Resolution of the prisoner issue will be crucial to the success of the Eta ceasefire, writes Paddy Woodworth
The ceasefire declared last week by the Basque terrorist group Eta has created a new political climate as significant - and as delicate - as the Spanish transition from dictatorship to democracy 30 years ago.
That is the view of the Spanish prime minister, José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, expressed in an interview with the Madrid newspaper El País on Sunday.
This morning Zapatero, who leads the centre-left Socialist Party (PSOE), will hold a meeting which may be crucial to the success of the nascent Basque peace process, and all that it promises. This meeting is not, as you might perhaps expect, with radical Basques, but with the leader of the conservative opposition, Mariano Rajoy.
It was in the context of this meeting that Zapatero made his comments about the significance of the new political scenario opened up by the ceasefire.
"We need a broad vision, generosity, and not to think about the next elections, but about the future of Spain, and especially of the Basque Country." Generosity and vision are not the first words that spring to mind about the political discourse of Rajoy and his conservative Partido Popular (PP).
Certainly not since they lost the March 2004 elections in the wake of their gross mishandling of the Madrid train bombings.
For two years, the PP and its media supporters have persisted in promoting the most bizarre conspiracy theories about those bombings, suggesting that an unholy alliance of sectors of the PSOE, the police, Islamists and Eta members plotted to eject the conservatives from power.
When Zapatero unlocked the door to Eta's ceasefire last May, by offering talks if the Basque radicals definitively abandoned violence, Rajoy accused him of "betraying the dead". Since then, the PP has shattered the bipartisanship which has usually characterised Spain's counter-terrorist policy with an implacable hostility to any Basque peace process.
Faced with the fait accompli of a ceasefire, however, the PP and conservative newspapers have quickly moderated their tone, limiting themselves to insistence that no political price be paid for peace, a point Zapatero has already made repeatedly. They are also still saying that they will not join any political talks involving Eta's political wing, Batasuna, which is currently illegal.
The devil, of course, will be in the detail, in this case the detail of the definitions. Is it, for example, a political act to grant early release to terrorist prisoners? PP statements still maintain that any concessions to the prisoners would be a betrayal of Eta's victims, and of democracy itself.
In public, Zapatero hedges his bets on both questions, using vague phrases like "the grandeur of democracy, which has the spirit and the ability to include everyone who uses democratic methods to defend whatever ideas they like".
In private, he must know that Eta would not have abandoned violence if it thought its prisoners were going to serve out sentences of up to 60 years. Nor is a peace process conceivable without the participation of Batasuna, a point which Zapatero confirmed explicitly on Sunday.
Eta and Batasuna have been counselled in the pre-ceasefire period by Sinn Féin figures like Alex Maskey and Gerry Kelly, and by the Redemptorist priest Fr Alec Reid, who witnessed IRA disarmament. It must be assumed, then, that intermediaries have conveyed to the Spanish government that the release of prisoners was a deal-breaker in the Irish peace process.
All parallels with Ireland have to be qualified with considerable caution.
It is certainly true that Eta is in a much weaker position in "military" terms today than the IRA was in the mid-1990s.
Many realistic observers believe it was the capacity of the IRA to break its first ceasefire with the Canary Wharf bombing "spectacular" that shifted John Major's position on prisoner release, leading to the second and final cessation. This is a grim reflection of the impact of violence, in certain circumstances, on democratic politics.
Eta tried, and failed, to carry out similar "spectaculars" in Madrid in the aftermath of its own 1998/99 truce, and has suffered tremendous attrition from arrests and arms seizures since them. But it remains a lethal force.
Its disposition to dissolve itself today is probably based less on military defeat than on a conviction, shared by Batasuna, and of course by Sinn Féin, that in the present political context its aims can be better achieved through the ballot box rather than through the barrel of a gun.
Zapatero will certainly make a great effort to bring Rajoy on board the peace process when they meet today. But as the peace train leaves the station, if absolutely necessary he will leave him behind. He is guaranteed support by all the other parties and can move ahead without the PP, though it would deepen an already dangerous and emotive right-left fissure in Spanish politics, at a critical moment, if he has to do so.
Opinion polls post-ceasefire indicate a surge in support for both Zapatero and talks with Eta, though there are contradictory trends against concessions on prisoners - suggesting that the Spanish public may still waver between the PP and the PSOE positions on this issue.
Zapatero says he will wait until June to establish that Eta is applying its ceasefire rigorously, with an end to all extortion and street violence. He will then ask parliament to endorse talks in June, after which his government will discuss "technical questions" with Eta: prisoners, disarmament, and exiles.
He will probably make a conciliatory gesture early in this period. Many Eta prisoners are held in jails far distant from their families, a policy criticised by human rights groups. They could be brought back to the Basque Country without any new legislation.
Political talks, at which Eta will have no place, will be the second track of the peace process. It is here that Zapatero's comparison with Spain's transition to democracy may be valid, because these discussions could be the departure point for a more federal Spain, in which dual national identities are fully acknowledged.
They will require uncommon common sense and great imagination, and involve endless political semantic hair-splitting. But, as Churchill said, "jaw-jaw", however tedious, is always preferable to its brutal alternative.
Paddy Woodworth is the author of Dirty War, Clean Hands; ETA, the GAL and Spanish Democracy (Yale University Press).