Discourses of Victimhood and Victims’ Narratives: Assessing Different Dimensions of Victimhood in Spain

This paper analyses elements of ETA’s discourse of victimhood, such as the transferral of responsibility for the “Basque conflict” to the Spanish State, the description of the “Basque conflict" as an armed confrontation between “two sides” and the emphasis that “victims on both sides deserve equal treatment". It then contrasts ETA’s discourse of victimhood with the narrative of ETA´s victims, which considers the former as a manipulation of history and of the truth, an attempt to try to close the book on the past without taking any responsibility for the crimes that ETA committed. The paper ends by highlighting the damaging effects that the dissemination of ETA’s discourse of victimhood has had for victims of terrorism and for society as a whole. The author maintains that a society suffering from terrorism, as in Spain's case, has a collective and public responsibility to maintain the distinction between victims and terrorists in order to build a future without political, social and historical impunity.