Working for peace has never stopped

55-year-old remembers the day his father was found shot dead

Inaki Garcia Arrizabalaga was 19 when a breakaway commando of the Basque separatist group ETA murdered his father, plunging him into a “spiral of hate” before he changed his outlook and started working for peace in his homeland.

More than 36 years later, ETA says it has finally laid down its arms, but for the business professor at Deusto University in the Basque Country, the highlymediatised event is but an “anecdote.”

For him, the truly key event was on October 20, 2011, when the armed group that killed 829 people in its four-decade campaign for Basque independence declared a ceasefire. It was inevitable that they were going to hand over weapons,” he said last week ahead of yesterday’s official disarmament ceremony.

Sitting in his office in Spain’s northern Basque seaside city of San Sebastian, the 55-year-old calmly remembered the day his father was found shot dead, his covered corpse propped up and chained against a tree.

“On October 23, 1980, I was a student at this university, I was in class and at 8.30 in the morning my older sister came to get me, and said ‘Come home, dad didn’t show up at work’,” he said.

“All of us siblings went home, we started asking around in hospitals to see if there had been an accident, but no.”

Then came a call that a body had been found on a hill in the city. They all went and discovered it was their father’s, a director at telecoms firm Telefonica whom he later found out had been targeted by the Autonomous Anticapitalist Commandos, an anarchist breakaway of ETA, in retaliation for phone taps.

Ensued four, difficult years during which he plunged into what he calls a “spiral of hate,” before being sent to London to study by his mother.

Away from the strife, he was able to think more clearly and came back a changed man, he said, realising the killers had not only murdered his father, but were ruining his life as well.

Later, he started working for peace and conciliation and has never stopped.