TerrorismBasque ETA separatists announce they are 'completely' dissolving

The Basque militant group ETA has announced it would disband and end its “political initiative” after a 60-year campaign for independence of the Basque region from Spain and France. Spanish officials, however, said they would keep pursuing ETA “terrorists.”

In a letter published on Wednesday in news portal El Diario Norte, leaders of ETA said the group had “completely dissolved all its structures.”

The group’s violent campaign had claimed over 850 lives in the last sixty years.

The main points:

· ETA said it was “putting an end to its journey” in the letter published on Wednesday.

· The disbanding does not “overcome the conflict the Basque Country maintains with Spain and France,” they added.

· Spanish police will continue to pursue ETA members, who they called “terrorists,” despite the move, Spanish Interior Minister Juan Ignacio Zoido said.

· The group declared a truce in 2011, handed over weapons in 2017 and apologized to its victims last month.

· The latest ETA letter comes two days ahead of a scheduled peace conference in southwestern France.

Bloomberg reports that the group representing ETA’s victims, COVITO, slammed ETA shortly before the latest publication. COVITO head Consuelo Ordonez, whose brother was killed by ETA in 1995, said “the only decent sentence that the terrorists could have uttered starts and ends with, ‘We should never have existed.’”

Spanish Interior Minister Zoido vowed to keep investigating unresolved crimes attributed to ETA and to pursue its members. “ETA obtained nothing through its promise to stop killing, and it will obtain nothing by announcing what they call dissolution,” he told reporters.

The Basque separatist movement has been ratheting down its activities for years, but the letter’s publication on Wednesday marks a key step toward the group’s dissolution. A 4 May conference has been scheduled for Spanish, Frech, and ETA representatives to hammer out the final details of the Basque region’s post-ETA political life (the Basque Region straddles the Spain-France border, with about a third of the region under French rule).

In its letter, ETA acknowledged its responsibility in failing to resolve the conflict. At the same time, they said the Basque region was “before a new opportunity to finally close the conflict and build a collective future.”