Facing terror charges, ETA's last boss apologises for deaths

Spanish anti-terrorism investigators have depicted him as a bloodthirsty advocate of violence who only opportunistically pursued negotiations after police crackdowns and a shrinking support base from Basque separatists weakened ETA. Now 69, diminished by a battle with cancer and facing the prospect of spending the twilight of a life devoted to Basque independence behind bars, the man widely known by his police alias Josu Ternera, or “The Calf,” says he's sorry for the “irreparable damage” caused by ETA violence as it sought to build an independent state straddling the Pyrenees mountains between Spain and France.

The last known chief of ETA, the now-extinct Basque separatist militant group, goes on trial Monday in Paris for terrorism charges that he deems "absurd" because of his role in ending a conflict that claimed hundreds of lives and terrorised Spain for half a century. Josu Urrutikoetxea led ETA during one of its bloodiest periods, when its victims included children bombed to death while sleeping in a Zaragoza police compound, where a monument to their stolen lives now stands. In a rare interview after 17 years on the run, he offered an apology, advised other separatist movements against resorting to violence and painted himself as a changed man.

That's a preposterous claim to those who lost loved ones to ETA's violence, which caused around 850 deaths and thousands of injuries and hijacked the Basque and Spanish political debate for decades. Just because he oversaw ETA's end in 2018, they stress, that doesn't erase his past. Spanish anti-terrorism investigators have depicted him as a bloodthirsty advocate of violence who only opportunistically pursued negotiations after police crackdowns and a shrinking support base from Basque separatists weakened ETA.

Now 69, diminished by a battle with cancer and facing the prospect of spending the twilight of a life devoted to Basque independence behind bars, the man widely known by his police alias Josu Ternera, or "The Calf," says he's sorry for the "irreparable damage" caused by ETA violence as it sought to build an independent state straddling the Pyrenees mountains between Spain and France. But even when he admits regrets, he adds a caveat.

Asked if he would apologize to ETA victims' families, he told The Associated Press: "Of course, (I offer) apologies for something that we can't repair." But he insisted Basque's independence movement suffered, too, from violence rooted in the Spanish dictatorship that ended more than four decades ago. "The Basque country was entering into a black hole" of cultural repression, he said, "and we had to do the maximum to pull it out." Some of ETA's victims said they want more than apologies; they want him to face justice. "I don't seek revenge against Josu Ternera," said Lucía Ruiz, who was 10 when she was injured in the 1987 blast targeting military police barracks in Zaragoza, where she lived with her father, a civil guard. "But this gentleman tried to kill me and I want for him to pay a price for it. It's my right as a Spanish citizen." Since his long-awaited arrest last year, Urrutikoetxea has been on a campaign to shed the terrorist label and rebrand himself as a repentant, aging peacemaker.

Amid growing international support, he won conditional release in July pending trial, after lawyers argued his poor health made him vulnerable to contracting coronavirus. He's now staying with a professor friend near Paris' Place de la Republique where he is trying to get a college diploma and is allowed out a few hours a day with an electronic bracelet. In a petition published Saturday, former Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams, academic social critic Noam Chomsky, separatist Catalan ex-president Carles Puigdemont and more than 250 other intellectuals called for France and Spain to end Urrutikoetxea's "outrageous and intolerable" prosecution.

By putting him on trial, they argue, "France is implicitly criminalizing all negotiators and calling into question all current and future peace processes in the world." But across the Pyrenees, those calls are rejected by the vast majority of Spain's political mainstream. Spanish newspaper El Mundo described what it called "an operation to whitewash" him. Survivors of violent attacks and relatives of ETA's victims say the campaign humiliates them. Ruiz and Spanish authorities believe that Urrutikoetxea, as ETA's leader, either approved or knew about the car that, loaded with dynamite, exploded under her window at the Zaragoza Civil Guard headquarters where she lived with her father, mother and sister.

Three ETA assailants were tried and imprisoned as the executors of the attack, which killed 11 people, including six minors, all of them her neighbors or acquaintances. "He now presents himself as the country's savior," Ruiz said. It will be difficult to prove in court that he orchestrated the attack, she said, because "unfortunately these people don't leave a paper trail. But this gentleman is a murderer, with murder written in capital letters." Urrutikoetxea denies any role, saying, "They want me to answer for something I had nothing to do with." His life mirrors the trajectory of ETA, whose initials stand for "Basque Homeland and Freedom" in the Basque language and was created during Gen. Francisco Franco's 1939-1975 dictatorship.

He joined at 17 in 1968, the year of ETA's first deadly attack. Classified as a terrorist organization by the U.S. and several countries, ETA shot to international prominence in the 1970s amid attacks and kidnappings. ETA's cause was politically and socially divisive inside Spain's Basque society and widely rejected across the rest of Spain. It had some significant support among separatist-minded Basques, but many other Basques were appalled by its tactics and silenced by the terror the group imposed.