The Basque Region and the ETA: Overview

• Their language, known as Euskera, has no clear links with any other known Basques have lived in Europe since before Roman times.

• The protection and promotion of Euskera has always been at the heart of the Basque struggleAbout 30% of the 2.5 million Basque people speak itRadio and television stations

• Fishermen: whales and cod. Columbus's crew was largely Basque.

Franco Regime

Franco’s Regime

• Strong opponents of Franco's Nationalist troops during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930sDuring Franco's 40-year rule region is punished. Franco on the Basque region : "traitor provinces.”

• Franco bans the speaking of Euskera in public.

Franco’s Regime

• Little economic investment in the region.• From 1959 ETA fights war for independence

for the Basque country- seven regions in northern Spain and southwestern France

• ETA first emerged as a student resistance movement

• ETA kills more than 800 peopleTheir targets were mostly police, judges and politicians.

• Terrorist activities funded through kidnappings, robberies, and extortion

• ETA has made an explicit commitment to the “action-reaction theory” insurgents carry out attacks to provoke arbitrary and indiscriminate government reprisals against the population, calculating that this will increase resentment and win insurrectionary forces more support

Post-1975

• Transition to democracy in Spain brought Basque home rule own parliament and police force, education policy, collects own taxes.

• ETA's legal political wing Herri Batasuna gained 18 percent of the vote in regional elections in 1998youth vote key

• 2003 Batasuna banned under Spanish law for supporting terrorism

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• 2006 Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero's government began negotiations with ETA after the organization declared a "permanent" cease-fireTruce ends when ETA set off a bomb in Madrid's Barajas Airport killing two.

• Zapatero's government takes harder lineno new peace process until ETA turns over its weapons or announced its dissolution

• January 2011 ETA announced that it was declaring a "permanent and general cease-fire.”

• From the declaration: a solution to the Basque conflict will come "though a democratic process that takes the will of the Basque people as its maximum point of reference, and dialogue and negotiation as its tools."

ETA Today

• Outside observers will confirm that ETA longer purchases weapons or engages in the extortion

• Brian Currin, the international mediator who helped to achieve piece in Northern Ireland and South Africa: "This is what we've been waiting for…The fact that they have agreed to verification by the international community has huge implications."