'It Has To Be Al Qaeda'

Their own leader, Arnold Otegi said yesterday they are totally opposed to this. ETA could not have done this. In a way it goes against the grain of ETA. If ETA has done this, it is ETA's death among their own supporters. Obviously there is my own wish that this not ETA--it would be so shameful and so infamous for every Basque. Yet you cannot rule out that in that kind of organization: They are like cornered animals where they are constantly pursued, they feel relentlessly beaten by the Spanish police. I don't know, maybe a group of them went to this extreme. I want to believe that it's not the case, but you never know.

Normally do you sympathize with ETA?

No, not at all. I am an anthropologist. Twenty-five years ago as a graduate student I did an ethnography of political violence of my own village, Itziar. I did an ethnography of how people got into becoming ETA sympathizers or ETA activists. The roots of it were very much in religion, in the church. There was a lot of it in the Spanish Civil War [at the end of which General Francisco Franco took power and ruthlessly oppressed the Basques]. It was a kind of peer pressure thing also. It's like a kind of Homeric tragedy in which you see people getting into it--and you might have done the same thing--but it ends in tragedy; it ends in error; it ends in murder that is unjustified. These past couple of decades I have abhorred ETA's madness. These last years they have killed intellectuals, journalists, some of them friends of mine. I couldn't be more ashamed of being Basque.

ETA seems to be distancing itself from these bombings.

I just heard that they have disclaimed it. Can you believe them? I tend to believe it. The main source of the news seems to be the Spanish government.

Which has a complicated relationship with the ETA.