Intelligence

The new axis of evil?

Times Online - World

By Paddy Woodworth
The beleaguered Basque leadership has become a 'wounded beast'. But has it been driven into an unholy alliance with Islamic terror?

IT IS the nightmare scenario of every 21st-century counterterrorist official, indeed of every citizen of our grim new era who wants to stay alive: an indigenous terrorist group with deep roots and a long track record teaming up with an international network that can supply new training, new techniques, and anonymous operators.

Could this be the case with Thursday’s bombings in Madrid? Has Eta developed links with al-Qaeda, or a similar group, to create an alternative infrastructure to the one which had apparently been virtually dismantled by police successes over the last four years?

Might such links resolve the conundrum that the attacks bear some of the hallmarks of both groups, yet do not quite fit the modus operandi of either?

This scenario is necessarily speculative, and, on the face of it, still the most unlikely given the facts to have emerged so far. But an open mind is perhaps the greatest asset in assessing the entirely new situation presented by what we may now call El 11 de M arzo, or March 11.

The hypothesis that this was a joint Eta-Islamist operation at least enables us to tease out the distinctive features of both groups, and assess a little more clearly who was most likely to be responsible for the atrocities.

Unfortunately open minds have not been on display in the highly politicised debate about the likely culprits. As late as yesterday morning, Ana Palacio, the Foreign Minister, was insisting that it “crystal clear” that Eta was responsible. Almost simultaneously Koldo Gorostiaga, an MEP of the Batasuna party which is Eta’s political wing, was telling me it was “completely impossible” that Eta could have carried out the attack.

Both statements are highly political. Spain votes tomorrow in a general election. If the attacks are blamed on Eta, the Spanish people are likely to swing to the ruling party, which has always presented a tough and united front against the Basque terrorists. If the bombings were carried out by an Islamist group, then the gulf between the Spanish public and the Aznar Government over its support for the Iraq war is likely to reopen.

For supporters of Basque independence such as Señor Gorostiaga, Eta involvement in the attacks would be a political disaster. Eta’s return to violence after the 1998-99 ceasefire cost his Batasuna party

50 per cent of its electorate. Those who do still give tacit support to Eta tend to do so reluctantly, out of old loyalties, and would certainly rather see a more “selective armed struggle” than Thursday’s descent into indiscriminate slaughter.

But to an independent observer the only thing that is clear about the massacre is that nothing is yet certain, though the balance of evidence is swinging towards the involvement of Islamic terrorists.

The indictment sheet against Eta includes: likelihood (most bombings in Madrid are down to it); immediate precedent (it tried to bomb Madrid only ten days ago); historical precedent (it usually carries out “spectacular” attacks at election time); motive (a desperate attempt to show that the Spanish police had not pulled its teeth); some forensic scientific evidence (the Spanish police claim that the explosives used are similar to Eta’s standard issue).

The charge sheet against an Islamist group runs like this: modus operandi (simultaneous and highly co-ordinated attacks); motive (Spain’s support for Bush’s Iraq war); scale (a large number of civilian casualties fits an apocalyptic campaign which, unlike Eta’s, is totally impervious to Western public opinion); forensic scientific evidence (the Koranic tapes found in a truck associated with the bombings); admission (the e -mail to al-Quds claiming to come from the al-Qaeda-associated Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades, and Eta’s unprecedented denial of responsibility last night).

What, then, is the likelihood that the two groups were working together to produce this confusing jigsaw of evidence?

The best argument derives from what we might call the “wounded beast theory”, as articulated by Joel Cathala, the veteran French counter-terrorist officer, on Thursday to explain why Eta would have been prepared to cause such appalling human suffering: “When the beast is wounded, that is exactly when it is at its most dangerous.”

Eta’s current leadership is young, lacking in political formation and more ferociously radical than its predecessors. This group has certainly resisted persuasive arguments from supporters to call a new ceasefire. Yet its military campaign has been a shambles, with unit after unit falling into police hands virtually unblooded. The very muted response on the Basque street to the banning of Batasuna and associated groups over the past two years might suggest to such a leadership that the Basque people had lost their will to struggle, and needed to be “inspired” by an unprecedented show of strength in Madrid.

Such a leadership, under deep cover and out of touch and perhaps even out of sympathy with its own political base, might draw deeper on a quasi-mystical strain underlying Eta’s ideology — the “sacramental” view of violence identified by the Basque anthropologist Joseba Zulaika in his provocative work Basque Violence. It might be argued that such a strain of thinking is not a million miles away from the apocalyptic thinking of al-Qaeda.

We also know that al-Qaeda has operated extensively in Spain, where a number of its operatives have been arrested since September 11. Indeed, there is some evidence that the attacks on the US were partly planned in Spain. Its members can move easily through a large immigrant Islamic community. Most Spanish Muslims abhor violence, but the racism and discrimination that some sections have suffered, coupled with the impact of the Middle East conflict and the Iraq war, ha ve created a disaffected minority who sympathise with extremism.

It is true, too, that Eta has historic links with Arab states. Algeria and Libya both served as training grounds in the past. Like the IRA, the Basque group has also associated with radical Palestinian groups.

Perhaps the strongest paradigm for Arab-European terrorist co-operation comes from the joint operations carried out by the German Baader-Meinhof group and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in the 1970s.

This certainly gave an indication of how warped an isolated terrorist group’s thinking could become. Baader-Meinhof was born out of the German 1968 generation’s rejection of Nazism, yet its activists ended up callously helping to separate Jews (as hostage-victims) from Gentiles in attacks directed against Israel.

However, there is a striking difference between these precedents and the present situation. In the past, both the European and Palestinian groups were coming from an at least apparently similar secular and “Marxist” position. It is much harder to imagine camaraderie between today’s Muslim fundamentalists and the infidel soi-disants Marxist-Leninists who run Eta.

In short, the nightmare scenario of Basque-Islamist collaboration seems most likely to remain in the realm of political fiction. On the other hand, anyone predicting the terrible events since September 11 would no doubt have been dismissed in the last century as a fantasist.

Paddy Woodworth is the author of Dirty War, Clean Hands: Eta, the GAL and Spanish Democracy (Yale 2003).

March 12, 2004 at 07:12 PM in Terror groups | Permalink | TrackBack (14) | Top of page | Blog Home