ETA to government: "If the talks break down, this will be Vietnam"

The Spanish government's announcement in May 2007 that it was breaking off talks with ETA was another blow to any hopes at the time of ending 40 years of violence in the Basque Country. On December 30 of 2006, ETA had detonated a bomb at Barajas airport, killing two people. Under intense political and media pressure to crack down on the terrorists, after five months the government resumed its policy of arresting ETA activists and dismantling the organization's satellite organizations. In response, the terror group threatened "Vietnam."

Veteran politician Jesús Eguiguren, a former president of the Basque regional parliament, and currently the leader of the Basque Socialist Party (PSE), headed the government negotiating team. In ETA, las claves de la paz (ETA, the keys to peace), Eguiguren looks back to that important period, which he argues, contrary to expectations at the time, paved the way for ETA's announcement on October 20, 2011, that it was to lay down its arms definitively.

ETA's "Thierry" threatened the Socialist representative before the Barajas attack

The terrorists were frustrated that police pressure was not lifted during the talks

First contacts. "It all began in the Caserio de Txillarre at the beginning of 2000," says Eguiguren, referring to informal talks at a remote country hotel in the Basque Country with Arnaldo Otegi, the then leader of ETA's political wing Batasuna under the Popular Party administration of José María Aznar. After the Socialist Party won the 2004 elections, Eguiguren contacted newly installed Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, who initially was uninterested in discussing how to move the peace process forward. Shortly afterwards, Eguiguren met with then parliamentary spokesman Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba - two years later he would become interior minister - and outlined the state of play of the talks with ETA. "He understood the situation immediately: what we had, and what was at risk. I have never met anybody with such quick responses."

ETA's first approach: summer of 2004. Within months of the Socialists taking office, ETA made its first overture to the new government, sending a letter to Eguiguren saying that it was prepared to enter into talks about resolving the conflict. "At the end of the summer, the government's response was conveyed to ETA through intermediaries. I was the messenger," says Eguiguren.

Second letter: February 2005. "ETA sent a second letter in February 2005, stating that it was 'fully prepared to establish direct communication that would allow, through political negotiations, for a democratic resolution to the conflict between the Basque homeland and Spain.' The letter went on to say that if the government were willing, talks should take place 'under the auspices of an international organization'."

A third letter followed in April 2005, suggesting that the Geneva-based Henri Dunant Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue oversee the talks. A meeting was set up for late May (eventually it would take place on June 7), ahead of which the government sought congressional approval to begin talks with ETA, with the Popular Party voting against. With the support of other parties, the motion was approved.

On June 21, Eguiguren met Josu Ternera, the veteran ETA activist who after being released from jail became a member of the Basque parliament. The pair were introduced by representatives of the Henri Dunant Centre respectively as George and Miguel. "I of course knew who he was; I knew him, we shook hands, and talked."

Ternera had been on the run for the last three years after Spanish police had accused him of organizing a terrorist attack in 1987 that killed 11 people. "Ternera denied having anything to do with ETA's leadership, saying that he was an intermediary, that he had some moral authority, but was not part of the leadership. He understood that if there were to be peace in the Basque Country, ETA would have to recognize the harm that it had done, but of course he talked about the conflict in terms of both parties," says Eguiguren, adding: "I believe that he was sincere."

Don't mention self-determination. "The idea was to search for solutions and to put them down on paper with the aim of ETA ending its activity and the government announcing that a process was now underway. We laid out some ideas that addressed the causes of the conflict. Then some possible ways of resolving them. Finally, we began the process," says Eguiguren. "We agreed not to use terminology that was unacceptable to either party, for example, self-determination, which we couldn't accept. I think that Ternera understood how important this was. We also agreed that if we did make any progress, that the Popular Party would have to get involved. They understood this. They said from the start that any agreement would have to be with the Spanish state," he adds.

Bombing in Madrid. On June 25, just four days after the conversations started to establish the terms of future negotiations, ETA exploded a car bomb outside the Peineta Stadium in Madrid, just 11 days ahead of the International Olympic Committee's announcement of the host city for the 2012 Games, with Spain's capital on the shortlist. Eguiguren was told to return to Madrid. Instead he stayed to demand an explanation. "I was told that there would be no more attacks and that the Peineta bombing had been planned long before."

Provisional road map. The plan was for dialogue in Geneva to agree the road map and its ratification in Oslo, while ETA would maintain a ceasefire and the government would state publicly that the process was underway. There would be meetings between key government and ETA negotiators, meetings with other political parties before political agreements could be reached and implemented.

Second phase: ETA calls for police to back off. "[ETA] accepted that the government wouldn't be able to act immediately following the ceasefire, but did ask for the police to back off and for Batasuna to be given some margin to act in the political arena. I always said that I couldn't speak on behalf of the judiciary, which is independent, and neither could I offer police guarantees," says Eguiguren. "In Geneva we barely touched on what would happen after ETA declared a ceasefire and the government had told parliament about the talks beginning. But the time had now come to do so." ETA wanted to follow the model used in Northern Ireland, where the police took a back seat. "I told them that this wasn't possible."

Demands on ETA. Eguiguren then came up with his own list of conditions, including an end to killings and other attacks or even street violence; no more buying of weapons or explosives. heists, recruitment or training of terrorists. ETA accepted these conditions, and agreed to them in writing.

Ceasefire and talks. On March 22, 2006, ETA declared a permanent ceasefire. Exactly three months later, Eguiguren began talks in the Norwegian capital of Oslo. He was accompanied in the process by Javier Moscoso, a former chief of staff under the Felipe González governments of the 1980s. "ETA didn't call the meeting to begin talks based on the road map (which would never be held), but to list its complaints." Eguiguren describes the meeting as "cold," and that all that took place was an assessment of what had happened during the three months of the ceasefire. ETA said that there would be no more meetings until the security issue was resolved, allowing them greater freedom of movement, but the organization's representatives also knew that this wasn't something that could be decided by Eguiguren. "They also protested that the verification of the ceasefire that the prime minister had suggested had not been previously agreed, and that the government was selling the process to the electorate as a technical issue, in other words about peace in exchange for releasing prisoners and improving their conditions, rather than a process of political dialogue. Ternera insisted that the road map did not make it clear that the political process would only begin when the technical issues had been resolved."

If the arrests continue, violence will resume. During this time, the police and judiciary had kept up the pressure on ETA, with continued arrests of the organization's leadership, as well as success in dismantling its arms supplies. "They handed us a document with the number of arrests and even the number of road checks. They said that the government had kept up the pressure to weaken the nationalist left parties and added that they no longer had any confidence in the process and that things looked very bleak. I replied that this was not the government's strategy, and that it was too early to be complaining, because the process had not even begun. I accepted that things were not going as we had planned, and that those opposed to the peace process were making life difficult, and that in a democracy, the government cannot control everything, especially the judiciary," says Eguiguren. Ternera responded by issuing threats: "He said that we were playing with fire; that the government's interpretation of what had been agreed in Geneva and Oslo would have consequences: the arrests were continuing, the ban on Batasuna had not been formally lifted; and the cross-party agreement had not been reached yet. He said that if things continued in this way, the whole process might have to be abandoned and ETA would resume the violence."

Lausanne. June 23, 2006. Six days later, Zapatero told parliament that talks with ETA had begun. He added that the government would accept the decisions made by the Basque people, in accordance with legal procedures. A week later, a Socialist Party delegation met with senior representatives of Batasuna. "We thought that the meeting would bring the Basque nationalist left into the picture as political intermediaries. We even agreed with Otegi what we would all say before the meeting," says Eguiguren.

The process "grinds to a halt." The next round of talks was this time conducted by Javier López Peña, aka "Thierry," the then-head of ETA. Ternera was also in attendance. The Spanish government's representative was José Manuel Gómez Benítez, a member of the General Council of the Judiciary, the body that oversees the Spanish legal system. Ternera read out the letter that he had handed over to Moscoso in July for the prime minister: "The process has ground to a halt. The conditions agreed prior to the ceasefire are not being met. There has not been any change in the way the government is acting: the arrests and the bans continue." He added that Zapatero had not kept to the conditions agreed in Geneva, and that he had changed the sense of the original statement by changing the term Basque citizens for Basque Country.

For ETA, this meant excluding Navarre from the negotiations. ETA has always included both the French Basque Country and Navarre as part of what it calls the Basque Homeland. This would be the final meeting between Eguiguren and ETA's representatives. Three months later, on December 30, ETA would explode a bomb parked in a van in Barajas' new Terminal Four, killing two men.

The Spanish police continued with their crackdown on ETA, increasingly working in conjunction with their French counterparts. In May 2008, ETA's organizational capacity was dealt a major blow following the arrest of Thierry, along with two other senior figures in the organization. He is currently serving a six-year sentence for criminal conspiracy in a French prison.

The book ETA, las claves de la paz. Confesiones del negociador, by Jesús Eguiguren and Luis R. Aizpeolea, published by Aguilar, will go on sale in ebook format on December 7 and in print on December 14.