•  madrid
• Tuesday, October 18, 2011
• Inter Press Service

International mediators meeting in a peace conference Monday in Spain's northern Basque region were hopeful that the armed separatist group ETA would respond positively to their call for the group to lay down arms.

The group of international personalities who have helped broker solutions in places like South Africa and Northern Ireland said 'We believe it is time to end, and it is possible to end, the last armed confrontation in Europe.'

'We call upon ETA to make a public declaration of the definitive cessation of all armed action,' they said in a statement read out at the meeting in San Sebastián, in the Basque Country.

The negotiators, who included former United Nations secretary general Kofi Annan and former prime ministers Bertie Ahern and Gro Harlem Brundtland of Ireland and Norway, respectively, were trying to help bring about an end to ETA's four decades of violent struggle for an independent Basque homeland in northern Spain and southwestern France, in which it has killed some 850 people.

But while the mediators were optimistic, sceptics pointed out that the Spanish government has held peace talks with ETA (Euskadi ta Askatasuna — Basque Fatherland and Freedom) several times, and the group's declarations of a ceasefire have generally ended abruptly with a new terrorist attack.

In June and July 2006, government representatives held talks with ETA in Geneva. But in December that year, members of the group detonated a car bomb that destroyed a parking garage at the Madrid airport, killing two people and injuring 20 others.

And an indefinite ceasefire declared by the group in 1998 lasted 13 months. A member of the Basque region government who asked not to be identified told IPS that the problem is that one faction of the group could be opposed to a peace deal and might return to the use of violence on its own, regardless of what the leadership has decided.

Former deputy prime minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba, the governing socialist party's candidate for the November elections, said 'the only communiqué that would mean anything is one in which ETA declares an irreversible and definitive end' to the violence.

In January, ETA announced that a September 2010 ceasefire would be 'permanent and verifiable' by international observers. But the government refuses to engage in talks until the group lays down its arms and disbands.

Spain's police union expressed its doubts in stronger language Monday, saying the peace conference in San Sebastián would only lead to more deaths, because it makes ETA 'stronger than yesterday' by recognising it 'as a political agent with which it is necessary to negotiate.'

© Inter Press Service (2011) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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