Idaho bill draws attention of Spain and White House

BOISE, Idaho -- The last thing anyone in Idaho expected was an international incident.

When the Idaho House took up a nonbinding resolution last week urging peaceful self-determination for Spain's Basque minority, it hardly raised an eyebrow. There are 15,000 Basques in Idaho, the biggest such community in the United States, and Basque issues occasionally come up.

State Rep. David Bieter -- whose mother was Basque -- introduced the measure, and 84-year-old Secretary of State Pete Cenarrusa, a Basque, spoke glowingly of his heritage and praised the resolution.

"Today in the Basque country there is great joy," he said before the measure passed on a unanimous vote.

What happened next rippled all the way to the White House and beyond that to Spain.

Javier Ruperez, the Spanish ambassador to the United States, complained that the resolution was a "gratuitously unfriendly gesture" and said Spain gives a high level of autonomy to the Basque region.

He also said that failing to specifically condemn the violent Basque separatist group ETA -- blamed for hundreds of deaths over the past 30 years -- was like discussing Sept. 11 without mentioning al-Qaida. Ruperez was kidnapped by the ETA in 1979 and held for a month.

Approved change

At the White House's request, the resolution was held up before it got to the Idaho Senate. The Bush administration set up a meeting between Idaho Basque leaders and State Department officials about possible U.S. involvement in resolving the Basque-Spain conflict.

In exchange, Idaho lawmakers changed the resolution to have it condemn the ETA, and approved the measure unanimously.

Bieter later told his colleagues: "I, like you, had no idea that we would get the world's attention."

The talk has not stopped in Idaho's Basque community, which includes a Basque Block in downtown Boise, a group of restaurants, bars and a museum built around what was once a boarding house for sheepherders.

The Basques, a people of unknown origin speaking a language that appears to be unlike any other, settled thousands of years ago on both sides of the Pyrenees, the mountains that divide present-day France and Spain.

Although the Basque country has never existed as a political entity, its people have always had a sharp sense of their uniqueness and fierce pride in their language and culture. Even the Romans were content to let the Basques alone while part of the empire.

Sailed with conquistadors

Most Idaho Basques are descendants of immigrants from the Spanish province of Viscaya, a forested region on the Bay of Biscay. Many sailed with the Spanish conquistadors to South America or fished off Labrador long before the French or English arrived.

By the late 19th century, they began migrating to America to escape war and poverty, and the men took jobs as sheepherders in the remote, high deserts of the West's Great Basin. Thousands ended up in Idaho and other nearby states, their descendants becoming merchants, teachers, bankers and politicians.

A second wave fled Spain when dictator Francisco Franco crushed an attempt to form a Basque nation in the 1930s. Basque Homeland and Freedom, or ETA, evolved in the late 1960s as a militant response to Franco, who banned the Basque language and other culutral displays.

Joe Goicoechea's family was among those who fled war in Spain, coming to the West during the second Carlist War in 1873.