Spain Declares End to Basque Peace Process

Daniel Woolls
Associated Press, January 3

MADRID, Jan. 2 -- The peace process to end Spain's Basque separatist conflict is over, a casualty of the car bombing at Madrid's international airport over the weekend, the country's interior minister said Tuesday.

"There is no process. It has been broken, it is over, it has been liquidated.

ETA ended it with the bomb it set off in Madrid," Alfredo P?rez Rubalcaba said at a news conference, using the initials of the separatist group Basque Homeland and Liberty, which is blamed for the explosion.

His remarks went further than those of Prime Minister Jos? Luis Rodr?guez Zapatero, who said after Saturday's thunderous blast that he was suspending -- but not canceling -- plans to negotiate with ETA, which in March had declared a cease-fire it called permanent.

The blast leveled a five-story parking lot at the airport, injuring 26 people and leaving two Ecuadoran immigrants missing and feared dead amid tons of rubble. ETA has not asserted responsibility for the attack, but a caller who warned authorities before the explosion said he represented the group.

The group has largely been stymied by waves of arrests and the March 2004 train bombings by Islamic radicals in Madrid, which killed 191 people and led many Spaniards to conclude that another deadly ETA attack would be unthinkable. The last deadly ETA attack was in May 2003.

Batasuna, widely seen as ETA's political wing, declared in late 2004 that it wanted to end the conflict through negotiations.

ETA and its political supporters have complained in recent months that the peace process was stillborn because the government was refusing to make concessions, such as moving ETA prisoners to jails in the Basque region and halting arrests and trials of ETA suspects and pro-independence politicians.

The mayor of Madrid said Tuesday that crews sifting through thousands of tons of rubble at the airport had reached the core area of the car bombing, but could not go faster in their search for the two missing men because they could not disturb evidence for investigators.

The men were believed to have been asleep in separate cars in the lot when the bomb went off.