Belgium

The Delegation of the Basque Government in Brussels was a political office that looked like a shipping business. It was born in the middle of the Spanish Civil War to win support among Europe’s Catholics, the Germans raided it in 1940, and it stayed open, with the same two men at its head, until the seventies.

It was set up in July 1937, and it was one of the longest-lasting and one of the few to have permanent staff from the start. It was headed by Martín Lasa Ercilla, with Juan María Aguirre Lecube, brother of the lehendakari (president of the Basque Government), as deputy delegate. To give it legal cover, two companies were formed under Belgian commercial law, the Mid Atlantic Shipping Co., based in London, and the Compagnie Maritime et Commerciale, in the port of Antwerp, and the delegate was listed as representative and director of both.³

Belgium mattered for two reasons. It was one of the countries where a network for taking in refugee children had been built, and it was an intellectual power in Catholic public opinion, precisely the ground on which the Basque Government wanted to fight the propaganda battle. The Delegation worked to win support for the Basque fighters held prisoner, and to do so it relied on the Archbishop of Mechelen and on the Basque Jesuits, who knew the country: Belgium had been their destination when they were expelled from the Spanish state in 1932.³

In August 1940, with Belgium already occupied, the German military authorities burst into the Delegation and the companies’ offices, acting on the directions of two Francoist diplomats who were Basques themselves. The delegate and the deputy delegate were jailed, though later released, and the seized papers were sent to Spain. That episode allowed them to begin the contacts that would end up organising the escape of lehendakari Aguirre from occupied Europe. Aguirre had travelled from Paris to La Panne, in Flanders, and the German advance had left him trapped there.³

When the world war was over, Lasa and Aguirre went to court to reclaim the premises, which had been handed over to the Spanish consulate in Antwerp, and they got them back with the backing of the Belgian Government. They stayed at the head of the Delegation until the seventies. From Brussels the Delegation spread the word of the resistance against Franco’s regime, such as the strike of 1947, and sought a place in the European movement that was being born in the city: in 1947 it encouraged two Basque deputies to put forward a motion at the Congreso Internacional de Juristas Demócratas (International Congress of Democratic Lawyers). In 1960 it organised the funeral of lehendakari Aguirre in Antwerp Cathedral.³