Website
Gernika Peace Museum
The Civil War was a bloody episode, which is still not fully healed. One of the places where the war’s outrage was most striking is Gernika, a town in the Basque Country which was heavily bombarded by the German and Italian air forces in April 1937. The Gernika Museum was inaugurated in 1998 so that neither this terrible event nor the period in which it happened would fall into oblivion. It shows the history of the town, the bombing and the context in which it took place.
In 2003, after the completion of a new museology project, the museum was converted into the Gernika Peace Museum Foundation. Its mission, besides the tasks it was already carrying out, is to focus on spreading the culture of peace. The museum has widened its objectives, which now include the preservation, exhibition, spreading, investigation and education of its visitors and the basic ideas of the peace culture, without forgetting to show the town’s historical facet.
In order to fulfil this task, the museum offers the public a permanent exhibition, addressing three key questions: what is peace?, what did happen in Gernika in a moment when there was no peace?, and what does happen with world peace nowadays? Besides this exhibition, the museum’s activities include, among others, temporary and itinerant exhibitions, own publications, conferences and educational workshops.
The museum also counts with a Documentation Centre on the Bombing of Gernika, a specialised public service, launched by the town authorities, with the objective to gather and inventory all written, graphic and audio-visual material on the 26th April 1937 bombing which can be found worldwide. The centre is open to all researchers and persons, interested in the documentation depository to get a deeper knowledge of the real facts that occurred during the bombing, but also during the war and exile.
The centre’s website explains in detail the bombardments that were launched on the town, their material and personal consequences for its inhabitants, the subsequent occupation by Francoist troops, and gives a brief summary of the first steps towards reconciliation. Also on the website, you can find the activities, scheduled both by the museum as by the research centre, as well as the latest research work in which the centre’s team is participating. Moreover, the option exists to pay a virtual visit to the different areas of the museum.
Website
Uharan
In March 2015, the social movement Lokarri for peace and harmony in the Basque Country was dissolved after a trajectory which lasted nine years. Once ETA had ended its violent operations and a peace process which can be considered irreversible was established, the organisation had fulfilled its objectives. At the same time the end of Lokarri was made public, its members also announced that they would continue to work for further reconciliation and coexistence in a new organ, which would absorb the previously succeeded legacy.
This is how, around the end of 2015, Uharan saw the light: a new organisation, aiming at promoting the role of the Basque society in the road to peace and coexistence. The name of the organisation, Basque for “to the star”, is a manifest of the wish to carry on the Lokarri philosophy, but from a perspective which is different from the one usually taken by social movements. Uharan wants to create a space where society can participate, taking profit of the social network, woven by its predecessor, and maintain contacts with local, national and international experts and organisations, working in the field of coexistence and human rights.
Despite its young age, Uharan counts with the help of around seventy volunteers, of which most already have experience as members of the previous organisation. On the website, you can consult the activities they organise, as well as news items and events, related to peace and the resolution of the Basque conflict, such as film festivals, report publications or workshops, among others. The portal also offer you the possibility to register, so you can receive the monthly newsletter and get to know the different options to participate in activities, related to the peace process.
Besides the monthly newsletter, the organisation also issues quarterly informative compilations, where the network of national and international organisations and experts, which already had connections with Lokarri, analyse the situation of the peace process in the Basque Country. They also hold a yearly seminar or conference to debate on key issues in the field of reconciliation and coexistence. The aim of these meetings is that they are plural, promote citizen’s participation and provide useful conclusions for the peace process.
Book
Ondas en el agua, by C. Martin Beristain, G. Bilbao and J. Ibáñez
Ondas en el agua (Waves on the water) relates the experience of Glencree, a town in Northern Ireland where a group of about thirty victims of ETA, GAL and the Basque Spanish Batallion together with members of the National Security Forces, met between 2007 and 2012 with a clear objective: dialogue and peace. Written by key authors in the peace process, such as Carlos Martin Beristain, Galo Bilbao and Julian Ibáñez de Opacua, who were part of the dynamic Glencree team, Waves in the water transports the reader to the process of mutual recognition with a constructive and positive message.
The work consists of two prefaces, one signed by Professor Rafael Grasa, the other by Txema Urkijo, consultant for the Basque government regarding policies on terrorism and its victims between 2002 and 2004. The book contains four chapters and three annexes, with practical documentation on the process.
The first chapter explains how the Glencree initiative was set up, who was going to participate, how it was designed and how problems related to context and uncertainty were overcome. The second one, shorter, focuses on the initiative’s methodological process and the importance of obtaining positive results. The third chapter contains an analysis of the achievements of the project, the weight of lived experiences, the “victim” identity, the empathic work and the will to give visibility to the experience. Finally, the fourth chapter constitutes the conclusion of the book and is based on a small synthesis of the initiative and summary of the lessons learned, so that they would be a source of inspiration for the processes of reconciliation.
Ondas en el agua is part of the digital collection “Tools for peace, security and justice”, published by the ICIP and Líniazero. The work has been published in pdf and ePub format.
Documentary
Victims, truth and reconciliation
The documentary Victims, truth and reconciliation, shown on the program “Latituds” of the Catalan public television (Televisió de Catalunya), tells the story of the Glencree experience through the testimony of two of the participants of the secret meetings, organised in Northern Ireland between 2007 and 2012.
The experiences of Carmen Hernández and Axun Lasa are a reflection of how people who would have never crossed eyes in the street, end up crying together and recognising their mutual suffering in this Irish town. The two main characters, Carmen and Axun, had suffered the Basque conflict from two completely opposite perspectives. Carmen is the widow of Jesús Mari Pedrosa, PP councillor in Durango, who was murdered by ETA, while Axun lost her brother, accused of terrorism, and killed at the hands of the GAL movement.
They both explain how, thanks to the Glencree experience, they have been able to put themselves in each other’s shoes and understand that pain does not choose sides. They ask for recognition for all those who have suffered equally, in order to improve the coexistence of future generations and to construct a society, based on empathy and self-identification through others.
In the ICIP-produced documentary, we can also see an intervention by Carlos Martín Berinstain, coordinator of the Glencree initiative, and Jordi Palau-Loverdos, who participated in many peace and reconciliation projects in the Rwanda peace process. Both recognise that, for peace and reconstruction processes, it is possible to have common guidelines, as long as they start by creating Truth Commissions and commit to bringing people together.
Documentary
Negar franko egingo zuen aitak!
Based on the stories of people who lived in Villabona, a small town in Gipuzkoa (Basque country), during the Spanish postwar period, the documentary Negar franko egingo zuen aitak!(How my father would have cried, 2014), directed by Bertha Gaztelumendi, explains what life was like then and how coexistence was rebuilt between the sides of the winners and losers of the Civil War.
The purpose of the work, which lasts 41 minutes, is to transmit the memories of the facts and learn from what happened. The director starts with the hypothesis that coexistence can be rebuilt, since the war did not create a disruption between the town’s inhabitants. Based on this assumption, the documentary captures how the neighbours were able to reconstruct the social network without any outside help.
The film makers also wanted to involve young people in the production process, who were in many cases ignorant of what had happened during the Civil War and of Francoism. For this reason, they were given the role of interviewers, so that the main characters could share their experiences and those of their families with them face-to-face.
Besides recovering the historical memory and transmit it to future generations, the documentary is also meant to be a model for similar processes in other Basque villages. The Zaharrak Berri program of the Gipuzkoa Province Council, aiming at promoting the recovery of this historical memory, has prepared a manual in order to provide guidance to groups, wishing to start a project, similar to the one described in the documentary.
Bertha Gaztelumendi, a Basque journalist with over 25 years of media experience, is specialised in studies regarding peace and conflict resolution. Negar franko egingo zuen aitak is her second documentary, after her first experience as a director with Mariposas en el Hierro (Butterflies on the Sword), where she shows the impact of violence on women and their potential as peacebuilders.
© Generalitat de Catalunya