ETA announces permanent ceasefire

Armed Basque separatists ETA announced yesterday a permanent, verifiable ceasefire after more than 40 years of bloodshed in their battle for a homeland independent of Spain.

“ETA has decided to declare a permanent and general ceasefire which will be verifiable by the international community,” it said in text, voice and video statements distributed to media in Basque, Spanish and English.

“This is ETA’s firm commitment towards a process to achieve a lasting resolution and towards an end to the armed confrontation.”

A video showed three ETA members in white hoods and black berets, sitting in front of a table and reading the statement out in the Basque and Spanish languages.

Behind them on the wall hung the ETA symbol of a snake wrapped around an axe, which represents armed struggle.

It is the first time that ETA has unilaterally declared a permanent ceasefire in its campaign of bombings and shootings, which has claimed the lives of 829 people in more than 40 years.

Meanwhile Spain’s Interior Minister, Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba, said later yesterday an ETA ceasefire declaration failed to meet expectations but was not bad news.

“All democratic governments, all political parties, have insisted again and again that the only statement we want to read is the one in which ETA declares the end and does so irreversibly and definitively,” he told a news conference.

“It is evident that today, once again, it has not done what democratic parties hoped for,” said Mr Rubalcaba, who is also the deputy to Prime Minister José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero.

“If you ask me if I am calmer today, honestly I would say ‘yes’. If you ask me if it is the end, I would say ‘no’. If you ask me if this statement is what Spanish society was hoping for, I would say ‘absolutely no’,” Mr Rubalcaba said.

“To put it another way: Is this bad news? No it is not.” But he also said the ETA statement was not the news that many Spaniards had been hoping for a resolution to the conflict. The minister said ETA was still trying to gain a political return for its ceasefire.

“It is clear that ETA wants to maintain its position as a guardian, as a guarantor of a supposed negotiation, which is the same as ETA aspiring to achieve a price for an end to the violence,” he said.

Mr Rubalcaba said the ETA proposal for international verification of its ceasefire had been repeatedly rejected by the government, which demands Spanish verification.

ETA’s outlawed political wing Batasuna has urged the group to declare a permanent and verifiable ceasefire so as to lift a ban on its political activities in time for regional elections in May this year.