16/06/2015
Lacking any other means except a post office box and a couple of ads in newspapers, more than 35 years ago, three women founded the Association of Victims of Terrorism. One of them was Ana María Vidal Abarca who, along with Sonsoles Álvarez de Toledo and Isabel O'Shea, managed to sow and reap in the Basque Country a testimony of solidarity and decency in what was then a wilderness of fear and complicit silence which parched the most elementary civic values and even the compassion with those who fell victims of the terrorist barbarity.
Today, aware of the loss of Ana Vidal Abarca, reviving her example is not only a way of acknowledging her immense contribution to the cause of the victims and to the fight against terrorism. She also reminds us that although evil has always been banalised – now also in 140 characters – there are people whose works make up a life of exceptional value. Those people are essential for a society to have referents, real bastions of civic strength and moral clarity, before the attack on democracy, the rule of law and the deepest sense of the sacrifice of the victims by the worst enemies of freedom.
Those of us who met Ana enjoyed a woman in constant action, unreservedly devoted to her cause which was also ours. We perceived in her the constant presence in her memory of her husband Jesus, chief of the Provincial Police of Alava, killed by ETA in Vitoria in January 1980.We valued her serenity and balance which in no case weakened her convictions but made them more persuasive and firm.
What Ana Maria Vidal Abarca lived to defend and vindicate is not the past. What she did, and all she helped doing, are not pages of a book that has to be closed. On the contrary, her precious legacy deserves more than a memory; it deserves the commitment to continue it, to prevent the evil she fought against from reappearing to erase the memory of those who suffered unjustly and the responsibility of those who inflicted the suffering.