Cautious welcome to end of ETA

BASQUES digesting the apparent end of separatist group ETA’s armed campaign are taking it with quiet, careful relief.

Because the decades of violence were too agonising, there was no dancing in the streets or champagne bottles being popped open.

“There seems to be a sort of restrained euphoria,” said Pedro Ontoso, deputy director of El Correo, a major Basque newspaper.

The government has ruled out talks with ETA, rejecting an appeal for dialogue made by the militant group in announcing its “definitive cease of armed action.”

Spain was adamant there would be no talks with ETA even as it welcomed an end to the violence. “There is nothing to negotiate with ETA,” Defence Minister Carme Chacon told Spanish National Television, adding that ETA had not achieved its aims and that the decades “of pain and crime have not served them at all.”

But the people of San Sebastian, a prosperous area of northern Spain, feel they are experiencing a cherished slice of history after 43 years of attacks that have left 829 people dead.

ETA has raised hopes before with announcements of ceasefires, even ones it called permanent, like a truce in 2006 that ETA ended after nine months with a huge car bombing that killed two people.

This time, ETA’s bombs and bullets — if not the organisation itself or its goal of an independent Basque state — do seem to be gone for good, Basques said.

“The sky is a beautiful blue, and we are living moments of excitement and hope after recovering the peace and freedom that society wanted so badly,” said Miguel Angel Lujua, president of Basque business federation Confebask. Its members had routinely received extortion demands from ETA and travelled with bodyguards.

ETA has been decimated by arrests in recent years and declining grass roots support among Basque nationalists who stomached its violent campaign in exchange for working toward the goal of independence.