21 January 2022
Bilbao Campus
The director of the Pedro Arrupe Human Rights Institute, Gorka Urrutia, the Institute's researcher, José Ramón Intxaurbe, and the Basque Government's Minister of Equality, Justice and Social Policies, Beatriz Artolazabal, have presented the Report on the injustice suffered by members of the Spanish Security Forces and their families as a result of ETA’s terrorism (1960-2011), prepared by the aforementioned Institute at the University of Deusto.
The report has been carried out by professors Jose Ramón Intxaurbe, Gorka Urrutia and Trinidad L. Vicente, following the request made early in 2020 by the Basque Government through its Vice-Ministry for Human Rights, Memory and Cooperation, headed by Jose Antonio Rodríguez Ranz.
To carry out the report, members of the Spanish Civil Guard and the National Police Force at different stages were interviewed as well as other officers' relatives. The quantitative data obtained show that ETA assassinated 357 people during this period: 207 (58%) Civil Guards or former Civil Guards, and 150 (42%) National Police Force officers. Likewise, in the case of Civil Guard officers, and due to the repeated attacks on barracks, 17 of their family members died in different attacks, two of them teenagers and 11 children. Finally, the attacks committed by ETA left 711 people injured; 43% of them with injuries resulting in total permanent disability.
"The threat that ETA launched against the members of the law enforcement bodies reached all aspects of professional performance and all areas of private and family life. This contributed, through collective intimidation, to the fact that the police officers- and by extension their families- were exposed to a situation of social isolation". This is the first of the conclusions reached by the professors, who also pointed out that "this situation is absolutely unacceptable from the point of view of democracy and respect for social diversity".
The report recognises that the situation "has no place in a democratic society, since it entailed the systematic violation of fundamental rights recognised not only in the Spanish legal system but also in the main normative texts of international law". This chapter expressly cites violations of the right to physical and moral integrity, to life, to liberty and security, to movement and residence, to education, to the free development of personality and to personal dignity.
To reach this conclusion, the professors at the University of Deusto’s Human Rights Institute interviewed 14 people, who gave accurate and, at times, intimate testimonies about their memories and experiences. These included direct victims or relatives of ETA’s fatalities. This group highlighted the social isolation to which they were condemned: "Having contacts, let alone making friends, with local people was almost impossible"; "I lived in a flat with two companions. Nobody knew us in the block; we had to sneak around"; "I experienced it as something terrifying, as nobody could know who my father was because otherwise, they could kill him". Another of the tolls they paid were the romantic break-ups and family breakdowns: "I was recently married when I was posted to the Basque Country. My ex-wife did not want to go with me, she was afraid. After three months we ended up separated".
The fear and the physical and psychological scars left by the attacks are reflected in different testimonies. This is the story of a person who was 27 years old at the time and was left in a wheelchair after an attack. A police officer who suffered an attack at the age of 21 and took four years to walk again "with a cane and some insoles" also tells of his experience.
The report also includes statements from family members who speak of personality changes and even outbreaks of violence in their parents after surviving the attacks.
"The people interviewed said that they lacked greater empathy from society as a whole towards their condition and suffering, while at the same time expressing a clear reproach to those who ignored their suffering under the premise that they must have done something," the study states.
Recommendations
One of the first recommendations reflected in the report is that an effort should be made to raise awareness and recognition of what it meant to the victims what they have endured. "It should be public and, to the extent that it is endorsed by the institutions, it should be an official acknowledgement. It is a restorative memory not only for the innocent victims whose unfair suffering will be revealed, but also for the social fabric that has lived through an intolerable evil and is now trying to recover democratic coexistence".
As far as society in general is concerned, the report invites "Basque society to reflect on the construction of a restorative and empathetic memory of the suffering endured by the innocent victims, as well as to take into account the value of the diversity that was undermined by the terrorist group ETA and its social environment".
In the course of the interviews, some of the respondents considered the presence of memory in the classroom, through the narrative of the victims themselves, to be important; programmes such as Adi-Adian, developed by the Basque Government. The report goes further along these lines, recommending "continuing and strengthening" these initiatives. It also supports "encouraging" the placement of fixed plaques on public roads in the places where attacks were committed, and continuing "with the work of repairing a culture of civic coexistence".
The Report on the injustice suffered by members of the Spanish Security Forces and their families as a result of ETA’s terrorism (1960-2011), is the latest of the studies carried out by the Pedro Arrupe Human Rights Institute at the University of Deusto, following those already published on people under threat; the Ertzaintza-Basque police officers; the penitentiary policy regarding distancing the families of prisoners, councillors and their families.
Last year, the Department of Equality, Justice and Social Policies commissioned the Institute of Human Rights to carry out a new study focusing on prison officers, which will be published next year.
