Eta terror group may call ceasefire

The Basque terror group Eta – originally blamed for the Madrid rail massacre - may be ready to call another ceasefire in hopes of convincing the incoming Socialist government to negotiate more political concessions.

“I have the impression that in a very short time – in coming days, or coming weeks – that Eta will declare a ceasefire,” one of the group’s founders, Julen Madariaga, 65, said in southern France where he has lived for three decades.

Influential newspaper columnist Kepa Aulestia wrote: “Eta always has known how to take advantage of these occasions. It’s very weak and needs a strategic truce.”

The “occasion” is the changeover next month from the conservative Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, who cracked down on Eta, to Socialist Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, shock winner in the March 14 general elections.

On Sunday, Eta issued a statement proposing dialogue with the Socialists.

But Zapatero responded a day later, “The only communique I await from Eta, as do the vast majority of Spaniards, is one in which it abandons violence.”

Nevertheless, the Socialists are looking for a way to break the political impasse and end the violence which Aznar, for all the success his Popular Party government has had in weakening Eta, was unable to achieve.