What the Basque Terrorists' Cease-Fire Reveals

A unilateral cease-fire declared over the weekend by the Basque terrorist group ETA is getting the cold shoulder from the government of Spain, with officials noting that similar announcements in the past ended with more killings. Madrid says it will not relent in its 50-year struggle until the separatists, already severely weakened, dispose of their weapons altogether, and it has called for caution in dealing with what many interpret as a last-ditch strategy by ETA and its political allies to reclaim the political initiative.

The cease-fire was announced by way of a video broadcast Sunday by the BBC. The statement read by one of three militants said that ETA "decided some months ago to not carry out any offensive armed actions." No conditions or time frame were included in the statement. Only eight days earlier, the Basque separatist party, Batasuna, had proposed an eight-point agenda to end separatist violence, including international verification of the armed wing's disarmament. Batasuna has been outlawed since 2003, when it was charged with funding the guerrillas of ETA. The two groups have often been seen as the political and armed wings of the same separatist movement. While some Spanish officials see the new offers of a cease-fire as an attempt to play for time, other analysts think they reveal divisions between Batasuna and ETA.

The political establishment — including officials in Spain's Basque provinces and members of the major parties — noted that ETA's proposed cease-fire falls far short of full, immediate and verifiable disarmament. The possibility of negotiations "is dead because ETA made sure of that," Interior Minister Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba said on Monday, a reference to the group's record of ending previous cease-fires abruptly — including the last one, which came to a dramatic close in December 2006 when ETA bombed the parking lot of Madrid's newly opened international airport terminal, killing two people.

ETA was born in 1959 to fight for an independent Basque homeland that would include two Spanish provinces and a sliver of southern France. The group's activities have reportedly led to the deaths of more than 800 people. It has declared at least eight truces in the past, but several peace negotiations, including two this decade, have failed. Coordinated Spanish and French police pressure, especially since the 2006 peace talks, as well as the outlawing of Batasuna, have eroded the group's power, even among Basque nationalists.

Over the past few years, ETA's top military leaders have been captured with such regularity that it has denied the group's military structure the ability to reorganize. Police have thwarted several plots this year and the leadership of Batasuna has been jailed and barred from political activity. Analysts seem to believe this pressure has led both the armed and political wings to offer the latest cease-fire. "ETA is definitely playing for time to regain the political initiative," says Oscar Elía, an analyst with the Madrid-based Strategic Studies Group who has written extensively about ETA. The group is under intense pressure not just from the state, but also from Batasuna, which is losing influence in Basque politics to nonviolent nationalist groups ahead of May's municipal elections. Says Elía: "If Batasuna is not allowed to take part in the next elections, there will be thousands of people with ties to ETA that will be left out in the street and with one foot in jail, and these are the people that are pressuring ETA."

(Occasionally, Batasuna has managed to get around the ban. For example, in the 2005 regional Basque elections, a new communist party that had never managed to win representation got more than 12% of the vote after Batasuna leaders supported its list. Such activity has forced Spanish courts to regularly police the candidate slates of the various Basque parties.)

So what comes next? Officials and analysts alike wonder whether this is just the first of several ETA goodwill announcements to drag the government into talks with the goal of getting the administration to lift the ban on Batasuna. "ETA knows that what hurts them the most is not having a political sphere," says José Ignacio Torreblanca, a Madrid-based senior policy fellow in the European Council on Foreign Relations. "That's why they are making this tactical approach. They want to win time and to confuse the country."

The government, however, is setting a high price to allow Batasuna's Basque nationalists back into the political process. "ETA has to renounce violence completely and forever," Rubalcaba said, adding that the government will not relent in its political and police pressure, regardless of the cease-fire. He also gave Batasuna two choices: "Either they break ties with ETA forever or they convince ETA to abandon violence forever."

ETA's intentions are murky. The guerrillas and their political allies are in disarray and it's not clear which wing is in charge, the military wing or the political one. Even within the military structure, authorities believe the group is splintering into several sides. In fact, Ramón Zallo, a former ETA militant from the 1960s now a communication professor at Basque Country University, believes the video cease-fire announcement was not really directed at Spanish authorities but at Batasuna, which he believes is organizationally separate from ETA. "This is an internal struggle to determine who will lead Basque nationalists, whether ETA or Batasuna, and ETA wants to have the final word," says Zallo. The video may have been a way to alleviate the problems of Batasuna but, he says, "If ETA wanted to clear a path to legalize Batasuna, they would have been more specific in their communiqué."

Nevertheless, analysts concur that ETA is so weakened that the government has no need to make any concessions, even if ETA's intentions are sincere. "What ETA hasn't understood is that Spanish society will only accept that they completely surrender their weapons," Torreblanca says. "The government will not risk it knowing ETA's track record; [local] political parties will make sure Batasuna doesn't get any breathing room."

Indeed, most observers agree that ETA's future will be decided in the next few months. "ETA's internal situation is dramatic. This is the ideal moment to finish them without making any concession. The cease-fire is only the first step. They will give in gradually," Elía says. "At this juncture, the defeat could be definite." But until then, Spain is not getting its hopes up.