“How can one take up arms and surrender them in one life?” This is the question answered by Myriam Prévost and Anna Buy in their audio series How to end a war. These documentarians offer us to approach the war – at a time when it is making its sad return to the marches of Europe – by its end, by its outcome, if it is not utopian to speak of it in this way.
Founded in 1959 to resist the Spanish dictatorship of General Franco, ETA (Euskadi ta Askatasuna for “Basque Country and Freedom”) turned to armed struggle in 1968. Today, more than 850 deaths are attributed to it. How did the Basque Country turn this bloody page in its history?
Over the course of eight episodes, Myriam Prévost reconstructs, with the Basque actors in the conflict and academics, the pieces of a complex and fascinating puzzle between secret negotiations, failure of negotiations, unstoppable spirals of violence and repression, absurd but necessary legal decisions. to advance, arrests and clandestinity…
“What the Basques say is that to make peace, you have to know how to talk about how the war happened”: the first two episodes set the geographical scene and unfold the origins of the conflict, with, in particular, the lighting of the historian and militant of the abertzale (independence) left Peio Etcheverry-Ainchart.
Death, exile and torture
How do you end a war when one side doesn’t want to discuss or acknowledge what happened? “What remains inconspicuous in this story itself not very visible is the violence of the state, French or Spanish,” explains the documentary filmmaker. The deaths can be counted on both sides, and to this must be added exile and the thousands of cases of torture reported by Basque activists, approached in the documentary with great sensitivity. In the fifth episode, the courageous testimony of the activist Iratxe Sorzabal Diaz is an essential window into what remains today a taboo subject and yet essential in the process of appeasement.
The high point of the documentary remains the incredible story of the disarmament, initially clandestine, and the self-dissolution of ETA, carried out in 2017 and 2018 by civil society and a few activists who risked everything to unblock a situation rotting.
Bypassing the chronology of events so as not to make the story too dense, the narration espouses the lack of linearity that characterizes peace processes. We move forward, stumbling from stumbling block to stumbling block, without ever really falling thanks to an educational production and finely punctuated by moving moments of song and the parodic humor of Arte Radio.
Without falling into the pitfall of romanticizing a movement that at one point chose terror to make its cause exist, this documentary is valuable in that it gives a lot to see off-screen from the official narratives, produced by the States directly involved in the hostilities, or in the media, and which have dominated the vision of the conflict of those who are far from it.
Its resonance about other struggles, on other scales, more distant or more symbolic, traces a clear path, made of mourning, respect for all victims and refusal of humiliation, that others could be inspired to borrow when the time comes.