Basque County in Spain
Eibar:
When Elena and May were growing up, you didn't talk about the separatist group ETA and the decades of killings in their native Basque country. Now they are shouting and crying about it.
Actors in their forties, they are at a high school, playing out for their young audience the dramatised scenes of hatred and tension that Basques in northern Spain have suffered.
Four years after the separatist group declared an end to its armed independence campaign, the emotional scars left by four decades of bombings and shootings remain.
Elena Arambarri and May Gorostiaga's theatre programme is one of various ways they are trying to heal them. They confront their audiences with the everyday conflicts engendered by the ETA issue.
"Your father's a murderer!" yells May, acting in character as an eight-year-old child berating another in a playground.
Her shouts echo around the gym in Santa Maria de la Providencia high school in the Basque town of Eibar.
Growing up here at the height of the violence, "there was a law of silence. It was better to keep quiet than get into trouble," said Elena, 47.
Like other towns, Eibar was divided into pro- and anti-ETA communities.
"You were labelled according to where you lived, what school you went to, your clothes, what concerts you went to - whether they sang in Spanish or in Basque," she said.
"The issue still scares people... But people are very keen to move forward."
Cultural 'repression'
ETA emerged in protest against the treatment of Basques under the dictator Franco Francisco.
"We used to feel so repressed, we'd had enough," said Esther Guisasola, 72, landlady of a rural holiday home in Eibar's steep valley.
"They didn't let us speak Basque. We couldn't celebrate our festivals. We felt like they hated our culture," she said.
"But then ETA went too far and the people turned against them."
The group is blamed for the deaths of 829 people.
There were also some 150 anti-ETA killings blamed on militias close to the police, according to a study by the Basque regional government.
"Thousands of people were hurt. There were thousands of claims of torture that have never been investigated," said Jonan Fernandez, the top official for the regional government's reconciliation initiatives.
Inaki Arriola, a Socialist former mayor of Eibar who wants the Basque country and its two million inhabitants to remain part of Spain, has painful memories of those times.
Actors in their forties, they are at a high school, playing out for their young audience the dramatised scenes of hatred and tension that Basques in northern Spain have suffered.
Four years after the separatist group declared an end to its armed independence campaign, the emotional scars left by four decades of bombings and shootings remain.
Elena Arambarri and May Gorostiaga's theatre programme is one of various ways they are trying to heal them. They confront their audiences with the everyday conflicts engendered by the ETA issue.
"Your father's a murderer!" yells May, acting in character as an eight-year-old child berating another in a playground.
Her shouts echo around the gym in Santa Maria de la Providencia high school in the Basque town of Eibar.
Growing up here at the height of the violence, "there was a law of silence. It was better to keep quiet than get into trouble," said Elena, 47.
Like other towns, Eibar was divided into pro- and anti-ETA communities.
"You were labelled according to where you lived, what school you went to, your clothes, what concerts you went to - whether they sang in Spanish or in Basque," she said.
"The issue still scares people... But people are very keen to move forward."
Cultural 'repression'
ETA emerged in protest against the treatment of Basques under the dictator Franco Francisco.
"We used to feel so repressed, we'd had enough," said Esther Guisasola, 72, landlady of a rural holiday home in Eibar's steep valley.
"They didn't let us speak Basque. We couldn't celebrate our festivals. We felt like they hated our culture," she said.
"But then ETA went too far and the people turned against them."
The group is blamed for the deaths of 829 people.
There were also some 150 anti-ETA killings blamed on militias close to the police, according to a study by the Basque regional government.
"Thousands of people were hurt. There were thousands of claims of torture that have never been investigated," said Jonan Fernandez, the top official for the regional government's reconciliation initiatives.
Inaki Arriola, a Socialist former mayor of Eibar who wants the Basque country and its two million inhabitants to remain part of Spain, has painful memories of those times.
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