Official negotiations are expected to begin soon between Madrid and the Basque separatist group, the ETA. The Basque government is seizing this opportunity to launch a peace plan. This plan's measures to recognize the crimes committed and to pay compensation to victims, including the victims of Francoism, represent a veritable challenge for Spain, which for the past thirty years has chosen to forget its past in order to forge ahead with democratic transition. Pierre Hazan, one of the experts consulted by the Basque authorities, explains these measures and describes the issues at stake.
The Spanish transition to democracy has always been an exception to the rule. Whereas in most countries, the transition from civil war to peace or from dictatorship to democracy leads to a re-examination of these dark periods and even the establishment of truth commissions, the payment of reparations for victims or the organization of trials, this was never the case in Spain. On the contrary, the Spanish made their successful transition to democracy through collective amnesia. A survey cited by the BBC affirms that half of all Spaniards have never discussed the civil war at home - which caused several thousand deaths between 1936 and 1939 - and that 35% have never even broached the topic at school. Since Franco's death in 1975, the right and the left have been united by a "pact to forget" in order to avoid discussing a past deemed too sensitive. However, seventy years after the civil war began and 30 years after the Franco dictatorship ended, attitudes are starting to change.

"Our transition from dictatorship to democracy is an example in Europe and I think we [need] to cherish it and not to reopen wounds which have already been cured," said a spokesperson from the Peoples Party (right-wing). This party is opposed to the law being drafted by José Luis Zapatero's socialist government on the "recovery of historical memory." The families of thousands of Franco's victims who were killed and buried anonymously in mass graves have also begun to speak out against this policy of forgetting the past. For the past six years, the bodies of approximately 500 victims have been exhumed - out of an estimated total of 30,000 - including the body of Garcia Lorca, a famous Spanish poet who was assassinated.

The unique dynamic of the Basque conflict is now opening the way for a harsh new attack on these decades of silence. The Basque government has just launched a "peace and reconciliation plan" to help bring an end to the conflict that has bathed this region of northern Spain in blood since 1968, killing over a thousand people and terrorizing the society. In this plan, the Basque government tackles the issue of Franco's repression head-on. From his office in Vitoria, surrounded by reproductions of "Guernica", a famous painting by Picasso of this Basque martyr town that has become a world symbol of the horrors of war, the president of the Basque government, Christian-democrat Juan José Ibarretxe, invited international experts, mostly from Northern Ireland and South Africa, to study his government's plan in September. The goal is to create the best possible environment to encourage Spain and the ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatusana) - which declared a permanent cease-fire on March 22 - to end one of Europe's oldest conflicts. The Basque government will not be a party to these negotiations. However, it wants to make its marginal role count. Consequently, it decided to delve into the memory of the past by first recognizing the harm inflicted on all victims - not only the victims of the ETA, which has assassinated between 800 and 900 victims since 1968, and the victims of the police and extreme right groups, which are responsible for 350 deaths and cases of torture, but also the victims of Franco's reign. Better still, the Basque authorities have decided to compensate these victims. Thirty-six million euros have already been paid out to people who were detained or tortured under the Franco regime. After the civil war ended, the victorious Franco supporters shot 3,000 opponents in this region alone. Angel Cerrano, one of the government officials in charge of the victims case, explains why these victims were included in the peace plan. "The dictator years spread hatred, a fascination with weapons and a militarization of minds - all of which was absorbed by the ETA. Integrating the memory of the dictatorship helps us better understand what happened subsequently and it helps us build a future." In keeping with this initiative, the authorities have decided to change the names of streets that evoke the memory of Franco.

The Basque government's plan also calls upon Spain to incarcerate ETA prisoners in detention centers near their region and offers to establish a human rights monitoring agency and to introduce education on "peace, co-existence and reconciliation" in schools. Thus, inspired by the reconciliation mechanisms that have been developed in other countries over the past twenty years, the Basque government with its limited resources wants to reconfigure the political environment, with the end result being to do away with the "Spanish model."