Eusko Flickr : Bloody Sunday March - Basque Supporters

Bloody Sunday March - Basque Supporters
Originally uploaded by seanfderry-studenna

The Northern Irish Path

Thanks to a press release by the University of Ulster we learned about what Ibarretxe said regarding a certain path to peace, here you have it:

Northern Ireland Points Path to Basque Peace, Says President Ibarretxe

Northern Ireland’s path to peace could be the route to ending conflict in the Basque country, the democratic leader of more than two million Basques said in a major address at the University of Ulster’s Magee campus.

Juan José Ibarretxe Markuartu, the President of the Basque Government, said disavowal of violence and inclusive talks – the basis of the peace process here - must be the first step to resolving the long-running dispute about Spanish sovereignty over its Basque population.

Delivering the Tip O’Neill Peace Lecture, he said inclusive talks and respect for a democratic mandate must replace a failed formula of back-door contacts between the Spanish Government and ETA extremists who have been waging a 40-year war for Basque independence.

“ETA and the Spanish government can not decide the future of the Basque people in secret meetings. This future will only be freely decided by the men and women of our country through peaceful and democratic means,” he asserted.

“I am convinced that we will never achieve peace if we carry on making the same mistakes. We have to learn from Northern Ireland and many conflict zones that have been able to transform positively even more difficult situations.”

President Ibarretxe was the latest international luminary to deliver the lecture, at the invitation of Nobel Peace Laureate Professor John Hume, holder of the Tip O’Neill Chair of Peace Studies at Magee. The Chair, funded by the Ireland Funds, commemorates the Speaker of the US House of Representatives during 1977-1987 who was widely respected for his support of the peace process in Northern Ireland.

Before Monday’s lecture, Professor Hume escorted the President on a tour of Derry’s Walls, accompanied by Professor Tom Fraser, the former Provost of Magee.

In the lecture, President Ibarretxe paid warm tribute to Professor Hume’s dedication to peace-building: “You represent the best of humankind, the power of dialogue against violence, the capacity of political leaders to solve the real problems of their people, the necessity to fight peacefully the most violent battles and the resilience to overcome opposition in the most difficult conditions. Your whole life is a source of inspiration for political leaders all around the world who have to face up to similar circumstances.”

As President of the Basque Autonomous Community since 1999, the President is the chief voice of non-violent Basque nationalism. The historic Basque culture and identity straddles the Spanish-French border in the north-east of the Iberian Peninsula.

The Basque Autonomous Community is one of Spain’s 17 regions, all of which have varying degrees of home-rule under sovereignty of the central government in Madrid. It has 75% of the Basque people, who for generations have demanded self-determination.

The Basque Country is a competitive and balanced community, President Ibarretxe said. “An ancient people among the top countries in the field of sustainable human development…... but we lack peace. Unfortunately, on too many occasions, news about the violence of ETA hides the economic and social reality of a peaceful and hard-working people. Northern Ireland has suffered a similar situation for too long.

“Nobody knows better than you that violence only generates the suffering of innocent people and tarnishes the good name of the Basques. Basque society demands that ETA declares clearly and unequivocally its willingness to put an end to its violent campaign now.”
Following the 2007 collapse of an ETA ceasefire, President Ibarretxe launched a talks’ initiative which he described as “actually a Basque-style Downing Street Declaration”. The political debate in Northern Ireland moved from secret negotiations between the British Government and the IRA, to all-party talks after the signing of the Downing Street Declaration, he recalled.

“The message that your two governments sent out to all parties involved was crystal clear at all times. Talks would be inclusive, all parties simply had to accept a firm commitment to using exclusively peaceful and democratic means to achieve their goals and the people of this country had to be consulted directly about the changes for the future. This is precisely the same route we need to follow in the Basque Country.

“Our main difficulty lies in the reluctance to move from the old paradigm of negotiation between ETA and the Government, to a new paradigm based on all party talks.”

It was unfortunate, he said, that President Zapatero of Spain did not interpret his offer of all-party dialogue as an opportunity for a Basque way to follow the route marked out in the Northern Ireland peace process.

“He never presented an alternative, and neither did the rest of the political parties…..Our problem is that any attempt to conduct a similar effort in the Basque area is still considered as weakness in the face of terrorism.

"This is the old paradigm but a new one can still be created. We need to reinforce the leadership of all political parties. And we have to do it accepting all the consequences, even though the end result of the peace process may be unexpected and on many occasions difficult for those who were the front runners.

“We are at a crucial time that will affect the history of our land. A democratic battle is being waged between those who still carry on trying to transform the Basque conflict implementing old and failed frameworks and those that want to explore new avenues for peace. The outcome of this debate will determine our future for the coming decade.”

Funny thing, Ibarretxe's political party squandered the chance they had a couple of years ago when they decided to abide by the orders coming directly from Juan Carlos Borbon and Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero who did all they could do in order to derail the peace process ushered by ETA's ceasefire going to the extreme of refusing to accept an offer by ETA to lay down their weapons.

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Pelota in the USA

This article about the practice and enjoyment of pelota (the quintessential Basque sport) in the USA comes to us via The Miami Herald:

THE KING OF JAI-ALAI

Goiko is the king of jai-alai

BY NICHOLAS SPANGLER

The following scene occurred in the fifth point of the 12th game at Miami Jai-Alai on a Saturday night last spring.

It features two Basques using question mark-shaped wicker baskets fastened to each man's right hand to fling a small, smooth, very hard ball against a granite wall at lethal velocity for the delectation of a small crowd.

The taller of the pair is Inaki Osa, also known by his playing name, Goikoetxea (say Goy-koe-ay-chay-ah, Goiko for short). He's 27, 6-foot-3 and 204 pounds. He's winner of the last five jai-alai world championships and the best player alive, maybe the best ever. He's playing a guy named Jabi, who is no slouch but is probably not bound for jai-alai Valhalla, either.

They're on a three-walled (front, back and left-side) court that's 176 feet long, 40 feet tall and 45 feet wide, each trying to throw the ball so it hits the front wall and bounces twice or hits the side netting before the other can catch and return. Boy, are they throwing hard: two prosthetically enhanced Joba Chamberlains throwing the hell out of the ball and every time it hits the wall it cracks cold and hard and dangerous.

Backhands are exchanged. Six, seven, eight in a row hit the front wall halfway up with heavy topspin at 120 miles per hour and skid back along the side wall. Goiko throws backhand number eight, steps to the center of the court to cover the wide ball, then back in when he sees Jabi's ball hugging the side. He's poaching up, looking to grab this off the wall early.

Early's good, because it opens more angles of the court, and because it shaves Jabi's reaction time. Early's great, unless Jabi's ball -- because it hits some tiny shard of obtruded granite or because, this long into the rally, it's hotter and tackier than expected -- bounces hard off the side wall instead of skidding. And of course this is what happens, too fast for Goiko to make the catch, so fast all he can do is jerk his basket out of the way and swing around to face the back wall.

He's going to take the rebound -- a defensive shot, but doable, only now he's so far out of position he has to run back and his weight's still moving toward the back wall when he catches, twists and lofts the thing 130 feet toward the front wall in clear violation of the spirit, if not the letter, of certain laws of physics.

Jai-alai means ''merry festival'' in Basque, though Basques themselves call it cesta punta, "basket point.''

WANING IN AMERICAN

A few words about the state of the sport in America: it is sick. If it dies, future generations will gaze uncomprehendingly at documentary evidence of its existence consisting of one cameo appearance in Tron (1982) and those few seconds in the opening credits of Miami Vice (1984). ''What the hell was that?'' somebody will say, the way you would if you happened across a game of jeu de paume or SlamBall.

American jai-alai has no amateur participation to speak of, partly because it's difficult to play and every so often, somebody gets hit in the face. Sometimes this results in death or severe injury. Ernest Hemingway saw it in Havana:

"Red carnations began to spread on his white shirt. His face was completely crimson . . . he was bathed in blood and still he remained on his feet. The other pelotaris (players) and the judges ran up to him and led him to the infirmary. Frightened, I also ran to the treatment room and when I arrived I was amazed that the victim received me with a sorrowful smile. He shook my hand . . . and passed out.''

Jai-alai is expensive. All the baskets are handmade, come from Spain and cost $500 or more. A professional will go through one or more a month. Only six very good basket makers are still alive and all are older than 50. Balls are made from two flaps of English goatskin sewed around a core of Filipino rubber, cost $125 and might last a game before the goatskin needs to be repaired.

American jai-alai is a betting, not a spectator sport, sustained not by ticket sales and corporate sponsorship but the house cut of a pari-mutuel pot. The money's not in a broad fan base but in a core group of habitual gamblers. The handle rules.

To feed it, the Spanish partido format, which pits two players against each other in a contest to 30 or 35 points, was changed after its American arrival in the early 1900s to an eight-post, round-robin format that permits a greater number of bets and some baroque variations on the traditional win/place/show in the '60s. During the late '80s and early '90s, warm-ups were cut; off-season was eliminated in 1988. As many as 14 games were crammed into a single performance, with performances six days a week.

Sixteen frontons operated across the country. Opening nights in Miami, the largest, drew 14,000 people.

The business model was successful through the mid-1980s. Then the sport took a number of body blows: the 1988 players' strike, the spread of cable television and gambling cruises to nowhere, the introduction of the Florida Lottery and passage of the federal Indian Regulatory Gaming Act, which gave rise to two Indian casinos in South Florida that sucked people and money from the country's last two year-round frontons. Attendance and revenues have fallen steadily over the last decade, barely propped up by off-track betting and card room receipts.

A RAY OF HOPE

But what gambling took away, it may yet return: slot machines are coming in the first quarter of 2010, which means more money, probably a lot of it. A Las Vegas corporation has already bought the Dania Beach fronton and others are said to be nosing around Miami's. Fans hope some of the new money will go toward advertising the sport and upgrading the facilities.

Some words on the best jai-alai player in the world: He earned around $90,000 in guaranteed salary and performance bonuses last year, drives a Volvo and lives in a subdivision outside of Miami. It's an un-gargantuan, un-flash, un-super-lux townhouse shared with his girlfriend and his older brother, Luis, another jai-alai player. The living room contains a television, a couch set and the amplifier for Goiko's electric guitar; the dining room has no furniture.

Goiko is aware that his standard of living, while comfortable, isn't in the same universe as that afforded to stars of other sports. ''There's nothing I can do,'' he said one morning, sitting on his couch. "The sport is almost gone. The sport is not well.''

The brothers don't talk much about jai-alai. The sport doesn't particularly interest Goiko when he's not playing.

Goiko's one of the only players in the world who finishes in the money more than out. He never practices, has never been injured, and has already been conferred bobble-head immortality. Luis is good, but he loses more than he wins, and management never paid to manufacture a line of dolls in his likeness. ''He has confidence always, everyday always,'' he said one night in the locker room before the games. "Not like me.''

In the early afternoon, Goiko gets a burger at Fuddruckers and heads over to the fronton, where he plays for about three hours, six days a week, double performances every Saturday. He does this eight months of the year and plays tournaments in Spain for the remaining four. He'd rather be surfing, which is what he does most summers between tournaments. But he's not good enough to surf professionally and jai-alai's what he has done since a scout spotted him at 16 on an amateur court in his hometown of Zumaya, Spain.

His mother painted, his father fished, and without jai-alai he might be fishing too. ''I went to school and my marks were everything bad,'' Goiko said. 'My father told me, 'You want to play jai-alai or fish nets?' I don't want to fish.''

So he rode the same jai-alai pipeline that has carried thousands of Basque boys from Spain to Florida since the 1930s, when pari-mutuel betting was legalized in the state. His path was Milan, Rhode Island, Orlando and finally Miami in 2002.

''Usually, at 22, they are not so strong as he was,'' said Michelena, the former star who's now player manager at Miami. "And from the beginning, he has been fast.''

HIS STRENGTHS

His size let him cover great swaths of court with just a few steps and a lunge. His mechanics were raw but he was strong enough they didn't have to be perfect. He simply out-muscled opponents.

Add to this a couple of tactical innovations: he held the ball longer than usual, giving him time to size up the court before throwing; and he ran around his backhand, a Nadal-esque move that played to his great strength, the forehand.

A jai-alai forehand, less mechanically sweet than the backhand, begins with the hips and torso twisted clockwise and the wrist laid back. As the body uncoils, the elbow functions as a pivot; forearm, wrist and basket snap forward, and the movement ends with the right leg splayed out like a pitcher's on follow-through.

It requires more strength than the backhand but allows for better disguise and shot selection. Setup for an outside cortada -- a hard sidearm shot that hits the front wall low and cuts to the sidewall -- doesn't look different from a dejada drop shot, until it's too late to do anything about it.

The back-court star Benny Bueno, who played at Miami until his knee gave out in 2007, talked about Goiko's madurando el tanto, ripening the point: "His forehand is so good that he doesn't have to win the point on the first throw. He can throw a couple back to back until he really has you dead and then kill the point. He's on offense and you're on defense the whole time.''

BACK IN THE MOMENT

But not at this very moment, when he's scrambling to get back in the point, very much on defense, possibly as amazed as everybody else that his ball actually hit the wall.

Jabi's all over this weak feathered thing and the crowd, seeing an upset imminent, hoots. He throws sharp wide to kill the point. This is a gimme putt, an open lay-up, the overhead a foot from the net: except Goiko, who sees all and apparently knows all, as if he's playing this game at all times a few seconds in the future, is already loping over to the side netting, very fast but not at all rushed, before Jabi even releases. He makes the catch. He fakes wider still with his forehand, sees Jabi bite and wrongfoots him, putting the ball away into the deep corner.

Now is the time to cheer, because something miraculous has just happened. But American jai-alai, a few years into its second century, has its own traditions and they don't involve much cheering.

Fifty people are sitting in the dark in a fronton built for more than 4,000. A few of them clap. Then there's just mutter, because in certain regards American jai-alai is just like the dogs and horses, and everybody's hustling to the betting windows to put their money down before post time.

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Eusko Flickr : Euskadiko

Euskadiko
Originally uploaded by Afrobrasil

ETA : 50th Anniversary

This article was published at Yahoo News:

ETA vows to keep fighting after 50 years

MADRID (Reuters) – Armed separatist group ETA on Friday vowed to keep fighting as it marked its 50th anniversary and said demand for an independent Basque Country was stronger now than when it formed under the Franco dictatorship.

ETA said the governments of Spain and France had forced it to continue its armed struggle in which it has killed more than 800 people since the late 1950s, mainly in shootings and bombings.

"Without imposition from the states, this people would take the path of independence by pacific and democratic means ...

"Until then we will have to keep fighting with all strength and means because the enemy states do not show the slightest sign of a will to respect the Basque Country's word," ETA said in a statement published in the newspapers Gara and Berria.

ETA formed during General Francisco Franco's right-wing dictatorship when the Basque language and culture were repressed. Spain returned to democracy after Franco's death in 1975 and the Basque Country, and regions such as Catalonia and Galicia, have since gained varying degrees of autonomy.

"Although it (ETA) rose up in Francoism, ETA's goal was not to conquer Francoism but to achieve liberty for the Basque Country, and ETA still continues bound to that goal," ETA's statement said.

"Today, support for independence is more deeply rooted than 50 or 30 years ago," it said.

Spanish governments have held unsuccessful peace talks with ETA rebels, including the current Socialist government which abandoned talks in 2006 when the group killed two people with a car bomb at Madrid airport.

Spanish authorities say ETA has been reduced to a relatively small number of guerrillas after a series of arrests of senior figures.

Polls show most Basques do not want an independent state.

(Reporting by Raquel Castillo and Sarah Morris; Editing by Janet Lawrence)

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A Thief Among Thieves

This note comes to us via the New Haven Advocate, it tells us about a wine label you can find at a wine store in town, as it happens, the new wine has a Basque name.

Here you have it:

The Wine Thief's Lapartu

By Kathleen Cei

Following the popular Viña Ladrón (in both red and white varieties), a new private label red has just been released at The Wine Thief (378 Whitney Ave., New Haven; 203-865-4845 and 181 Crown St., New Haven; 203-772-1944, thewinethief.com).

Lapartu ($10) is a blend of 2007 carménère (80 percent) and syrah (20 percent) from Curicó Valley, Chile. Thief chief Karl Ronne met with winemakers at the Korta family vineyard a year ago to come up with the signature blend among tank and barrel samples.

Ronne describes carménère as similar to a cabernet/merlot blend, while syrah's known for its spicy fruit character. The result is fuller in body, texture and structure than you might expect from a wine in this price range. Since the Korta family hails from the Basque region of Spain, the wine is named Lapartu, the Basque word for "thief."

But I bet you may be wondering why such a strange name for a wine store, well, the provide the answer at the FAQ's section of their web page:

Q: What is a Wine Thief?

A: A long glass or metal tube used for drawing samples of wine from barrels during the aging process.

Wikipedia's version:

A wine thief is a glass or food-grade plastic pipette used in the process of wine making. It may be anywhere from 12 to 24 inches (30 to 60 centimetres) in length and may have a bend near one end. The wine thief is used to remove a small amount of wine from a cask, carboy, or other fermentation device for testing.

Home winemakers may also use a wine thief in connection with a length of tubing to syphon wine from one container to the other (a process called racking) or to transfer the wine to bottles.

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Pintxos in Donostia

This article was published by Time magazine, a news outlets that often plays it by the book and insists on divesting the Basques from their history and their identity.

Anyway, here you have it:

Tapas: Bite-Size Beauties

By LYDIA ITOI

How many Flavors can a tapa hold? Originally, a tapa was a piece of bread set on top of a wine glass to ward off flies and hunger. Today, a few tapas can make a full-fledged meal. The tapas capital of the world is San Sebastián, in the gastronomic heart of Spanish Basque country — where San Sebastián is called Donostia and tapas are called pintxos.

Whatever the city's name, its streets are lined with places serving one delectable nibble after another. But even in these rich pintxo pastures, nowhere is the grazing more highly evolved than at Aloña-Berri (www.alonaberri.com), which routinely sweeps national and regional tapas competitions with its innovative offerings. Aloña-Berri's staff manage to fit more tastes in a teaspoon than most restaurants put on a platter; their architectural pintxos are so elaborate that I have counted 12 perfectly balanced elements in a single bite.

Take txipiron. Traditional tapas bars serve the tiny squid simply grilled. At Aloña-Berri the txipiron is stuffed with onion confit, artfully suspended over a thimbleful of seafood-laced martini, garnished with a fragile pane of caramelized sugar scattered with onion sprouts and red pepper, and accompanied by a cube of toasted squid-ink rice. The bar offers a 10-course haute cuisine feast in miniature for a minuscule price of $35, but don't miss the pigeon baztela cooked slowly with sweet spices, raisins and rose petals, then wrapped in a crisp filo pastry. Another standout is the milhojas, a luscious caramelized tower of coin-sized potato disks sandwiched between slices of apple, cèpe mushroom and foie gras. The only problem? One bite is never enough.

At least Time does have the courage to break through the wall of lies built by Spain and France about the Basques and they have published at least 32 articles using the term "ethnic Basques", something that must of the USA based main stream media avoids.

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The Basques and The Philippines

The article you are about to read was published at PhilStar and the author dispels some myths and misconceptions about Philippine (and Basque) history, here you have it:

Of Basques, emblems and history

ROSES & THORNS By Alejandro R. Roces

One of the weaknesses of Philippine history, or really any history, is the tendency to perpetuate historical inaccuracy. Once an error becomes accepted and perpetuated through writings and stories, history is changed — usually to something unrecognizable. Occasionally, this is done purposefully — propaganda for instance. People in power rewrite history, or put their own spin on it, to suit their needs. This was a central motif in the book 1984 by George Orwell. “Big brother” changes and edits the past to fit a specific idea or concept. This reminds me of the “telephone game” where children or adults are lined up, told to memorize a phrase or a sentence, and whisper exactly the same words to the ear of the next child or person. What is relayed after the tenth child/person will always be remarkably different. An error is twisted, continued, completely changing the whole idea in the process.

The kastilas have always been known as those who occupied and ruled our country for more than 400 years. In reality, these are the Basques whose roots can be traced to the Basque Country, an autonomous region north of Spain, a distinct people with a different history, language (Euskera) and culture. Few people know that Juan Sebastian Elcano, the first to circumnavigate the world, was a Basque from the province of Guipozcoa. Most of the crew in Magellan’s expedition and subsequent voyages were Basques. Urdaneta and Legazpi, who came to our country in 1565, were both Basques. A good number of governor-generals who ruled during the Spanish occupation, including Luis Lardizabal who set up the province of Nueva Vizcaya (from the name of the Basque province called Biscay) and Simon Anda de Salazar were Basques. Thus, the Philippines may have been a Spanish territory, but it was also a Basque nation due to the role that the Basques played in the history of the Spanish occupation in the Philippines.

Today, there still exists a group of Basque remnants in the country. One of these is the distinguished Ynchausti family, one of the first major manufacturers and businessmen in the country whose activities laid the foundation for a budding Philippine economy. Many of us remember YCO Paints and Floorwax. Other companies they owned or founded were the Bank of the Philippine Islands, La Carlota Sugar Central, Ynchausti Steamship Co., Ynchausti Rope Factory, Tanduay Distilleria and Rizal Cement, to name a few. The year 1854 marked the formation of the Ynchausti y Compania, an umbrella company that brought together all these different companies and investments of the Ynchausti family. Ynchausti y Compania still exists today (in relative low-profile), however it controlled most of the assets above until around 1936, when some assets were sold to the Elizalde Clan (who had been trusted employees and minor shareholders up to that point). It is sometimes claimed that the divestment of the assets took place in 1893. But this is not true. Ynchausti y Compania is even listed in the 1901 Commercial Directory of the Manila and there are many mentions of the company well into the 1930s.

The Ynchaustis, close family friends, talk about another instance when error in history have entered public awareness and became perpetuated as fact. They refer to certain facts about their product, Tanduay, one of the venerable brands of Philippine industry that has been internationally awarded and recognized. The commonly held misconception about the insignia of Tanduay, very likely related through ignorance, is that the emblem is a fabrication. On the left side of the Tanduay coat of arms is a shield broken into four parts: a walnut tree on the upper left and bottom right hand quadrant, in the upper right and lower left hand a chevron. Despite popular belief, this is not a fabrication but in truth the coat of arms of the Ynchausti family. This is easily verified by checking the rolls of the coat of arms of Basque families in the Basque Country. Tanduay was a flagship company of the Ynchausti group of companies in the late 1800s, it would make sense that they would brand it as their own. Even the name Tanduay comes from the name of the area where the Ynchausti factories and head offices were based in Muelle de la Industria along the Pasig River. This then explains the shield to the left of the insignia and the emblem to the right is the Tower of Castile, which was a prominent part of the coat of arms of Old Manila. The companies of the Ynchaustis were based in Old Manila.

The story of the Ynchaustis in the country form part of our rich history as a nation. There are many lost stories from pre-World War II Philippines. Much of our past is sadly forgotten or changed (intentionally and otherwise). It is time we begin to seriously investigate the real history of our country. It is more interesting than we can imagine.

Historic facts are historic facts, and they should be told the way they are whether you like them or not. Elkano, Legazpi and Urdaneta were Basques, they were not Spaniards and no matter what the Spaniards want to say about it they can not deny that fact. Now, Elkano, Legazpi and Urdaneta took part in the rise of Spanish imperialism and its genocidal wars of colonization around the world, and that is a fact that no Basque can deny.

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Gernika's Lessons

Remember a few years back when George W. Bush, Tony Blair and José María Aznar were weaving their web of lies and deception in order to bully the international community into backing up their holly crusade in Irak?

There was a pivotal moment in which then Secretary of State Colin Powel was forced by Bush's hawks to lie before the UN Assembly, we can all remember how he moved around a small vial containing a white powder but few of us recall the blue drape behind him. That blue drape was put there to conceal Picasso's Guernica replica from the world's view for the painting was a stark reminded of what war really means.

Well, it did not matter, soon after Bush's USA went to war and now that very same replica will be touring Tony Blair's England, maybe because Aznar's Spain decided to abduct the original as an excuse for preventing the painting to be shown in Euskal Herria.

This note comes to us via The Independent:

Guernica in Britain: The art of war

No artwork left its mark on the 20th century as emphatically as Guernica. And Picasso's monumental painting remains as controversial as ever. As the UN's famous replica comes to Britain, Gijs van Hensbergen dissects its awe-inspiring power

Wednesday, 28 January 2009

On 3 November 1998, Kofi Annan, Secretary-General of the United Nations, stood up to address the International Council of New York's Museum of Modern Art (Moma): a world élite of tastemakers and guardians of culture. Referring to the Guernica tapestry, a copy of Picasso's original painting, that was hanging in the corridor outside the Security Council chamber room, Annan declared: "The world has changed a great deal since Picasso painted that first political masterpiece, but it has not necessarily grown easier. We are near the end of a tumultuous century that has witnessed both the best and worst of human endeavour. Peace spreads in one region as genocidal fury rages in another. Unprecedented wealth coexists with terrible deprivation, as a quarter of the world's people remain mired in poverty."

It was a grimly realistic analysis of how far the world had progressed since 1937, when Picasso reacted so powerfully to the catastrophe of the bombing of the Basques' spiritual capital, but also of how far we were from achieving that elusive goal of the UN mandate for enduring world peace. Annan's statement to Moma's International Council also recognised Guernica's unique position in the history of art, elevated as it had been to the status of moral exemplar; a universal icon, warning that unless we studied its lessons, history was doomed to repeat itself.

Just over four years later, in the last week of January 2003, in the wake of the twin towers tragedy, a blue shroud was thrown over the Picasso tapestry to hide it from public view.

Considering the central role Guernica had played in the UN's education programme, it was a strange and highly symbolic decision. According to Fred Eckhard, a UN spokesman who had been given the impossible task of playing down the significance of the action, it was merely that blue was a more appropriate colour as a backdrop for television cameras, in contrast to Picasso's visually confusing mixture of blacks and whites and greys. Other observers, however, were quick to draw their own conclusions. It wasn't colour or shape that was the problem; what the picture showed up was the embarrassing contradiction of presuming to take the moral high ground while simultaneously campaigning for war.

On 5 February, the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, shadowed by George Tenet, director of the CIA, had been scheduled to brief the United Nations Security Council in a last-ditch attempt to win UN approval for the war with Iraq that would start, according to military analysts, with a massive aerial bombardment of Baghdad that was to receive the chilling codename "Shock and Awe".

That same week, Hans Blix was expected to report back on either the discovery, or, as seemed more likely, the lack, of any concrete evidence proving that Saddam Hussein had been stockpiling weapons of mass destruction. On an almost daily basis, John Negroponte, US ambassador to the UN, had come out into the corridor to brief the world's press, while hovering in the background over his shoulder, the viewer could easily make out the mutilated bodies and screaming women of Picasso's painting. The presence of Picasso's Guernica was, it seemed, confusing the viewer. Painted as a passionate protest against senseless violence, it was once again succeeding only too well, illustrating perfectly the truism that we never seem to learn from our own mistakes.

Defiantly, in response to the cover-up of the painting, Laurie Brereton, a UN delegate representing Australia, pointed out: "Throughout the debate on Iraq, there has been a remarkable degree of obfuscation, evasion and denial, and never more so than when it comes to the grim realities of military action. We may well live in the age of the so-called 'smart bomb', but the horror on the ground will be just the same as that visited upon the villagers of Gernika [the Basque spelling of the town]... And it won't be possible to pull a curtain over that."

***

It was obvious that from the day of its creation, Guernica has never lost its power to shock. Even when reproduced, in tapestry, or in poster form, it still continues to mirror the horror of war and throw a harsh spotlight on our propensity for cruelty. Subtly, over the years, Guernica has reinvented itself and changed from being a painting born out of war to one that speaks of reconciliation and the hope for an enduring world peace.

In 1937, on Monday 26 April, as Franco's Nationalist forces pushed north to cut off Bilbao and take control of the Basque Country, the decision was taken to crush resistance with an overwhelming show of force. At 4pm, and for the next three hours, 60 Italian and German planes rained incendiary bombs down on Gernika, reducing it to a burning wreck. Nothing like this had been seen in Europe before. And no single act was so prescient of what the world would soon come to understand as the appalling reality of total war, where innocent people are bombed indiscriminately, or strafed by machine-gun fire as they escape from the carnage in towns up into the hills. The newspapers reported graphically on the tragedy, and the shockwaves circled the globe.

In Paris, on 1 May, Pablo Picasso, who was by then the world's most famous living artist, started to give concrete form to his powerful sense of revulsion, jotting down at lightning speed some initial ideas. Over the next fortnight, preparatory sketches, drawings, and paintings poured out with a feverish passion.

By late June 1937, Picasso was ready to put the finishing touches to a painting that had been executed on such a scale that he had been forced to jam it in at an angle in his enormous studio on rue des Grands Augustins. The canvas, which had acquired the title Guernica, was covered with what at first sight seems a chaotic jumble of animals and contorted human bodies drawn out in an austere palette of blacks, whites and scumbled greys.

Photographs taken by Picasso's new lover, Dora Maar, show the artist reaching forward from the top rung of a stepladder, stretching out to make a quick addition at the top of the canvas. Sweating, almost manically absorbed, Picasso paces up and down the painting's length, feeling and reading its almost palpable presence and testing out, again and again, the suffocating pressure of its interior space. Torn paper was pasted on to the canvas to try out possible changes and then quickly removed. Ideas and doodles were torn out of the ether, built up and overlayered, one on top of the other, as they were drawn into the painting's creative vortex and hammered into shape. Desperately short of time, Picasso had covered the almost 30 square metres of canvas in little less than six weeks. By any standards, it was an extraordinary achievement.

Out of the chaos, Picasso had managed to give shape to an arresting and profoundly disturbing image. There was nothing that specifically alluded to Gernika, or the terror that rained down from the skies. Instead, Picasso had resorted to employing images whose simplicity and meaning could travel across every cultural divide. At the base of the painting, decapitated, splintered and crushed, lies the corpse of a dead warrior, strangely reminiscent of a classical bust. Above him the weight of a horse, contorted with pain and clearly in its death throes, threatens to collapse to the ground.

On the right of the picture, three women in various states of distress look in upon the scene. In the background, barely discernible at first, a cockerel is crowing up at the skies from the top of a table. Most poignant of all, at the extreme left edge, the picture is anchored and framed by the tragic image of a mother with the limp body of her dead child held in her arms, who in turn is overshadowed by an impassive bull. Only the ghost of a wind blows across the canvas to lift the beast's tail.

At first sight, there seems to be no clear relationship between cause and effect. There is no easy way in to read the story or discover exactly at what point we have joined the narrative. But among the shattered walls, blind doorways and roofs, we come to a growing realisation that something terrible has happened here.

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When first shown at the Paris Exposition in 1937, the painting's reception was strangely muted. In fact, considering the coolness with which it was initially received, particularly by the official Basque delegation, it would have been reasonable to assume that Guernica might end up rolled and stored in the back of Picasso's Paris studio, like Les Demoiselles d'Avignon; left to collect dust and haunt those who had seen it with ever fainter echoes of a drama that had long since played itself out. Awkward and difficult to transport, this was perhaps the most likely outcome. After all, in the remaining Republican strongholds of Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia, the most obvious venues for showing the work, it would have served only to demoralise the militiamen who were witnessing daily what was painted out so graphically across Picasso's large backdrop.

During the Second World War, however, and particularly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Guernica's imagery became more recognisable, indeed painfully familiar. City after city in Europe was bombed. Finally the catastrophic lessons of Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought the stark realisation that the world would never be the same again. With no hint of irony, the President of the United States, Harry S Truman, announced sombrely: "I fear that machines are ahead of morals by some centuries, and when morals catch up, there'll be no need for any of it.' Guernica had been horribly prescient. What it depicts is modern mass slaughter only faintly disguised behind the ancient rituals of death. Every community in the world that has suffered an appalling atrocity has become synonymous with Guernica the painting and Gernika the town, the brutalised spiritual heartland of the beleaguered Basques.

As the prolonged sound of air-raid sirens boom out across a threatened city somewhere far away, each new conflict, each new bombing, each act of total devastation, begs the question: shall this be the Gernika of our age? Warsaw, Coventry, Dresden, Rotterdam, Hamburg, Stalingrad, Hiroshima, Stalin's Gulag Archipelago, Pol Pot's Cambodia and, closer to us today, Rwanda, southern Sudan and Srebrenica. Iraqi Kurdistan has its Halabja. Recently, during the Balkan crisis in Kosovo, Serbs attempted to liquidate the Kosova Liberation Army. Each and every example has been cited as the Gernika of its day.

On 23 September 1998 in Washington, DC, Senator John McCain took to the Senate floor, declaring: "We have not lacked for rhetoric, but we have proven woefully inadequate at backing up our words with resolute action... Mr President, prominently displayed in the United Nations building in New York is Picasso's famous and haunting Guernica. That painting symbolised for the artist the carnage, the human suffering on an enormous scale, that resulted from the Spanish Civil War as a prelude to the Second World War. Perhaps it is too abstract for those countries in the United Nations that oppose the use of force to stop the atrocities that have come to symbolise the former Yugoslavia, or that believe the war in Kosovo is the internal business of Serbia."

Just as Anne Frank's story has become symbolic of all the Jewish children lost in the extermination camps, and Auschwitz shorthand for the apocalyptic horror of the Holocaust, Guernica has become synonymous with indiscriminate slaughter in whatever corner of the world such tragedy takes place.

On any given day, somewhere in the world, in parliaments, council chambers and in open debate, Guernica is cited to add a sense of moral suasion and urgency to the argument. Picasso's Guernica is the image that draws our constant attention to the proximity of catastrophe. Reproduced by the million, copied by other artists, reinterpreted by even more, Guernica remains, nonetheless, inviolate and unspoilt.

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The extraordinary thing about Guernica is that it refuses to yield and drown under the weight of its own ubiquity. It is still an image that can awaken the nightmares of our historical past while painting a terrifying scenario of what has yet to come. Despite the marketing and the myriad psychological, sociological, historical and art-historical interpretations – enough to fill a library – it can still be guaranteed to stun the viewer into silence as he witnesses it afresh. Guernica has, and this is even more unusual, the capacity to speak intimately to the individual while also remaining a universal symbol that is understood by all.

From Paris in 1937 to the United Nations today, much of the painting's meaning has lain beyond Picasso's reach and control. Guernica has its own life, forging a relationship with its audience that has often been entirely separate from the life of the genius who brought it into our world. Over the years, that audience and historical circumstances have continued to change. And Guernica, as is inevitable, has become stylistically dated.

But while the fabric of the painting has become increasingly fragile, as a work of art it has nevertheless been ageing well. It has never lost its relevance, nor its magnetic, almost haunting appeal. From its first showing in Paris to its arrival in Spain 44 years later, it has witnessed and helped to define a century. That its lessons have still not been heeded or learnt makes it as relevant and iconic today as it ever was. Guernica, for better or for worse, more than any other image in history has helped to shape the way that we see.

Extracted from 'Guernica: The Biography of a Twentieth-Century Icon', by Gijs van Hensbergen, published by Bloomsbury (£10.99). To order a copy for the special price of £9.89, plus free post & packing, call Independent Books Direct on 0870 079 8897. The Guernica Tapestry will be on display at the Whitechapel Gallery, London E1, from 5 April 2009 to 18 April 2010 (www.whitechapel.org )

'While I work, I leave my body outside the door'

For art historians keen to search out Guernica's ancestors in art, the painting has proved a minefield. Picasso had often stressed the need for the modern artist to be a visual kleptomaniac, and with Guernica he didn't disappoint.

He had raided the store cupboard of art history and drawn from myriad sources: from Roman funerary sculpture to David's Oath of the Horatii; from the 10th-century St Sever Apocalypse in the Beatus de Liébana codex, to Catalan primitive art; from the classical Winged Victory of Samothrace to Bartholdi's Statue of Liberty; from Grunewald's Isenheim Altarpiece to Delacroix's Massacre at Chios; from Gericault's Raft of the Medusa to Rubens's Horror of War in Florence's Pitti Palace; from Guido Reni to Poussin; from Pierre Paul Prud'hon to press photographs in L'Humanité and Ce Soir; from Rogier van der Weyden's Descent from the Cross to Goya's Third of May and his horrific Desastres prints. One recent theory suggests inspiration also came from an anonymous Catalan fresco, The Triumph of Death, in Palermo's Palazzo Abatellis.

All these were absorbed, metamorphosed and transformed. Picasso also used his own earlier motifs; in Guernica we find passages from Songe et Mensonge and Minotauromachy, of course, but the Crucifixion, Three Dancers, Vollard Suite, early bullfight juvenilia and hundreds of other echoes, faintly remembered gestures, similar compositions and the employment of his habitual techniques are there too.

It mattered little that Picasso sourced so readily from elsewhere; what mattered was his capacity to come up with something shocking and new. He had performed a kind of visual alchemy in which the immediate power of the propaganda poster sits side by side with something as ancient and atavistic as the Altamira bull. On 12 July 1937, the Paris Exposition's Spanish Pavilion opened and the public could study Guernica and decide for themselves.

Few artists in history, excepting Goya, whose Second and Third of May were produced in just two months, have been capable of imagining and bringing to resolution such a complex and ultimately convincing work in such a short time. Physically, as well as intellectually, it was a remarkable feat.

Françoise Gilot, continually surprised by Picasso's extraordinary stamina, wondered at the physical cost of such an obsessive drive. "I asked him if it didn't tire him to stand so long in one spot. He shook his head. 'No,' he said. 'That's why painters live so long. While I work I leave my body outside the door, the way Muslims take off their shoes before entering the mosque.'" GvH

The Spanish Civil War: 1936 to 1939

Fighting broke out after a group of Spanish army generals, Franco among them, rebelled against the government of the Second Spanish Republic, which came to power in 1931 following the abdication of King Alfonso XII.

The conflict attracted worldwide attention as a struggle between left and right, with the elected Republicanos, or Popular Front, backed by the Communist Soviet Union, and Franco's Falangistas supported by Fascist Germany and Italy.

The military coup began in mid-July 1936. In early November, the Republican government fled Madrid for Valencia. Germany and Italy recognised the new regime and sent support before the year was out.

In addition to the civilian casualties of the horrific bombing raids that inspired 'Guernica', historians estimate that up to 50,000 people were executed on both sides, including the poet and dramatist Federico García Lorca.

The Falangistas won the war in 1939, and Franco began his bloody 36-year rule. Over the next 12 years, his supporters murdered at least 100,000 Spanish citizens. Republicans were subjected to constant persecution.

Although photographers and reporters had covered earlier wars, the Spanish Civil War attracted an unprecedented level of foreign attention because of developments in media and communications. Ernest Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn and George Orwell famously wrote dispatches from Madrid and a variety of front lines, illustrating the human cost of war.

The photographer Robert Capa covered the war with his partner, Gerda Taro. His 'Falling Soldier' picture, alongside 'Guernica', is the most memorable representation of the war. Purported to depict the moment a Republican soldier took a fatal bullet, 'Falling Soldier' is held up as an example of how propagandistic photography can shape the image of a war internationally. Capa went on to found the Magnum photographic agency. He was killed by a landmine while covering the war in Indochina in 1954. Sophie Morris

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