Blanco was found alive, the two shots to the back of the head not killing him immediately. He died the following day in hospital. A former socialist health minister, Ernest Lluch, was killed in Barcelona. The year-old had retired from political life. However, the group quickly broke it, setting off a car bomb at the parking lot at Terminal 4 of Madrid-Barajas international airport.
Two people, who were sleeping in a car parked near the bomb, were killed. Zapatero ruled out any possibility of reaching a peace agreement with the terror group.
In December, his successor was arrested by French police. In January the newspaper Gara published the words: "ETA has decided to declare a permanent and general ceasefire, which can be verified by the international community".
Spanish authorities demand that ETA disbands. The announcement comes less than two weeks after the group offered an unprecedented apology that victims, their relatives, the Spanish and Basque governments say was too late and insincere. Sections U. Science Technology Business U. October 19, GMT. But while history will judge ETA as a failed terrorist group, the lesson for the rest of Europe is that neither absolutism nor denial are effective ways of solving complex issues of national security.
The bitterness is understandable. For Spain, and the Basque region, have been suffering at the hands of ETA one of the most lethal, protracted and intransigent campaigns of terrorism in modern Europe — 58 years, to be precise. In all this time, ETA militants assassinated Spanish politicians, magistrates, and newspaper publishers, planting roadside bombs and firing rockets, killing in the process more than people.
What caused such a persistent and long-standing volume of terrorist violence? ETA violently opposed the Franco regime, which suppressed opponents and banned minority cultures and languages, including that spoken by the Basques. ETA maintained an extremely one-dimensional view of the world, peopling it with clearly demarcated heroes and villains.
From the outset, the group saw violence as the most effective form of political pressure against what it perceived as an unfair and unresponsive political system. ETA might have been more easily contained had the Spanish governing elites and the security authorities acted in a more balanced way, combining security pressure to destroy ETA infrastructures and reforms intending to remedy grievances across the Basque country. In Spanish public memory are still vivid the attempts by Jose Maria Aznar, the former conservative prime minister, trying and failing to influence the general election by deliberately blaming ETA for the Al-Qaeda mass casualty Madrid bombings which had taken place 72 hours before the election.
Terrorism is a political and social phenomenon that needs to be understood within a specific context. In Spain, it was always easier for successive governments to dismiss ETA militants as fanatical maniacs than to consider the message ETA militants were sending. For terrorism, whether one agrees or not, is not simply violence but violence with a message.
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