ETA calls for negotiations with Spain and France

The violent Basque separatist group ETA today called for peace negotiations with Spain and France, warning them not to miss a historic chance for peace and said its permanent ceasefire will go into effect just after midnight.

“It is time to make important decisions, moving from words to deeds,” ETA said in a new statement handed out to Basque newspaper Gara.

The group urged the French and Spanish governments not to thwart the groundbreaking process launched by its decision to lay down arms after nearly four decades of bombings and shootings that have claimed more than 800 lives and made ETA one of Europe’s last armed militant groups.

Much of the communique repeated wording contained in yesterday’s statement announcing the permanent ceasefire, a first for a group that has called truces before only to revert to violence after peace talks failed.

“I have a certain degree of confidence that this might be the definitive one,” said Jose Antonio Ardanza, a former president of the Basque region.

This time, ETA is seen as seriously weakened by wave after wave of arrests in recent years and stymied by the Islamic terror bombings of March 11, 2004, in Madrid, which killed 191 people, wounded more than 1,500 and made further ETA killing politically unthinkable.

ETA has not staged a fatal attack since May 2003.

Both ETA statements said the Basque people had the right to decide their own future, an allusion to ETA’s long-standing drive for self-determination, letting Basques choose between the status quo of being part of Spain or a move toward more autonomy.

But today’s document mentioned for the first time “dialogue and negotiation” with the governments of Spain and France.

France is included because the Basque region straddles the border, and ETA has traditionally said three regions of south-west France should be part of the independent Basque homeland it has been fighting to create.

“ETA calls on the authorities of Spain and France to respond in a positive way to the new situation and not place obstacles in the way of the democratic process,” the statement said.

It did not say what issues should be negotiated.

But as speculation rose in recent months that ETA was close to declaring a ceasefire, despite a persistent wave of relatively small, non-lethal bombings, the issue of the more than 800 ETA prisoners in Spanish jails emerged as one of the topics Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero would have to deal with.

ETA and its supporters have long demanded that ETA prisoners, intentionally spread around the country, sometimes in far-flung jails in the Canary Islands or Spanish enclaves in north Africa, be moved to the Basque region itself so they can be closer to their families.

ETA’s weapons arsenals would also have to be dealt with.

Zapatero, who offered ETA peace talks last May if it renounced violence, has repeatedly said he would make no concessions to ETA and simply negotiate terms for its surrender.

He said after yesterday’s ceasefire announcement that he had not yet decided if this statement fulfilled his conditions for engaging in peace talks.

The news prompted a mix of wariness and jubilation across Spain, where ordinary citizens said they could hardly believe the end had come for a group blamed for so many deaths, so many injuries and so much damage.

The ceasefire was seen as a huge victory for the Socialist leader, but his critics maintained a hard line, saying they would fight to ensure the government does not give too much away.

“One cannot pay a political price for peace. If we were to do so, terrorism would have won,” said Mariano Rajoy, leader of the conservative opposition Popular Party.

ETA, established in the late 1960s, campaigned to carve out an independent Basque homeland in northern Spain and south-west France.

Over the years, ETA has mostly targeted security-force members, although in the 1990s it increasingly began to kill politicians.

In 1995, in one of its most audacious plots, it tried to assassinate Jose Maria Aznar, then an opposition leader who would go on to become prime minister.

The most deadly attack claimed by ETA was a 1987 bombing that killed 21 people in an underground car park at a Barcelona supermarket.