Relatos restaurativos? Acercamiento a las dificultades para construir una memoria compartida sobre ETA y sus VÍctimas

Abstract

This paper focuses on the controversies emerged out of the efforts to elaborate the historical narrative on ETA and its victims. Public institutions' challenges and difficulties to manage the collective memory of violence are explored here. In addition, the problems which a democratic society faces to attain a peaceful coexistence after a period of confrontation and violent conflict will be addressed, paying especial attention to the respect for the memory around the victims. In order to do so, the different interpretations that produce unlike narratives and which are considered by some social agents as offenses towards the victims are studied, along with the institutional initiatives to pay tribute to them. The law 4/2008: Terrorism victims' Recognition and Reparations as well as the actions detached from it allow for deepening into this narrative management's most formal dimension; however, they also open the path to analyze the tensions and experiences revolving around them and which are linked to the ideological reviews about both the memory of the conflict and the process of building a peaceful coexistence. Furthermore, the paper explores the legitimizing and delegitimizing collective expressions of the armed struggle, as indicators for the coexistence problems that arise when contrasting worldviews about the meaning of violence and the commitment to the victims are utilized. Looking into this reality demands for an examination of the most salient concepts that are highlighted within the public sphere as the key for the end of violence: the memories of the victims - together with the problematic definition of what a victim is -, the request of asking for pardon, the penitentiary policies, the reconciliation, the existence of winners and loosers, etc. These all are the hot topics of debate which, on the one hand, enable the understanding the meaning of and the exigencies for a democratic coexistence and, on the other hand, point out the impossibility of building neither a shared collective memory nor an only narrative - a restorative narrative - about the existence of ETA.