"There are always prophets of hatred who convince young people to commit murder"

Journalist Jon Sistiaga makes his literary debut with Purgatorio (Plaza & Janés), a high-voltage thriller set in the Basque Country after the end of ETA. The novel draws from his life experience as a young Basque who lived the Basque Country of the 80s and 90s; his professional work as a journalist who covered "many attacks" and has met with members and former members of ETA, "both inside and outside prison"; and his work as a reporter in conflict zones.

The novel starts from a suggestive idea. Josu Etxebeste, a prestigious restaurateur, decides to confess his role in the kidnapping and murder of Imanol Azkarate. He will send the victim's daughter the letters and drawings that her father made during the captivity, and will be delivered to Commissioner Ignacio Sánchez, the policeman who investigated the kidnapping. There is only one condition: the agent must confess that he was a cruel torturer. The thriller, recently published, is now in its second edition.

How does the Jon Sistiaga journalist and reporter, especially in places of conflict, become the writer of a thriller? Are you fond of reading?

I am a very reader, but above all I believe that journalists have the necessary tools to write. We know how to put lyrics together, we know how to do it with a certain order, with rigor, we know how to entertain when we have to write something that is worth it, we know how to be interesting, we know how to excite … All that, which we usually do in our day to day, makes it cost you less. Writing a novel may impose more, but it also frees you from certain norms. It frees you from your code of ethics as a journalist and allows you to make your imagination fly. In this case, what I feared most was to create a plausible novel, to create situations that were plausible. For me it was very important to generate a story, in a place and with characters that were believable.

A lot of people need to look in the mirror to give them back their image of the past and tell them if they're happy with what they did."

And the setting he chooses to set it is the Basque Country…

When I choose to make the leap to fiction and literature I do so not only to explore new narrative territories, but because I had quite a few things to tell about something I knew very well. After many years of professional secrecy, respect for record offs or insufficiently contrasted information that I had not been able to tell, I had something to say on the subject. The invention of characters gave me the opportunity to make my imagination fly and tell things that had always been stored in my notebooks, in my notes as a journalist, and that by giving them a form of fiction create a plot of very curious characters. What he intended is that it be read like a fictional novel, but playing with the reader to try to guess how much truth there is in what is told.

Has the creative process required previous fieldwork: interviews with victims, former ETA members, politicians…?

Let's say that the creative process of the New Purgatory has lasted about 40 years; that is, the sum of the time in which I, as a young Basque from Irun, began to be aware of what was happening around me; the period in which as Jon Sistiaga journalist I was witnessing what was the phenomenon of terrorism in the Basque Country, because I had to cover many attacks; and, finally, the time in which the Jon Sistiaga correspondent has traveled to many other places where violence has been part of the lives of his people. These experiences in other countries have nourished me with experiences and have given me the opportunity to know patterns of behavior that were repeated. All that together has crystallized in Purgatory.

'Purgatory' speaks of those who generate the theoretical corpus and the existential need to kill."

Therefore, the material already had it…

It was all inside. Being a work of fiction, you generate a series of characters that you build based on people you have met, notes that you have written, comments that were stuck in your mind, ideas that came to you at some point and that were eager to be told … That's the advantage of writing a novel about what you know. Maybe, if I have to do a novel on a subject that I don't know, the process would be different. In this case, the novel was inside; it was only necessary to wait to get the moment out and shape it.

In 2019 he also co-directed the documentary 'Zubiak'. Is this professional approach to the issue of ETA violence and its consequences also motivated by a perception that it may be closing falsely?

I wouldn't talk about closing falsely but about closing fast. From my experience in other places and other conflicts, I think there is a natural need to turn the page. It's understandable. What the population needs is peace, and then you turn the page quickly. However, the wounds that remain there, if you do not remove the pus that is underneath, can generate a certain septicemia that can affect a body or a society. The title of the novel comes from there: I think there are still a lot of people who need to go through their own purgatory. They need to look in the mirror to give them back their image of the past and to tell them if they are happy with what they did or what they were. Purgatory is a place to atone for sins, but also to purify oneself, and I think there are still quite a few people who haven't.

Cover of 'Purgatory', jon Sistiaga's first novel.

Plaza & Janés

The novel addresses the question of unsolved crimes from an unprecedented starting point: a former ETA member who decides to confess to his crime three decades later.

There are more than 300 unsolved crimes, almost all from the time of the 70s and 80s, and therefore there will be at least 200 people who know what happened, in many cases because it was they themselves who committed the crimes. Those people will now be between 65 and 80 years old, they don't have much left to talk about. It has been quite some time since the end of the violence and I think the Basque Country is beginning to be prepared to be surprised by some revelations. In Purgatory I propose an imagined hypothesis, and it is the fact that two perpetrators of a crime 35 years ago are respected people in the post-conflict Euskadi, and this is not a very crazy hypothesis; it is plausible. The issue is whether someone is going to take the step taken by the characters of Purgatory, not so much to obtain their judicial conviction and judicial truth, but to resolve the mourning of the victims. There are many victims who at one point in their lives all they want is to know what happened and why it happened. Above that, in addition, those people are convicted and go to jail, if there is evidence and it is not prescribed.

Most of those who have been in jail agree that they were manipulated."

The story of the novel, however, especially points to those who instigated those crimes, above those who committed them.

Purgatory does not speak so much of those who committed blood crimes or those who ordered them, it goes a little further. Purgatory aims to talk about those great prophets of hatred and apocalypse who convinced 18-year-olds to commit human sacrifices. It speaks of those who generate the idea, the theoretical corpus, the existential need to kill in order to survive. Of those who were behind, in the background, without appearing, in the darkness of a criminal ideology, while it was based on the elimination of people.

It is an issue that many former members of ETA insist on today repentant, such as those linked to the 'via Nanclares'…

I have spoken to many members and former members of ETA, both inside and outside prison, but also to many Northern Irish paramilitaries, former members of the IRA, members of Rwandan militias, FARC commanders or Iraqi jihadists, and what they tell me, with nuances, is very similar: in the end there is always someone who convinces young people of the need to kill for a cause or sacrifice for a cause. There is the great fallacy of always, since everyone who decides to die for something is because he is willing to kill for something. In that sense, Purgatory tries to explore those limits that exist between the ability to ask or grant forgiveness, between the needs of having several memories or several imperfect truths that come together, the need for reconciliation, because life has to go on, but above all that this reconciliation must have some previous parameters such as the fact of saying "I'm sorry" or recognizing the mistakes made.

That reflection they make about being instigated, however, may lead to an attempt to discharge blame on the part of those who executed the crimes.

But that's what happens: there are always some old gentlemen, some prophets of hatred, who convince young people to commit murder. These gentlemen, while the others are killing or in jail, are eating some hake in a gastronomic society because they know that they will not be caught. The reflection on why I did or did not do something occurs in anyone who has spent many years in prison. And as much as that person believes that he did what he had to do, almost everyone agrees that they were manipulated, used, or that their youth or desire to do something was manipulated to end in the enchantment of violence.

But the vast majority of young people who lived that time in the Basque Country did not enter ETA…

Purgatory also explores the difficult terrain in which we moved in the Euskadi of the 80s and 90s, and this inexplicable decision that many young people in euskadi made and that others did not make. Purgatory explores how the same young people, of the same class, the same football team, the parents friends, playing in the same streets and watching the same thing on TV, some fell into the enchantment of violence and others did not. Were some more fickle or more convincing? There is no discharge in Purgatory for the one who did what he did, but I have always been struck by the subsequent reflections of the one who has killed. Not everyone who killed afterwards is so brave.

That Euskadi was an ethical anomaly until some clichés of enchantment with violence were overcome"

In the novel he describes that climate that allowed the survival of ETA beyond Francoism and the Transition, and also refers to the people who, with greater or lesser involvement, populated that landscape. Are you looking for an interpellation to the reader?

Purgatory has at least a couple of reading levels. One for the people who have lived that Euskadi and another for the rest. The rest of the readers will see a novel I intend to be fast-paced, captivating, a thriller that takes you through a world that may seem implausible, but that has happened. For the Basque reader, on the other hand, I intend him to have other readings. That is to say, that any reader of the Basque Country who is over 25 years old can get into his own purgatory: where he was at certain times, what he did or if he shouted certain slogans that we did not give importance to then or were very combative or cheerful, and then we saw that they were brutal.

The historian Idoia Estornés relates in her essay 'How this could happen to us' the social climate in which ETA was strengthened since the 60s and wonders how it could have happened. The period covered by 'Purgatory' is later and does so from fiction, but there is also an effort to portray a certain magma. How could that happen?

I haven't explained it to myself yet. Julio Caro Baroja said that a train loaded with psychiatrists had to be sent to the Basque Country, and Purgatory is still a kind of mental field hospital. As a narrator, I also leave that question and reflect on it, since somehow there were many of us who generated a climate of passivity with everything that happened around us. The Basque Country of the 70s, 80s and 90s was an ethical anomaly in the European Union, where people were killed for thinking contrary. It happened until society overcame some clichés of enchantment in which many people fell… Perhaps there can be added things like the birth of a democracy, the disappearance of a dictatorship, the elevation or mythification of some young people who had faced a dictator who, on the other hand, died in his bed, the excesses of a repression by a police that used undemocratic methods … There was a conjunction of themes that generated that magma of permissiveness with what the violent were doing.

The novel also does not ignore the issue of police abuses and human rights violations, and even murders, that occurred beyond the suffering caused by ETA's terrorism. In Euskadi it seems a question widely accepted, is it a taboo in the rest of Spain?

Police violence and torture in the 70s and 80s is more than proven, but it is a subject that, although I do not consider it taboo, it is uncomfortable for many people. Therefore, in Purgatory it is also intended that the reader who is not from the Basque Country thinks if what some characters are doing was fair, honest, legal, or should they do it. I am referring to the fact that there are characters who boast of having done so. Just as there are people who could help solve many murders, there are many former members of the State Security Forces and Bodies who could do the same. The Official Secrets Act dates back to the year 78 and that has allowed us to continue hiding many issues that could have been resolved.

You have worked in many conflict zones, where should we look to close the wounds of violence without the sepsis you mention?

I don't think there is an Irish way of conflict resolution, nor a Colombian system, nor a South African example… Each place and problem has a different genesis, and each territory has to find its own way. If you want to hurry me as to what should be the pattern that is repeated, I think that we should know all the truths, no matter how imperfect they are, make a diagnosis, which although it is not common is plural, and that is based on something very clear: "killing was wrong, it was a mistake and it should never have happened". From there you can argue about why it started or who started. Whether we at least have a common principle can be discussed. And another common and very important thing is the reparation and pampering of the victims. We are talking about people who suddenly assumed a condition that they had never wanted and that marks them for their whole life. As Alasne, one of the protagonists, says, I want to stop being 'the daughter of' to be Alasne Azkarate, not the person they look at with compassion.