After a ceasefire of more than a year, ETA made a statement that they would no longer observe the agreement.
ETA, the paramilitary Basque nationalist organization, announced an end to their 15- month ceasefire, as of midnight on Monday June 5. Their statement, printed in two Basque newspapers, the Berria and the Gara, says they will continue to defend Euskal Herria, the Basque region that straddles the border between Spain and France, “with arms on all fronts,” and specifies that ETA is returning to violence because the Spanish government has not met “minimum conditions” in their negotiation process.
ETA claims Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero has responded to them with “arrests, torture and persecution” and criticizes the Supreme and Constitutional Courts’ decision to ban any candidates from the ANV (Accion Nacionalista Vasca — the Basque Nationalist political party with a socialist platform) from running in past local elections. This decision; they claim, “stopped the free expression of thousands of votes in favor of political change.”
The day before this dramatic announcement, ETA member and convicted killer, Inaki de Juana Chaos, threatened to go on a hunger strike again if he is forced to wear a GPS satellite bracelet. Inaki de Juana Chaos has served his prison time for twenty-five counts of murder but must serve an additional one at home, under house arrest, for promoting terrorism in articles he wrote from his prison cell. He has already undergone a prolonged hunger strike to protest what he feels is unlawful imprisonment.
ETA announced their ceasefire on March 24, 2006. But most consider it to have ended nine months later, when two Ecuadorean men were killed by an ETA bomb at the Barajas Airport in Madrid, while they slept in their cars. This terrorist act was followed by demonstrations of thousands of Spanish, denouncing the violence. The government’s opposition, the conservative Popular Party, used this occasion to boycott the demonstrations in a critique of Zapatero’s attempts to negotiate with ETA.
The country braces itself for potential new attacks just as this recent announcement leads to speculation that the ETA is internally divided, with a small radical component within it advocating a return to violent actions just when the country was hoping to move towards peace. ETA has been fighting for a separate homeland since the 1960s . Some 800 people have died in the conflict, most of them police, judicial and political figures targeted by the group.
This article was published Friday, June 8, 2007.
