SPANISH PRIME minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero was last night said to be “disappointed and deeply sceptical” after the Basque separatist group Eta announced a ceasefire.
There was a mood of dismay in Spain as politicians studied the announcement. The group said it was prepared “to start the democratic process” leading to an independent Basque nation.
The statement did not say the ceasefire was permanent or make any mention of laying down arms, a prerequisite the government has demanded before it will enter negotiations.
Although Mr Zapatero made no public comment on the announcement last night, his office said he was “disappointed and deeply sceptical – he finds it too little. Not only is it insufficient, but it is also fraudulent.”
Mr Zapatero is believed to have held discussions with his officials to agree on their stance and is expected to make a statement later today.
“It is clearly insufficient. We ask them to definitively end their violence, to lay down their arms, and we demand they disband their organisation. This is the least the Spanish people demand, and this is what we are once again demanding of them,” said Leire Pajín, third-ranking in the Spanish Socialist Party hierarchy.
Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams welcomed the ceasefire announcement and urged the Spanish government to seize the opportunity for what he believed could be a permanent end to the conflict. According to a Sinn Féin spokesman yesterday, Mr Adams and other senior party figures have been involved in long-running contacts with senior Basque separatist representatives in the past year or more for the purpose of helping end the conflict. He said that significant talks took place at the end of last year and earlier this year, where participants drew on the lessons of the Irish peace process.
Eta declared the unilateral ceasefire in a video broadcast by the BBC and published simultaneously on the website of the Basque language newspaper Gara. The video showed three figures, dressed in black, with only their eyes visible through slits in white masks, sitting at a table beneath an Eta serpent-and-hammer flag. The voice of a woman sitting in the middle announced the decision to cease offensive armed action.
“Eta confirms its commitment to looking for a democratic solution to this conflict. We call on all Basque citizens to continue with our struggle by whatever methods they have so that we can all make irreversible steps along the road to freedom,” the woman read.
For once politicians of almost every hue were in agreement, expressing their disappointment.
Adolfo Ares, the Basque regional interior minister, described the announcement as “totally insufficient and ambiguous. It is not an unconditional ceasefire.”
Although the announcement came this weekend, the woman said that the decision had been taken some months ago, but she gave no clue what had brought them to their decision or why they had delayed making their announcement.
But it can hardly have come as a surprise. No one denies the fact that Eta has been seriously weakened by efficient police operations in Spain, France and other European countries, following the detentions and imprisonments of hundreds of alleged terrorists – including their leader and two of his senior henchmen earlier this year. There have also been seizures of large quantities of explosives, arms and ammunition.
Only last month, Alfredo Rubalcaba, the interior minister, confirmed that 62 alleged Etarras were arrested in France and Spain in the first six months of this year alone.
Their most recent fatality was the shooting of a French gendarme in March this year, when he tried to arrest a suspect near Paris. It was the first time Eta killed a member of the French security forces. The last attack in Spain was just over a year ago, when two civil guards were killed by a bomb attack in Mallorca.