Defending the Earth | |
|---|---|
| Author | Republican Sinn Féin |
| Publisher | SAOIRSE |
How the Raj was run - India under British rule
The Indian subcontinent is isolated from the rest of Asia by the Himalayas, the world’s highest mountain range, flanked at one end by a vast desert and at the other by impenetrable jungles. Only a very aggressive, or very desperate, race of people would invade India by land.
Yet, from time immemorial waves of invaders have swept into India, only to find that India is a culde-sac: it tapers to a point and all the useful land is already occupied. Hence, what invaders have tended to do is to impose themselves on the existing population as a ruling elite. Then gradually they settle down and lose their warlike and predatory ways, only to be swept under by the next wave of invaders.
Invaders could either forbid intermarriage with the existing population or else encourage it. If they took the latter course they were usually assimilated within a couple of generations (as were, for example, Alexander’s Greeks): while if they took the former course they became another layer in India’s social hierarchy, which already in ancient times evolved into the caste system. Each invasion produced another wave of downward social displacement, with the earliest inhabitants at the bottom of the heap as the despised Harijans: the ‘untouchables’.
Yet India was and is a very rich country, with fertile soil and a multitude of resources, and it has always attracted invaders. Alexander the Great attempted a conquest but had to abandon it after initial successes because his troops threatened mutiny. He introduced coinage to India. But India has neither gold or silver so that all bullion had to be imported. It proved impossible to keep gold in circulation because people either hoarded it or else converted it into jewelry. Silver coinage continued to be used. India’s greed for gold became an important feature of classical economics.
The Roman Empire during its long decline lusted after the luxuries India could provide: the pearls and precious stones, the ivory and peacocks, the silk and spices, and despite the long distance an extensive trade developed. But all India wanted in exchange was bullion, and so the wealth of Rome inexorably went East, never to return.
The Mughals
The Asiatic peoples who destroyed the Roman Empire and who continued to raid into Europe for a thousand years thereafter also attacked India: the Huns, the Khazars, the Arabs and the Turks all fought their way into India. The last such group were the Mughals. This nomadic race, originating in Mongolia, invaded India by way of Afghanistan and quickly conquered most of it.
The Mughals horrified the Indians with their habitual heavy drinking, their high taxes and their homicidal tantrums, but they created in India one of the world’s great civilizations, whose achievements in art and architecture and civil engineering are still a marvel. The Mughals were nominal Muslims but their rulers (with one exception) practiced religious toleration and, for example, employed Jesuits as advisers on political and scientific matters.
The Europeans are Coming!
The Portuguese found a sea-route from Europe to India around the Cape of Good Hope in 1498 and were thus able to trade directly with India, cutting out the Arab and Turkish middle-men. But they found that technically India was well in advance of Europe and that the Portuguese had nothing that India wanted apart from gold and silver, and they hadn’t much of either. What they did have was superb ships, and they opened a trade route between India and China and prospered greatly as a result.
Other European countries tried to take a share of this trade and the Dutch in particular began to displace the Portuguese from many of the trade routes they had established. As England began to develop as a naval power, interest in trade with India also awakened and in 1600 the Honourable East India Company (which came to be known unofficially as the John Company, for reasons now uncertain) was formed in London as a trading conglomerate to try to get a part of India’s valuable trade.
At first the John Company had very little success. It seems the Jesuits told the Mughals that the English were basically just pirates. However the emperor Shah Jehan (he who built the Taj Mahal) had a falling out with the Portuguese and expelled them from a trading station they had at a little village called Calcutta and assigned it instead to the John Company. Later, in 1661, the Portuguese made an alliance with England against the Dutch and as part of the treaty handed over to England their base at Bombay.
Thus England gained two toe-holds on India. A hundred years later the English were the real rulers of India and the Mughals had been reduced to apathetic puppets. Why the ferocious and energetic Mughals should have been reduced to such a state of indolence and lethargy is one of the great mysteries of history. Some scholars have suggested that they developed an addiction to opium and that this sapped their energy.
The Uprising
By the 19th century the John Company was itself running out of steam, and was heavily in debt to the London government.
In May 1857 an uprising against British rule broke out in the north of India. It was spontaneous and unplanned but it spread rapidly. The insurgents had no real aims, they seem to have just hoped to get rid of the hated European overlords and restart the Mughal Empire.
The British withdrew into fortifications with their families and held off the rebels until troops from the garrison arrived to beat them back. The uprising, which the British always thereafter called ‘The Indian Mutiny’, collapsed in a few months, but the fright it gave to the British was devastating. Horror stories of the sufferings of wives and children cooped up in besieged forts were to be part of the education of English children for a century afterwards, and there were allegations of massacres of white settlers by the rebels.
Ruthless reprisals began at once. Anybody suspected of having taken part in any way in the uprising was killed. A favourite method of execution was to tie the suspect to the muzzle of a cannon, which was then fired.
Foundations of the Raj
A year after the uprising the London government decided to wind up the John Company and take over direct control of India. This was formalised in the Government of India Act of 1858.
India would be ruled by a viceroy with the help of a large centralised bureaucracy. One important consideration was that India should be run at a profit. All the cost of administering India had to be met out of the revenues of India, as had the cost of the British military garrison stationed in India.
On top of this India had to pay the ‘Imperial Contribution’: a portion of the British domestic budget, usually about 15 per cent, supposedly to cover the cost of shared facilities like the diplomatic service. Finally there was a 10 per cent import duty on all goods imported into India and paid directly to London, as compensation for alleged losses in the 1857 uprising.
The budget had to be balanced: there was to be no Indian equivalent of the National Debt. The two main sources of revenue were a tax on land inherited from the Mughals and the John Company’s opium monopoly.
The last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah, was deported to Rangoon and placed under house arrest there, but was never formally deposed. After he died Victoria assumed the title Empress of India.
The Indian Civil Service
During the 90 years of the Raj, the period of direct British rule over India, the running of India was in the hands of the Indian Civil Service (ICS). All former employees of the John Company were taken on automatically, with continuity of service and retrospective pension rights. Thus the ICS inherited all the subaltern personnel and all the attitudes and psychology of its predecessor.
Recruitment into the ICS was by interview, held in London. Rules of recruitment made sure that only persons educated in England’s posh boarding schools were eligible. The ICS came to be seen as something of a last chance career option for those who failed to get into either university or military college. It also had a certain appeal to persons of the school bully type, for in India an Englishman’s word was LAW.
For nearly a century these administrators, with their white sun helmets and boyscout shorts, ruled India, scowling and snapping out orders left and right; each of them never without a little cane for pointing and prodding. It was drummed into them that they must never admit to having made a mistake, as this would lower their esteem in the eyes of the ‘natives’.
Retirement age was 55, because it was felt that Indians should see Englishmen only in the prime of life. England soon became full of retired ICS officials living out their pensions: they became the backbone of the English political right and their experiences in India, where they had been Lords of all Mankind, made them very protective of the class system.
The task of the ICS was to run India at a profit. The local administrator in an area was magistrate, chief of police, press censor and everything else but his official title was Collector and his primary task was to ensure that revenue came in on time and in full.
Enthusiasts for Empire have always held up the ICS as a shining example of dedication, honesty and paternal concern for the ‘natives’. Closer examination reveals a different picture. The John Company had paid no pensions: instead employees were supposed to provide for their retirement themselves by engaging in ‘Commerce’ in their spare time. A better method of encouraging corruption would have been hard to devise. The ICS paid very generous pensions, but it had inherited the personnel and practices of the John Company. Young men arriving in India direct from boarding schools in England were expected to adopt an ostentatious lifestyle, with servants, polo ponies and the rest, and could hardly avoid getting into debt. Brought up to believe that ‘natives’ are all inherently dishonest, and lodged in a bureaucracy without control mechanisms where arrogance and bluster served to cover one’s tracks and where permits were needed for everything, it was all too easy to start what was politely called ‘shaking the pagoda tree’.
Nor was India governed particularly well. Under the Mughals it had been an exporter of food, under the Raj there were frequent famines. India was starved of capital and was kept backward. The development of industries was discouraged as this would have provided competition for British factories. In agriculture the policy was to divert land from food production to the growing of exportable commodities such as indigo, hemp, cotton, tea, coffee and opium. Public works were mainly for the military: trunk roads for easy movement of troops, strategic railways, fortifications and naval bases. The only major public works undertaking was an irrigation scheme on the Indus River: to grow tobacco and cotton for export.
The Beginnings of Nationalism
India has about 200 language groups, making inter-regional alliance difficult. Hinduism is the major religion, but Muslims had been the dominant group from about 1100 AD until the arrival of the Europeans. In the Indus Plain and in Bengal the majority of the population were Muslims and elsewhere Muslims were to be found as a minority.
A third important religious group was the Sikhs, found mainly in Punjab. Between the religious communities there was neither much hostility nor much communication: for the most part they just ignored each other.
During the later part of the 19th century a new national leadership began to emerge in India, made up mostly of persons who had been educated in Europe and had absorbed progressive ideas there and were determined to rise above caste and sectarian interests. In December 1885 the Indian Congress Party was founded in Calcutta, with the aim of campaigning for ‘Home Rule’ on the model of the Irish Party at Westminster.
The major difficulty they faced in India was that there were no elections, and therefore no means of creating an electoral power base. Also any mention of self-government to the authorities brought an immediate response that Indians were uncivilized and unfit to run a country.
1857 Uprising
In 1913 the Congress leader Jawaharlal Nehru actually visited Ireland and found that the younger nationalists had mostly decided that ‘Home Rule’ was a will o’ the wisp and that to pursue it any further was a waste of time and whining at the English had never got them anywhere.
Currency Problems
Coinage was introduced to India by Alexander the Great and imitation Greek coins continued to be minted by Indian rulers ever afterwards. The country had no resources in either gold or silver so that bullion for minting coins had to be imported. It proved impossible to keep gold coins in circulation; any amount of them disappeared into private hoards. In 1527 the Mughals introduced a single standard silver coin, the rupee (rupiya), with minor coins of copper or brass. The British continued to use the rupee, which was fixed at fifteen to the pound sterling
The value of the rupee depended on the value of the silver it contained while the value of the pound sterling depended on the amount of gold in the sovereign. In the late 19th century, thanks to the discovery of vast deposits in Nevada, there was a world glut of silver and the value of the rupee began to fall.
But India had to pay out huge amounts of money each year assessed in sterling: the ‘Imperial Contribution’, the pensions of retired ICS people, the cost of the British garrison and so on. The fall in value of the rupee relative to sterling meant that more revenue had to be raised to meet the same expenditure.
The First World War
In August 1914 England declared war on Germany. Officials of the Raj gleefully asserted that by Christmas the Union Jack would be flying over Berlin, but within a few weeks the proud British Expeditionary Force had been routed at the Battle of Mons and was in full flight across the Marne, and they were obliged to change their tune.
They approached the leaders of Congress and offered a deal: support the war effort and afterwards we promise rapid progress towards Home Rule. Taking them at their word the nationalists, including the pacifist Gandhi, publicly appealed to Indians to enlist: even though Germany was a country with which India had no quarrel.
Over a million Indians joined the British Army, and of these about 36,000 were killed and ten times as many wounded. But Indians had to endure the racist contempt of the British they fought alongside.
The highest rank an Indian could reach was Subahdar-major (Sergeant-Major) and this did not rate even as high as a corporal in an English regiment. An old officer’s mess toast ran: “To Tommy Atkins our pride and joy / He can call the Subahdar-Major BOY!”
During the war two new troubles arose. In the Sikh community there was much resentment because a party of several hundred Sikhs that had travelled to Canada on the assumption that, being technically citizens of the British Empire, they were entitled to settle there, were on arrival in Vancouver thrown into prison and held there until deported back to India. Among Muslims there was unrest when England declared war on Turkey, a Muslim country.
The Post-War Lunatic Phase
During the war India had been required to pay the entire cost of Indian troops serving overseas and also had to raise over half a billion pounds to pay for war supplies requisitioned in India.
After the war the British in India appear to have gone through a phase of madness. This was probably due to the influence of war propaganda, combined with survivor-guilt following very heavy war losses: particurlarly among the English social classes from which the garrison was largely drawn.
First of all, the viceroy announced that India would make a gift to England of one billion pounds as a contribution to the cost of the war. Secondly it was decided to build a new capital city in white marble in the desert near Delhi, the old Mughal capital.
Then an attempt was made to issue a gold coinage. Many millions of gold sovereigns were minted and put into circulation. (British 1918 sovereigns bearing the Calcutta mint-mark are today collector’s curios). At the same time a new Indian gold coin, the mohur, valued at fifteen rupees and struck from the same blanks as the sovereigns, was also issued. No sooner was this done than it was decided to revalue the rupee from fifteen to the pound to ten to the pound. This meant that there were now two coins in circulation containing the same amount of gold, but one was worth 50 per cent more than the other!
There was a coup in Afghanistan and this inspired the British to launch an invasion of that country. They found — like the Russians half a century later — that Afghanistan is covered in very high mountains, there’s nothing to eat and the inhabitants are all crack shots. In less than a year they had to withdraw in disorder.
There was unrest and sporadic rioting in many areas. In April of 1919 a demonstration in Amritsar was broken up by troops. It was alleged that two Englishwomen had been assaulted by rioters and in reprisal Indians were made lie down in the streets and crawl along on their stomachs.
A few days later large crowds flocked into Amritsar — actually to attend a religious festival — but the authorities surmised a riot was planned and ordered troops to open fire. Over 400 people were killed. The officer who gave the order to fire, General Dyer, was relieved of his command and sent back to England, where he was hailed by the Tory press as ‘The Lion of the Punjab’ and treated as a national hero.
At the same time an influenza epidemic swept India and several million people died. On top of this the two main revenue earners for the Raj, the opium and indigo markets, both collapsed.
There was a budget deficit in 1921 and again in 1922. The British sought a remedy by introducing a tax on salt.
Of all the things they ever did, nothing created more support for the nationalists than the salt tax. A massacre in Amritsar might not mean much to a coppersmith in Madras, but a tax on salt affected everybody.
Enter, and Exit, the Princes
As pressure for governmental reform grew, the British began to look around for ways of obstructing progress in that direction, and they turned to the ‘Princes’ for support.
The ‘Indian Native States’ made up nearly half the area of India. There were about 600 of them: mostly very small though the half-dozen largest were bigger than Ireland. The rulers of these petty states had been under the domination of the Mughals in a kind of feudal arrangement and had managed to patch up various deals with the British allowing them to maintain some of their wealth and power.
Each ruler had to pay an annual levy to the Raj ‘towards the defence of India’ — defence against whom was a question they were not permitted to ask — and were otherwise mostly left to their own devices. However each of them had assigned a ‘British Resident’ whose advice was expected to be taken. Misbehaving maharajahs could find themselves deported to the Seychelles Islands; there to live out their years playing whist with the likes of the queen of Uganda, the sultan of Johore or the archbishop of Cyprus.
These ‘princes’ had no real social function: they were really only glorified landlords and tended to degenerate into playboys. But it was to them that the British turned, knowing that there was a mutual interest in preventing political change in India.
A ‘Council of Princes’ was set up, intended to become eventually an Indian version of the London House of Lords. In 1926 the viceroy announced: “The relationship between the Paramount Power and the Princes should not be transferred to any new legislature without their permission”. So, the princes were to have a veto, but there was also a reminder as to Who was Boss: “The supremacy of the crown is not derived from treaties or engagements but exists independently.” In 1935 the British brought in formal legislation to the effect that there could be no change in the way India was governed until half the ‘native states’ agreed.
The British promoted the princes as the representatives of India: consulting them and buttering them up in various ways. Now and then a visiting ‘royal’ would tog up in turban and jodhpurs and hold a ‘durbar’ (garden party) for them before going off to the hill country to try and shoot some large animals. But the princes proved to be of little use. Most of them never even bothered to attend the council or take part in its deliberations: being more at home at the roulette table than the conference table, and before long the British wrote them off.
Mother India
In 1927 the British had an unexpected stroke of luck. An American writer, Katherine Mayo, published a book called Mother India on the subject of child marriage in India and on sex among the Hindus generally. Indian leaders admitted that child marriage was indeed a problem in some remote areas but they claimed that the book was exaggerated and misleading, and an Indian professor published a scholarly refutation.
But Mother India became a best seller: not least because the author, who was a tabloid journalist, did not spare the reader the grisly details. The British promoted the book world wide, as did certain missionary organizations, and it was to do a great deal of harm to the nationalist cause. All over the world, readers taking the book at face value tended to accept the British argument that the Indians were savages and not fit to govern themselves.
Divide and Conquer
Whatever the British did, the nationalists gradually increased in numbers and influence.
In some areas there were now regular disturbances. The British found it impossible to understand how their rule could be resented: for surely everybody knew that the British Empire was the envy of the world? They concluded that all the trouble was due to a ‘tiny minority’ who were ‘in the pay’ of England’s enemies and that the solution was to impose all sorts of inconveniences on the population: curfews, searches, travel restrictions, collective fines and so on and that the people would blame the ‘terrorists’ and ‘drive them out’.
This policy was at the heart of British colonial rule everywhere, and the fact that it manifestly does not work has never caused it to be abandoned.
Originally the Muslim and Sikh communities had given the British the most trouble, but the British now turned to these communities for support against the growing power of Congress. They were told by the British that while they were nowhere near the level of their white masters they were far superior to the Hindu majority. In the army and police Muslims and Sikhs were paid more and were given preference in promotion.
Nationalist attitudes also began to harden. The previous demand for Home Rule was replaced by a ‘Brits Out’ policy: Quit India. A well-organised campaign of passive resistance and civil disobedience was effective in convincing the British that they had better at least appear to be doing something.
They went for delaying tactics: there were endless Royal Committees, Inquiries, White Papers, Parliamentary Commissions and the like.
Eventually they began discussions with Congress. They suggested setting up a Consultative Assembly to ‘advise’ the government: one third made up of elected representatives and the other two-thirds to be ‘moderates’ nominated by the viceroy. Though unimpressed, Congress tried to negotiate, and the British then began throwing all sorts of obstacles in their path: for example they suddenly came up with a demand that the ‘depressed classes’ (the Harijans or ‘Untouchables’) should have separate representation.
A leading Muslim member of Congress, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, broke away and formed his own rival Islamic organization, the Muslim League. Thereafter the British insisted that Jinnah be included in all negotiations and given parity with Congress. The process that led to the partition of India had begun.
The world economic crisis known as the Depression had a severe impact on India because most of India’s exports were in the category of luxury goods, or at least goods that people could at a pinch do without.
The Second World War
When England declared war on Germany in 1939 the viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, did the same on behalf of India. The British insisted that the German economy was on the brink of collapse and the war would be over in a few weeks. However, things had changed a lot since 1914: public opinion in India now had to be taken into consideration. An unofficial agreement was put together, the main points being:
India would make a once-only contribution of ten million rupees to the war effort.
War material bought in India would be paid for by India, but an equivalent sum would be lodged in a bank in London and paid to India after the war.
India would meet the cost of defending India.
The third item seemed a bit of an afterthought, since there was little chance the Germans would get as far as India, but by 1942 the Japanese had actually crossed the eastern frontiers of India and the war against them was eventually to cost India ten billion rupees.
Congress opposed participation in the war, and Gandhi publicly campaigned against recruitment. (Nehru, who more or less supported the war, was in prison.)
With the fall of Singapore about 60,000 Indian troops were taken prisoner by the Japanese. An Indian nationalist who had been living in Japan, Surbhas Chander Bose, organised an Indian National Army to fight with the Japanese and recruited about half the POWs. But the Japanese turned out to be just as racist as the British: they were contemptuous of soldiers who had given up so easily and suspected they might do so again given the opportunity. Bose himself complained that the INA was employed mending roads, unloading trains and in similar activities. It should be added that the INA was very short of officers.
Some Indians were led to believe that after the war Britain would give India self-government but in 1942 Churchill reassured his back-benchers that this would not be so. The Indians soon found out: even in wartime it proved impossible any longer to preach one line in London and another in Delhi.
In 1943 there was a major famine in Bengal, costing somewhere between three and six million lives. When the local naval commander (Admiral Mountbatten) organised shipments of food into the area he was personally reprimanded by Churchill, who told him to ignore the famine and concentrate on fighting the Japanese.
The End of the Raj
When the war ended the British assumed their Indian empire was safe and destined to last long into the future. The ICS continued to recruit young men, offering them life careers. But things had changed in the world.
Surbhas Chander Bose was killed in a plane crash towards the end of the war, but his INA volunteers were now in prison camps in Burma and Malaya waiting for the British to decide what to do with them. The viceroy, General Wavell, regarded them as traitors and wanted to send them all back to their native villages and publicly hang them. But Indians who had fought for the British advised against it and suggested that a general amnesty would be the right solution.
The issue dragged on and on and caused much resentment in India and eventually led to unrest even in the Indian regiments in the army. When a few INA men were arraigned before courtmartials staffed by Indian officers they were let off with verbal reprimands. Eventually the British released the lot.
Meanwhile the British withdrew all the silver rupees in circulation, replacing them with ones made of nickel. The silver was needed to pay Britain’s war-debts. The war fund deposited in London was used to pay off various debts accumulated by the Raj over the years.
Britain began to lose control in India. In 1947 Lord Mountbatten was sent out as the last viceroy, with orders to pull out in as dignified a manner as possible. Six months later British troops lowered the Union Jack at the viceroy’s residence for the last time, and then cut down the flagpole.
India and Ireland
When the policies of the London government in Ireland and in India are compared similarities soon emerge. The 1798 uprising in Ireland was followed by the Act of Union, the abolition of the local puppet government, direct rule and the imposition of a top-down bureaucracy. The 1857 uprising in India was followed by the abolition of the puppet Mughal Empire, the arrival of a viceroy and direct rule. Both uprisings were put down with great cruelty. Both Ireland and India were systematically looted of their wealth, for despite their protestations the British were in both countries not to give but to take; and both experienced famines under direct rule.
In both countries the inhabitants were despised and treated with contempt. Even today London politicians at Stormont addressing the Irish on television tend to behave as if they are talking to spoilt nine-year-olds.
Divide-and-conquer by exploiting sectarian differences was a feature of British rule in both countries, and in both cases ultimately lead to partition. (This also happened elsewhere, examples are Palestine and Cyprus).
During the Second World War the British ambassador in Dublin, the bullying Sir John Maffey, was not a professional diplomat but a former colonial administrator who had spent most of his life in India bossing maharajahs around. In Dublin he acted as if he were still the British Resident in some obscure Indian Native State and de Valera was a slippery local ruler trying to get out of doing his duty to the Empire.
There was never much contact between Irish and Indian separatists: the Indians tended rather to look to the the Irish Party at Westminster as models of how to behave. It is known that after the Civil War a few Republicans offered their services to the Indians to help organize and train a rebel army, but Gandhi turned them down: he had concluded that if India rose in rebellion the British would massacre millions of people and that India should rely rather on its huge population uniting to make the Raj unworkable and that way force the British to withdraw.
The Basque Country
“In order to understand this feeling, it can be compared with that of an individual who has a place in a poltical scheme of things which recognises individuals but not people. If someone were to be asked whether he would like to enjoy the same health as another person, to be as beautiful, as youthful, or as well-off, he would doubtless reply in the affirmative. But if he were to be asked whether he would like to become that other person, he would reply that he would certainly not. Each individual wishes to have the advantages enjoyed by others, but without becoming them, without renouncing his own self. This feeling of identity is well understood at the individual level but not at the collective, or so it would seem; it is, however, a simple, elementary and potent feeling.” — Luis Nunez Astrain. The Basques. Their struggle for independence.
Provinces of Euskal Herria, Euskadi
| Jurisdiction | |
|---|---|
| Alava | Araba in Basque |
| Guipuzcoa | Gipuzkoa |
| Vizcaya | Biskaia |
| Navarra | Nafarroa |
| Jurisdiction | |
|---|---|
| Basse Navarre | BeNafarroa |
| Labourd | Lapurdi |
| Soule | Zuberoa |
Pamplona, the capital of Navarra, is also the former Basque capital.
Saint-Jean-de-Port is the capital of Bassa Navarre, which is under French jurisdiction.
Basque Country covers an area of 20,000 square kilometres.
Population 2,873,512
254,194 live in the northern part under French jurisdiction (Census 15 March 1990) 2,623,318 live in the southern part (Census 1 March 1991)
Centres of population Bilbao (Bilbo) with nearly 500,000, Pamplona (Irunea), San Sebastian (Donostia) andVitoria (Gazteiz) have about 170,000 inhabitants. Bayonne, in the French area has about 50,000 inhabitants.
The provinces in the French area Labourd, Soule and Basse Navarre are administered by the French departement of Pyrenees-Atlantiques along with the Bearn. The prefecture is situated in Pau, the capital of the Bearn.
The three western provinces, in the Spanish area, Alava, Guipuzcoa and Vizcaya are designated as one of the 17 Autonomous Regions of the Spanish State and are known as the Comunidad Autonoma Vasco (CAV): The Autonomous Basque Community). Its capital is the town of Vitoria.
Navarra south of the Pyrenees is another Autonomous Region and is known as the Comunidad Foral Navarra (The Foral Community of Navarra)
The CAV comprises three provincial mini-parliaments called Juntas Generales, each composed of 51 members. Their main function is to formulate and control the Diputacion of Executive Committee of each province. There is also, for all three provinces, the Autonomous Parliament of Vitoria (with 75 members), a legislative body, on which the so-called Government of the Basque Country depends.
The Foral Community of Navarre has a single legislative body, the Parliament of Navarra with 50 members, on which the government of Navarre relies.
“The only official recognition of the totality of the southern Basque Country [in the Spanish area] is a police project, known since 1983 as the Plan Zen (Zona Especial Norte) . . . it unites all four provinces in the fight against ETA.” (The Basques. Their struggle for independence).
The Basque language is Euskara, the oldest language in Europe. It is the only pre-Indo-European language spoken in Europe today. It was already in existence during the Bronze Age. Euskara has no known linguistic relations and is considered to be unique.
The provinces of Guipuzxoa, Labourd, Basse Navarre and Soule are the bulk of the Basque-speaking area. It is not spoken in parts of Alava, Navarra and Vizcaya.
In 1717, Philip V addressed a secret decree to the corregidores of Catalonia which included the sentence: “The corregidor will take the greatest care to introduce the Castilian language, using the most moderate and sidcreet methods, so that only the result will be noticeable and not the means”.
During the first decades of the twentieth century there was a practice whereby at the beginning of a school day, a ring was given to a pupil who was required to pass it on to any other child caught speaking Basque. The pupil with the ring at the end of the afternoon was beaten.
The civil registration of children with Basque names such as ‘Inaki, Kepa, Koldobika and all others which flagrantly smack of separatism’, as a Spanish decree of 1938 put it, was banned.
The proportion of Basques speaking Basque in 1868 was 54% (estimated by Ldislao de Velasco). By 1991 it had been reduced to 23.7%
| Area | Pop. | Speakers | % |
|---|---|---|---|
| Alava | 272,447 | 25,300 | 9.3 |
| Basse Navarre | 29,298 | 18,897 | 64.5 |
| Guipuzcoa | 676,448 | 310,100 | 45.8 |
| Labourd | 204,598 | 53,195 | 26 |
| Navarra | 519,277 | 52,023 | 10 |
| Vizcaya | 1,155,106 | 212,600 | 18.4 |
| Soule | 16,298 | 8,915 | 54.7 |
| Total | 2,873,512 | 681,030 | 23.7 |
The Flag
Sabino Arana Goiri, a native of Vizcaya, who founded the Partido Nacionalista Vasco (The Basque Nationalist Party) in 1895, devised the Basque flag. The flg consists of a red ground symbolising the people, the green diagonals of the cross of St Andrew, representing the trditional Basque lws, and a white cross, the symbol of Christianity. From about 1900 Sabino Arana began referring to the Basque Country as Euzkadi, a neologism composted of the root ‘euzko’, meaning Basque, and the suffix ‘di’, which implies the whole or the collectivity. The name Eukadi (now spelled Euskadi) refers to the totality of the seven Basque provinces. A second nationalist party, Accion Nacionalista Vasca (Basque Nationalist Action) was formed in the 1930s while another group, based around the magazine ‘Yagi Yagi’ also existed.
Since 1932 the Basques have celebrated their national day, known as Aberri Egana.
The first Aberri Egana was held in Bilbao, the birthplace of Sabino Arana.
ETA
Another nationalist group emerged in 1952 known as Ekin (action). In December 1958 Ekin changed its name to Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (The Basque Country and Liberty) of ETA for short. ETA carried out its first explosions in 1959 in the towns of Bilbao, Vitoria and Santander.
The first conference of ETA was held in 1962. Among the first things that ETA did were to denounce racism and replace it, as a priority, with an active defence of the Basque language. It also opposed the Christian Democratic ideology of the PNV with a radical secularism and a commitment to the cause of the working class.
In 1962 a general strike was called in the provinces of Vizxaya and Guipuzxoa, and also in Asturias and eventually throughout the peninsula, causing the first state of emergency since Franco had seized ower. The first measures by the French authorities against ETA took the form of house arrests.
In 1963 a group known as Enbata (‘the strong wind from the sea which blows before a storm’) was founded in the area under French jurisdiction. The group published a magazine of the same name.
ETA’s fifth conference, held in two parts between 1966 and 1967, worked out the organisation's basic principles, which remained in place up to the death of Franco in 1975. It brought together the theories of national and social liberation, adopting the term ‘the Basque working people’ and creating four wings to be resonsible for its activities in the cultural, political, working class and military fields. The first part of the conference dealth with the expulsion of those who were seeking to convert ETA into a workers’ party with a Spanish dimension
In June 1968 the leader of the fifth conference, Txabi Etxebarrieta, a native of Bilbao, kelled a policeman at a road-block. This was the first killing by ETA. A few hours later the police shot Etxebarrieta who became the first member of ETA to die in action.
ETA carried out its second killing the following August when a police torturer, Meliton Manzana was shot dead at his home in Irun. Following this the Franco regime declared a state of emergency in the province of Guipuzcoa.
In 1969 the police arrested almost the entire directorate of ETA. On Aberri Eguna in 1969 two young members of the PNV died when a bomb they were carrying exploded prematurely.
In December 1970 the military trial of 16 ETA members took place at Burgos. Six of them, accused of causing the death of the policeman Mnzanas were condemned to death. This sentence sparked off a wave of protests leading to a general strike and the kidnapping by ETA of the German Consul at San Sebastian. A new state of emergency was declared in the province of Guipuzcoa following the death sentences being handed down. The uproar at the verdict was such that Franco was obliged to publicly grant the accused a reprieve.
In 1973 ETA killed Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, General Franco’s second-in-command and President of the Spanish Government. The killing was carried out by means of a car-bomb. Towards the end of 1973 there was a split in ETA between the so-called ‘political-military’ and the ‘military’ wings.
In 1976 the ‘political-military’ wing decided to launch a legal political party which called itself Partido para la Revolcion Vasxa (Party of the Basque Revolution) known by its Basque initials of ETA.
The ‘political-military’ wing was wound up in the 1980s, so the present ETA draws its roots from the ‘military’ wing in the split. In an interview broadcast by the German television station West-3 on April 12, 1994 ETA made the following statement: “Our struggle has always been and continues to be selective. If we use a booby-trapped car, it is to strike against our enemies, those who oppress our people, and no-one else. On the other hand, while we are aware that there have been mistakes in recent years, the victims were not deliberately chosen. The way we operate does not and will not allow that. There have been blunders and errors and we have given much thought to preventing them from happening again. We try to use methods that will not result in the death of innocent people, for our sole targets are those who oppress the Basque people”.
“Gora Euskadi Askatuta”
(Long live a free Basque Country