BASQUE separatist terrorists ETA is due to make a 'key announcement' on Friday in Cambo-les-Bains, south-western France, and speculation has been rife as to whether the organisation planned to break up – but that speculation has now ended with a written communication.
Nearly half a century to the day of the terrorism cell's first fatal attack, an open letter to various institutions in the northern region has been published on several news sites in the Basque Country and nationally.
ETA says it intends to 'permanently end [its] historic cycle and function' and has 'dissolved all its structures', putting 'an end to [its] political initiative'.
The organisation has already issued a public apology for the 2,742 terrorist attacks, the first of which was in 1968 and the last in summer 2009, and the deaths of around 850 people, of which 198 remain unresolved.
But the Terrorism Victims' Foundation was unconvinced and its chairwoman Maite Pagazaurtundua – who lost her brother Joseba to ETA 15 years ago – said the 'small print' in the cell's speech 'cancelled out all the nice words about being truly sorry'.
Senior politicians continue to suspect an ulterior motive – for ETA to be 'offering' to disband as a bargaining tool for its prisoners to be released or moved to jails in the Basque Country nearer their families – and as yet, all ETA's promises have rung hollow with those whose wounds remain raw, in some cases literally.
During ETA's most active years – broadly, from the early 1970s to the mid-1990s – regular attacks aimed at authorities and civilian lives were lost as collateral in addition to the Guardia Civil and National Police officers and Armed Forces members who perished.
In total, 798 terror attacks targeted these three bodies.
ETA's other main focus for its bomb blasts and shoot-outs were tourist resort areas, to create maximum visibility, although these tended to involve fewer fatalities.
UK pensioners on holiday in Dénia (Alicante province) in January 2005 escaped alive purely because the Basque perpetrators lacked knowledge of British culture: a bomb was planted in the dining hall to go off at 15.00, when the terrorists assumed guests would be having lunch, but the Saga holidaymakers at Hotel Port Dénia had long since finished eating by then, meaning the only human suffering involved was minor injuries sustained by a waitress.
After headlines resonated in March 2006 with the joyful news of ETA's having called a truce, the long hoped-for peace was short-lived: On December 30 that year, a bomb was planted in the car park in Terminal 4 at Madrid's Adolfo Suárez-Barajas airport, killing two Ecuadorian men who were waiting for their families to arrive in Spain to spend New Year with them.
The last violent ETA attack was a car-bomb in Palmanova, Mallorca, killing a police officer in July 2009, but the terrorists did not hand in their weapons until a year ago.
And the damage can never be reversed for thousands of Spanish residents, especially permanently-injured survivors and grieving loved ones who lost family or friends in some of ETA's biggest blasts.
One Barcelona man lost his entire family, wife and two children, in the Barcelona Hípercor hypermarket bombing over 30 years ago, and hundreds of police and civilians were killed in an attack in Madrid's Plaza de la República Dominicana, which Antonio Troitiño, recently extradited from the UK after six years living in London, was involved in planning.
ETA's letter to Basque institutions refers to the 'challenge' of putting an 'orderly, reasonable and constructive' end to what it refers to as 'armed conflict', but what Spain's government, opposition and residents refer to as mass murder.
The organisation shifts the responsibility onto 'the people' for its disarmament and says they will be the 'receptors' of its break-up, because this is 'based on trust in the strength of the people', who sought to 'contribute to the path towards peace and freedom' in the region and 'because ETA was made up of the people and to the people it will return'.
Praising itself for 'brave responsibility' in 'shaking up the situation' and 'building a future from a new starting point', the organisation's get-out-of-jail card is that the 'conflict' the Basque Country reportedly has with Spain and France 'did not start with ETA and will not stop with ETA's end'.
The terrorists claim 'reluctance to solve the conflict' and 'missed opportunities' on the part of politicians 'provoked a continuation' of the violence and 'multiplied suffering'.
“However it may be, ETA recognises the suffering caused as a consequence of its fight,” the missive continues.
It spoke of 'new opportunities' to 'build a future together' and urges both sides not to 'repeat their mistakes', insisting that 'solving the conflict and building the Basque Country' is something that 'needs everyone involved', because 'the future is everyone's responsibility'.
The letter is signed off in the name of the organisation, both its acronym and its full title, Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, which translates as 'Basque Country and Freedom'.
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