By CATHERINE FIELD herald correspondent
HENDAYE - The bloody resurgence of Basque terrorism is sowing concern in Spain and France, highlighting the dilemma of fighting cross-border crime in a Europe whose internal frontiers are increasingly blurred.
The separatist group ETA returned to the car bomb and the assault rifle last December, ending a 14-month truce after fruitless talks on its demands for an independent state drawn from an ethnic region straddling the French-Spanish border.
Since then, six people have been killed and a dozen injured in 14 ETA attacks, stretching from northern to southern Spain and including the capital, Madrid.
Assaults in the past weeks have included the fatal shooting of a conservative councillor in front of his wife and teenage daughter, and the attempted car-bombing of a Socialist lawmaker and his family, which failed thanks only to a faulty detonator.
Repelled and fearful of a return to the bloodshed that stained much of the past three decades in northern Spain, hundreds of thousands of Spaniards have staged protest rallies against ETA.
Their Government, meanwhile, is worried that France is once more becoming a haven for ETA, enabling the shadowy group to harness support among French Basques to provide funds and a bolthole for men on the run.
"The truce gave [ETA] the chance to reorganise. We will devote the necessary means to fight it," French Interior Minister Jean-Pierre Chevenement vowed in Paris yesterday, after a crisis meeting with his Spanish counterpart, Jaime Mayor Oreja.
The two Governments committed themselves to "beefing up human and technical resources" against ETA, an apparent promise to step up infiltration and electronic surveillance.
But such tough declarations are widely belied by the problems of policing on the ground - how to prevent arms smuggling and terrorist plots in the open Europe of today, and how to crack ETA's hard core, who, like the IRA, can draw on substantial tacit support from their constituency.
Frontier controls between France and Spain have been scrapped, as they have thoughout nearly all of the European Union.
In Hendaye, a seaside border town in the heart of the Basque country, police have few powers to prevent terrorists from mingling with holidaymakers, smuggling in weapons to Spain by yacht or carrying arms on horseback over one of the isolated trails over the Pyrenees.
Among local people, no one speaks publicly in favour of ETA but, in a small, tightly knit community fearful of the men in black facemasks, no one dares to voice opposition.
There is also sympathy for a limited form of ETA's aims, especially its defence of the Basque language, the only language in Europe to have survived from pre-Celtic times.
ETA, which stands for Euskadi Ta Askatasuna - Basque Homeland and Liberty - was founded in 1959, spurred by Franco's brutal suppression of the culture, a crackdown that included a ban on songs, language and even Basque names.
Since its campaign of violence began in 1968, ETA has killed 774 civilians and military personnel in Spain, according to official figures.
Militants have also targeted banks, businesses, public buildings, trains and buses with petrol bombs and financed operations with extortion on both sides of the border.
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