BASQUE terrorist group ETA's disarmament has officially started in what the French ministry of defence calls a 'positive move' and Spain considers 'theatrics for media attention'.
Files were handed over in front of independent witnesses – including Italy's Archbishop Matteo Zuppi and Reverend Harold Good – a major player in the disarmament of the IRA – in Bayonne, southern France.
The huge files contained an inventory of ETA's weapons caches, which included 120 guns, three tonnes of explosive material and enough bullets for thousands of shots to be fired.
ETA has eight arsenals hidden in the French and Spanish Basque Countries, which spread on either side of the Pyrénées.
Although France's minister for the interior, Matthias Fekl, thinks the public disarmament announcement and the Bayonne process is 'a huge step forward', Spain does not believe the terrorists have listed all their weapons, nor that they will surrender them all.
Spain, along with France, has reiterated to ETA that they will get nothing in return for handing in their arms and that all the two governments will accept is a full and unconditional surrender.
Whilst ETA appears to have agreed with this, Spain believes it is a mere distraction tactic and designed for publicity.
And ETA has always made use for the media for its own ends, with every attack starting with a warning in the organisation's name to the Basque newspaper, Gara.
The separatists, who formed in the 1960s and murdered around 800 people in 40 years – starting with the fatal shooting in San Sebastián of the head of the secret police in 1968 - have been inactive since 2010, when they announced they would no longer carry out attacks, and agreed to hand in their weapons in 2011.
But they laid down conditions in return, including ETA prisoners being released or moved to jails nearer their families, and neither Spain nor France was prepared to bargain with them.
A car bomb in the Palma Nova resort area of Calvià, Mallorca in summer 2009 killed a policeman and was ETA's last act of violence, with its last major attack being on December 30, 2006 when the terrorists blew up the car park in Madrid-Barajas airport T4, killing two Ecuadorian civilians.
This was nine months after announcing a ceasefire which grabbed headlines and started a long period of political wrangling as then president José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero (PSOE) was willing to negotiate with the organisation to end the violence, whilst terrorism victims' associations and the opposition were dead against allowing ETA anything in return for their truce.
ETA's violence had slowed down in the decade before then, although infrequent attacks on police headquarters and cars, including living quarters, and in tourist areas caused chaos and led to injuries – in the case of bombings on a police car in Gandia (Valencia province) in 2002, at hotels in Benidorm and Alicante in summer 2003 and at the Saga Hotel in Dénia (Alicante province) in January 2004 – and continued to cause some deaths, including the young daughter of a police officer in Santa Pola (Alicante province) in 2002.
The height of ETA's bloodthirsty crusade was in the 1970s, but high-profile killings – including PP councillor in the Basque Country, Miguel Blanco, on live TV in 1997 – and the ever-present threat of danger in tourism hotspots and in or near police stations meant that until the Millennium at least, Spaniards living in possible target areas were nervous about leaving their homes.
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