, that it was none of my business. It was impossible to guess what psychological cogs were turning behind the Aznar facade. This was, however, clearly not a run-of-the-mill political topic for him.
I had approved of Aznar when he was first in power. He got rid of a Socialist government that, because of its multiple corruption scandals, had long forfeited the right to govern. He was also the first professed right-winger to be democratically elected to power since 1934. He showed Spain that the political right was not just Franco, but that it could exist perfectly well in a democracy – that, in fact, it was a necessary part of one.
With no absolute majority in his first term in parliament, Aznar had also had to broker deals with Catalan and Basque nationalists of Convergència i Unió and the Basque Nationalist Party, respectively. They supported him in parliament, thus
showing
not only that they are conservatives at heart but also that the ‘nationalist’ centre and the ‘nationalist’ periphery could get along and make the country work. It was, again, something many had thought impossible. His rowdy supporters, believing opinion poll predictions of an absolute majority, had gathered outside the party headquarters on election night and shouted: ‘
¡Pujol, enano, habla castellano!
’, ‘Pujol [the Catalan nationalist regional
premier
], you midget, speak Spanish!’
Aznar kept his hands out of the till, and, with a few exceptions, made sure his party did too. He was rewarded, at the 2000
elections
, with an absolute majority. Aznar, the
Sequerón
, shed tears as he waved at the crowd of supporters in the street. It was a strange sight. This man had always been accused of lacking charisma, of being unloved even by those who voted for him. There was more emotion behind the Aznar facade than met the eye.
Years before the September 11 attacks in the United States, Aznar had been ploughing an unfashionably hard line on
terrorism
. It was, he said, his first priority. He would be tough. Although he played host to Tony Blair and his family on a holiday in Doñana National Park in the days after the Good Friday peace agreement in Northern Ireland was signed, there could be no such deal with him. Each People’s Party councillor killed by ETA was another twist on the screw that tightened his resolve.
The funerals he attended cannot have been easy. I once sat in an apartment in San Sebastián, talking to a young, attractive woman while a three-year-old boy called Javier rushed about in his
dressing
gown playing boyish games. Ana Iríbar’s story was yet
another
tale of tragedy in the Basque Country. She was the widow of Gregorio Ordóñez. He was a city councillor shot at point blank range, in front of three lunch companions, as he ate lunch in La Cepa. This restaurant sits on the short Calle 31 de Agosto in the old part of San Sebastián, where ETA has now killed three times.
One of the assassins had walked down the street from his own parents’ restaurant. The killers walked straight up to him and put a bullet in his head. When I met his wife, Ana, she had been
widowed
for barely a year. But, recently a father myself, what stuck in my mind was the little boy. Those sort of thoughts must have been a constant in Aznar’s political life.
There was one ETA death, however, that intrigued me especially. The victim’s name was Margarita González Mansilla. She had been born seventy-three years earlier in Badajoz but had
migrated
to Madrid and raised a family in a modest little house. When she died there were no mass marches. Nobody took to the streets. Her death, three months after she went into coma, occupied only a few paragraphs in the newspaper. Even that much space was due to the fact that the bomb had been the one that, on 19 April 1995, had been aimed at Aznar. I always wondered how much her death – which had, after all, meant to be that of Aznar himself – might have affected him. It could, of course, have left him cold, but somehow I doubted that.
Aznar’s obsession with ETA grew. The police worked harder, the US pledged some kind of help – though numerous
government
officials I spoke to were unable to say how. The French police, above all, cracked down on them. By the time he left office, ETA had, for the first time, gone almost a whole year without managing to kill. It was not defeated, but it was close to it.
Aznar’s friendship with non-violent Basque nationalists soured as soon as he gained an absolute majority. The old pacts fell apart, or at least became inoperative. The nationalists moved in the opposite direction. They ate up some of ETA’s territory by loudly defending the right to self-determination and threatening to hold a referendum of their own. This was an attempt to split the difference, and push ETA and its Batasuna ally off the
political
map. It was also scrupulously democratic. For Aznar, it was close to treason. He even legislated so that he could lock up the Basque regional premier if he did call a referendum.
Spanish literature has provided us with the greatest
honourable
fool of all times. Don Quixote de La Mancha, that ‘light
and mirror of all knight-errantry’ who is now 400 years old, was a man obsessed by ‘the grievances he proposed to redress, the wrongs he intended to rectify, the exorbitance to correct, the abuses to reform, and the debts to discharge’.
Aznar, with his willingness to get into a fight and refusal to budge on matters he perceived to be of honour, had more than a few Quixotic characteristics himself. The temptation to draw
parallels
between Don Quixote turning windmills into giants and Aznar, after the Madrid bombings, turning Al-Qaida into ETA are almost irresistible, though there is nothing humorous about the latter. Don Quixote was deaf to Sancho Panza’s warnings before he charged the windmills. ‘One may easily see that you are not versed in the business of adventures: they are giants; and, if you are afraid, get aside and pray, whilst I engage them in a fierce and unequal combat,’ he said before charging at them and being knocked cold by a windmill sail.
Aznar’s faithful steed was not a horse called Rocinante, but a government apparatus run on presidential lines. It gave him the results he wanted. Where he was going to see ETA, it too had trained itself to see ETA. That particular trick was not new. British and American intelligence has done the same thing in Iraq, ‘
seeing
’ weapons of mass destruction that politicians insisted must be there – when they were not.
Aznar had already outdone both Bush and Blair in his
assurances
that the weapons existed. His stance then could also have been mouthed by the knight-errant of La Mancha. ‘What I say is true, and you will see it presently,’ Don Quixote said when
convinced
that a group of monks were really wicked enchanters. That was also the Aznar approach to the 11-M bombings.
The train bombing story did not end on 14 March. For the bombers had not gone away. Its final chapter was written four weeks later. By that stage the bombers had shown signs of being active once more. An attempt had been made to blow up a
high-speed
train on its way to Seville. A second failed attempt targeted the high-speed line to Zaragoza.
But police were getting closer. Eventually the bombers were
discovered in the dormitory town of Leganés. Police surrounded their apartment. A gun battle started. Then a special-operations squad was called in to storm the place. It was greeted by a huge explosion that blew out the walls of the apartment building, killing a police officer. The seven men inside had stood in a circle and exploded their remaining dynamite. Their bodies – or body bits – were scattered amongst the ruins. One had to be fished out of the building’s communal swimming pool. Seven corpses were eventually identified.
One belonged to an Allekama Lamari, a violent Islamist who had been mistakenly released from jail because of a bureaucratic mix-up between Spain’s two senior courts, the National Court and the Supreme Court. Communications between the two courts had, apparently, broken down – though they are barely 100 metres apart. The other bombers were a mixture of petty crooks, drug dealers and pious university graduates.
The profile of the Madrid bombers was depressingly low-life. They were freelance radicals, only loosely linked to Al-Qaida, but determined to follow the exhortations of Osama bin Laden.
The gang had a rural hideaway. It was a one-storey house in the countryside outside the town of Chinchón, just twenty-five miles from the capital. The bombers had held a barbecue party at their little retreat a couple of weeks after the Madrid bombings. They had stored their dynamite here and activated the mobile phones that would set them off. Neighbours remembered one of them, a hashish trafficker called Jamal Ahmidan, because he rode
motorbikes
and would appear with a couple of Spanish girls who had tattoos and piercings.
Spain, despite Aznar’s obsession with ETA terrorism, turned out to have a lively black market in Goma 2 and other explosives used in the mining industry of the northern Asturias region. Here, it seems, police missed warnings about the traffickers. The dynamite was reportedly paid for with just 6,000 euros and a quantity of Moroccan hashish.
‘It turns out that all this was done by a handful of petty crooks who were also police informers, but that police did not have the
faintest idea of what was going on,’ commentator Victoria Prego wrote in
El Mundo
newspaper. ‘The judges must now reveal … the full degree of ham-fistedness and carelessness that we are
discovering
.’
Aznar’s government, obsessed by ETA but rattling the Islamist cage with its vocal support for war in Iraq, had been looking the wrong way.
A parliamentary inquiry was set up. The politicians, however, were more interested in rowing about whether the government had lied or whether the Socialists had brought protesters out onto the street than what had gone wrong. Newspaper editors, even foreign correspondents, were, initially, placed on the list of
witnesses
to be quizzed. One morning I opened
El País
to find that I myself had been called as a witness – though the commission members later cancelled all the journalists.
The inquiry became a laughing stock. Political witnesses
competed
with one another to see how long they could go without stopping, even to eat. Acebes and Aznar both did more than ten hours. Zapatero lasted almost fifteen.
The inquiry was evidence of the divided Spain inherited from the Aznar years. The People’s Party sat in one corner uselessly clinging to the idea that ETA must have had something to do with it. The rest – the left and the regional nationalists or separatists – tried to prove that Aznar had deliberately and knowingly lied. Aznar, in the commission, gave wind to the conspiracy theories. He talked about connections between ETA and Islamists. The ‘intellectual authors’, he added mysteriously, were ‘not in remote deserts or far-off mountains’.
Zapatero, in turn, claimed Aznar had orchestrated ‘a massive deceit’. Both theories are now engraved in stone on each side’s version of events. ‘The political wounds from March 11 are so deep that we may have to wait a generation for them to heal,’
El Mundo
columnist Lucía Méndez concluded. The commission of inquiry itself split along the now depressingly familiar lines of the Two Spains when drawing up conclusions. It blamed Aznar for ‘manipulating’ and ‘twisting’ the truth. The People’s Party
representatives voted against. The contrast with the US Joint Inquiry report into the September 11 attacks made the whole affair seem even more shameful.
The victims and their families, meanwhile, looked on in
absolute
alarm and disgust. Pilar Manjón, who lost her nineteen-
year-old
student son on one of the trains, accused the inquiry members of behaving like kids in a school playground. The victims, she told them, had become a political football for them to kick around. ‘What have you been laughing at? Who are you trying to cheer on? What victories are you celebrating?’ she asked.
It took a while for the technicians to repair a videotape found amongst the rubble where the seven bombers had blown
themselves
up in Leganés. When the tape was finally ready, investigators heard a name some may have recalled from school history lessons.
‘The brigades that are in Al Andalus … will continue our jihad until martyrdom in the land of Tarik Bin Ziyad,’ the three heavily armed, white-robed figures threatened in one of the undamaged segments. This was none other than the Berber who had sailed his troops across the Straits of Gibraltar in 711. ‘Remember the
Spanish
crusade against the Muslims, the expulsion from Al Andalus and the tribunals of the Inquisition,’ the bombers added, claiming Spain was Muslim by right and Christian only by force. They, like bin Laden and Aznar, saw an age-old conflict simply entering its newest phase.