Jon Sistiaga: "The Basque Country lives in a climate of idyllic collective amnesia"

• Javier Marías "I don't forget the ETA attacks, people today forget very easily"

• 'Land of poachers' The open wounds of terrorism in the Basque Country

• 'We were never heroes' Novel about ETA, Le Carré style

Jon Sistiaga

(Irún, 1967) has flowed into the novel with the naturalness of a vocational storyteller.

He learned the trade under the bombs, in the Basque Country, in the Balkans, in Iraq.

As a reporter he traveled again and again to the heart of darkness, hotbed of hatred.

After interviewing crazed jihadists, patriots from the amonal, macheteros in Rwanda and Mexican drug traffickers, he lacked the unfinished business of fiction.

With

he goes upstream of the Basque cause, which promised its acolytes an

earthly

and

,

Oh, good vibes, on the condition of exterminating hundreds of fellow citizens and setting up a homeland infected with xenophobia.

From the ethnolinguistic tyranny and its executioners, from the revolutionary tax and the shot in the neck, from the trees that bear nuts and suck blood and from the revolutionary hymns and the memory of burned children, dressed as an entomologist of horror, the writer draws the materials for a fierce narrative.

Purgatorio

is incardinated in the Basque Country after the carnage.

A territory full of "rusty weapons in abandoned hideouts, betrayals, loyalties and atrocious secrets."

Populated by "repentant terrorists, proud terrorists, and victims who can't close their mourning."

The case of the journalist who ends up writing a novel is almost a commonplace. I suppose, but I also believe that journalists have to remove the stigma, the shame, that we cannot make fiction.

We have all the tools.

We have been writing all our lives.

We have the narrative pulse so that the reader of our information remains attentive and reads until the last paragraph and, above all, we are in the loop.

Of course, the field work was done, right?

I mean that he has covered what happened in the Basque Country for years. They are stories in which I have gotten to the inside.

I know all the characters, the sensibilities.

.

I have had them in front of me and I have talked with all of them.

We already have some great novels about the misnamed

, from the extraordinary

, by JA González Sainz, to the successful

, by Fernando Aramburu.

Did you have any reference?

He wanted to tell a series of stories that he had been dragging for a long time.

Journalists are subject to the dictatorship of the deontological code, respect the

, do not give some facts if you do not have them sufficiently contrasted, etc.

Fiction allows you to fly.

In my case, take out all those stories that I kept in notebooks, or in my memory, to give them as a novel.

Enough has already been written about the Basque conflict, but every territory that has passed through the shadow of violence needs to be told, and if possible from many perspectives, even if they are painful.

We have to talk.

after

what could be said?

Well, talking about the post-conflict. Indeed, the novel talks about the Basque Country today...A Euskadi where I perceive things that I have already seen in Rwanda, or in some areas of Colombia, Iraq or Ulster.

The evidence that there are accounts to settle.

People who have not paid for what they did.

The book does not talk so much about good or bad terrorists, that there are no good ones, but about the origins of that violence, the origins of totalitarianism, as Hannah Arendt would say.

Why and how is someone, a child, an adolescent, convinced to make human sacrifices on the altar of independence, or of religion or race?

Why is it necessary to kill to build something?

Who convinces them?

who are the prophets of the apocalypse who push others to end up in jail or the cemetery while they eat their cod pil pil in the gastronomic society?

He comments that where violence has worked there is a pattern: on one side the desolation of the victims, on the other the existence of these white-collar prophets, teachers, writers, etc., convinced of the need to

and happy to drag the rest.

It repeats, yes.

Every armed movement has an ideological substance behind it, whether we like it or not, someone who decides that in order to carry out their objectives they need to kill.

But he needs to build the narrative to convince the rest that there is no other option except to kill.

Kill for the cause.

Without going any further, it is what Putin is doing right now, and there will be many people who buy it.

There is always a teacher, a historian, a journalist, a philosopher, who builds an ideology that needs to be defended with blood, with human sacrifices.

That's what the novel is about. There are still many people who haven't purged their sins, and who don't want to.

Especially those who have never been caught.

Justice is relatively easy to find and convict those who kill, but the masterminds...

And I'm not talking about the heads of the organization, but about those who build the strategy from the beginning. Many years ago I had dinner one night with Alfonso Sastre and Eva Forest.

It was hard to assimilate that those old men, enlightened, committed to justice, said such barbarities.

also explores that human or inhuman side.

I have met genocides with more than 400 deaths in Kigali who were great grandparents.

Pablo Escobar's son told me that his father was the best father in the world from the inside, and from the outside, he told me, a monster.

I've talked to IRA members who adore their children and you see them in their own home patting their grandson's head while telling you about the times they planted bombs.

The book tries to humanize, in quotes, these characters.

I think the reader will empathize with them, even knowing that they are perpetrators of horrific crimes.

Because he shows them from another perspective.

It aims to entertain, but above all to make you think, about the thin line that exists between good and evil, which can be crossed at any time, and what is worse, it can be crossed again.

Politics often justifies the worst atrocities, even motivates them.

Anyone who uses violence for a political purpose, in this case the independence of Euskadi, but it may be the revolution in Cuba, or because they believe that there is an existential danger to their community, like the Hutus, or a divine mandate, like the jihadists, they all have an end behind them.

And they always believe they are bearers of virtuous violence.

As if there were a necessary violence, good, and another bad.

It is very difficult for them to understand, for example, that all violence begets more violence.

If there is also violence on one side, then it generates a boomerang effect that feeds it back.

novel, but yes, with a clear objective: to generate enough violence for the Spanish State to give in and grant independence.

That was the strategy.

Independence would be reached through a corridor flanked by thousands of dead, like those crucified in Roman times.

They put a pile of corpses in a gigantic pyramid and offered it to the god of independence. The novel also speaks of red lines. They cross.

From the moment someone decides to kill.

At first, let's put, only uniformed, those who represent everything we hate.

But then civilians fall, and then the ideologues have to sit down to write a new statement, in a way it was a mistake, he was passing by, he is a collateral victim... Or a sneak. That's the next thing, when you take too many civilians, then something must be added, it was a sneak, for example, something must have been done.

Next comes another red line.

Children.

The first child you carry.

Or the first kidnapped.

Little by little, the initial idea is deformed, violence picks up speed, and becomes more than a means, it is already an end that feeds back into your own ideology, which in turn demands more and more crimes, because you can no longer look behind, because everything is too shocking. How do you see the Basque Country today? It lives in a climate of idyllic collective amnesia.

That's exactly what it goes against.

.

He pretends to be a blow against the ethics of many of those who live in Euskadi.

Some because they have quickly turned the page, that's it, it's all over, great, there are no more buses burning in the streets, no demonstrations... And then there are those others, whom no one questions, and therefore they don't even need justify.

There are still a lot of people who haven't taken the exam, he said. It's something very fucked up, admitting that you were wrong, that you let yourself be deceived or manipulated... Think of the guy who gets out of jail after 20 years, who doesn't he has nothing, no studies, no pension, and that he did what he did, and when he comes out he finds that he is not a hero, a gudari, that he was an imbecile, and a criminal.

On top of that, the Euskadi that he remembered no longer exists, it is not what he thought, in the bar where he drank

now there is a Pakistani haberdashery, in the haberdashery where he used to go with his mother there is now a Chinese... Many have not recognized that they threw their lives away and that they ended the lives of others.

So they try to tiptoe past.

Of course there is still a sector that will try to claim everything.

But there is an

out of every 10 that go out.

The rest, the other 90% try not to be questioned.

How to get ahead without falling, on the one hand, into revenge and, on the other, without ignoring the bestialities committed and their causes? I don't think the story of radical nationalism has prevailed.

It is not my feeling.

Regarding the balance between justice and forgetting, reconciliation and memory, Paul Ricoeur spoke of the difficult equation of forgetting.

Is forgiveness something that must be demanded?

I do not think so.

At the same time we cannot forget.

We must listen to each other's stories, even if they hurt.

And above all it is important to fight for the truth.

I know many victims, family members of victims, who would be willing to go above and beyond a conviction just to know what happened.

One of the characters in the book has that attitude, that doubt.

The victims, above all, of the 70s and 80s,

where 80% of ETA's unsolved murders are, what they want is for someone to assume their guilt, if they then apologize, they'll see if they forgive them or not, but the important thing, the crucial thing, is that they tell them, that solve the doubts.

Why did they do it?

Why did they choose it?

Was it random?

Did you see them arrive?

Was afraid?

Did you look them in the eye?

Did he scream?

Did he suffer?

With that, many people could begin to close their duel.

And there are people who can help close it.

For example saying where there are corpses.

Or how the crimes were committed. Know to move on.

The truth as a lifesaver. I have seen it, with

that resolve doubts.

Why did they do it?

Why did they choose it?

Was it random?

Did you see them arrive?

Was afraid?

Did he look them in the eye?

Did he scream?

Did he suffer?

With that, many people could begin to close their duel.

And there are people who can help close it.

For example saying where there are corpses.

Or how the crimes were committed. Know to move on.

The truth as a lifesaver. I have seen it, with

that resolve doubts.

Why did they do it?

Why did they choose it?

Was it random?

Did you see them arrive?

Was afraid?

Did he look them in the eye?

Did he scream?

Did he suffer?

With that, many people could begin to close their duel.

And there are people who can help close it.

For example saying where there are corpses.

Or how the crimes were committed. Know to move on.

The truth as a lifesaver. I have seen it, with

, I shot that interview, and I saw live how she confronted her husband's murderer and how the other told her everything and told her that he had never apologized because what he had done was unforgivable, and she replied that she was not to say if he forgave him or not, even though he believed he deserved a second chance.

Because such a crime is unforgivable.

More than insisting on forgiveness, we must insist on the truth.

Something that is being done in other places that have experienced more or less similar situations, such as Colombia or Palestine.

More than seeking conviction and jail, that if it has to happen, well let it happen, of course, at least you have to find the truth...As a correspondent for so many years, do you miss being in Ukraine right now?No, I don't feel any need.

The body sometimes asks you to be there and tell it,

but now I don't work for any media outlet and... I've always asked not to be classified as a war journalist.

I am a journalist.

That war journalist thing, I don't know, it almost seems that you like wars, and it's not my case.

Will Putin be able to keep a territory with the population against it? Control, but... in the end, someone like Putin believes that he is called for a divine or patriotic mission.

With the data that he handles or has passed him, he generates an expectation, he convinces himself, in this case, that his country is threatened, and he attacks.

Here, someone has attacked first and has put the dead on the table.

We are all playing it in Ukraine.

There were numerous signs that Russia was preparing for a war to crush a democratic attempt on its borders.

I am a journalist.

That war journalist thing, I don't know, it almost seems that you like wars, and it's not my case.

Will Putin be able to keep a territory with the population against it? Control, but... in the end, someone like Putin believes that he is called for a divine or patriotic mission.

With the data that he handles or has passed him, he generates an expectation, he convinces himself, in this case, that his country is threatened, and he attacks.

Here, someone has attacked first and has put the dead on the table.

We are all playing it in Ukraine.

There were numerous signs that Russia was preparing for a war to crush a democratic attempt on its borders.

I am a journalist.

That war journalist thing, I don't know, it almost seems that you like wars, and it's not my case.

Will Putin be able to keep a territory with the population against it? Control, but... in the end, someone like Putin believes that he is called for a divine or patriotic mission.

With the data that he handles or has passed him, he generates an expectation, he convinces himself, in this case, that his country is threatened, and he attacks.

Here, someone has attacked first and has put the dead on the table.

We are all playing it in Ukraine.

There were numerous signs that Russia was preparing for a war to crush a democratic attempt on its borders.

someone like Putin believes that he is called for a divine or patriotic mission.

With the data that he handles or has passed him, he generates an expectation, he convinces himself, in this case, that his country is threatened, and he attacks.

Here, someone has attacked first and has put the dead on the table.

We are all playing it in Ukraine.

There were numerous signs that Russia was preparing for a war to crush a democratic attempt on its borders.

someone like Putin believes that he is called for a divine or patriotic mission.

With the data that he handles or has passed him, he generates an expectation, he convinces himself, in this case, that his country is threatened, and he attacks.

Here, someone has attacked first and has put the dead on the table.

We are all playing it in Ukraine.

There were numerous signs that Russia was preparing for a war to crush a democratic attempt on its borders.

We'll see if it doesn't turn into a global conflict. It can happen, of course, and the problem is that Russia has nuclear weapons.

Western democracies have to be cautious in managing it.

In my case, to respond to what you said before, I suppose that more than going to a trench and being shot four times or a bomb falling next to us, which has already happened, I am more interested in tracking down the whys and wherefores, the causes.

Who gave the orders?

In the end, those who shoot are some kids.

But those who are behind, who were they?

How did they give the orders?

How did they generate the necessary rhetoric to warm up the atmosphere?

Will there be other novels that drink from conflicts where it has been? As a journalist I try not to repeat myself, to reinvent myself every four or five years, to look for new things.

My previous book talked about wars.

If I write another novel I will try to get out of my notebooks, which is where your obsessions are at the end, the notes that you were taking... in the case of

, with the idea of ​​writing fiction from the point of view of someone who is Basque , which has covered Basque terrorism, but also other terrorist phenomena... and you know?

They are all the same.

They are all based on the same lies.

Some older gentlemen convince some idealistic youngsters of the need to kill for a cause.

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