Spain cannot trust the truce announcement by armed Basque separatist group Eta and will continue to pursue its members, interior minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba said today.
The ceasefire announcement yesterday could well be an attempt by Eta to legitimise its political arm Batasuna ahead of municipal elections in 2011, but Batasuna must break with Eta or have them disarm before this can happen, Mr Rubalcaba said.
“It could well be a step by step strategy. (Batasuna) have to get the message: either they break definitively with Eta or they convince Eta to definitively stop its violence," Mr Rubalcaba said in an interview with Spain's TVE1.
Mr Rubalcala ruled out negotiations with Eta on their goal of an independent homeland. “The word truce, as the idea of a limited peace to open a process of dialogue, is dead.”
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.
Adolfo Ares, the Basque regional interior minister, described the announcement as “totally insufficient and ambiguous. It is not an unconditional ceasefire”.
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 has killed over 850 people in its attempt to carve out an independent state in northern Spain and southwest France, but has recently been crippled by arrests of its members and a rise in support among Basques for a democratic solution to the independence movement.
It has broken ceasefires several times in the past, most recently in 2006 when a truce was ended by a deadly bomb attack at Madrid's airport. Past ceasefires have been seen by analysts as attempts by the organisation to regroup with a view to launching further attacks.
Additional reporting: Reuters