Word: etas
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Experience has shown it's foolish to ever consider a terrorist group definitively beaten. Still, it must be getting hard for officials in Spain and France not to strut a tiny bit following the recent blows they've dealt the separatist Basque organization Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA). In the past week alone, authorities have unearthed 13 ETA weapons caches in France, and arrested three alleged members suspected of staging two recent bombings in Spain. Nevertheless, officials describe the group as just as dangerous as ever...
...their force, none of those attacks got ETA what it wanted: negotiation with the Spanish government over independence for the Basque territories in the country's north. So why, then, when the organization is weaker than ever and has lost any immediate chance of restoring the peace process after it broke the 2006 cease-fire, does it continue to use violence as a political weapon...
...members or keeping those already involved. "Terrorist violence always acts as a kind of propaganda that is fundamental for maintaining group unity," says terrorism expert Alonso. But with the organization in decline, violence also has an obscuring effect. "Now it's become a way for a considerably weakened ETA to hide the fact that with firm action from the state, an unstoppable process of disintegration would begin," he adds. If the 2006 peace process is any indication, that firm action would have to couple a police crackdown with concessions - such as amnesty or a transfer of ETA prisoners to jails...
...Ignacio Sánchez-Cuenca, a sociologist at Madrid's Cumpletense University who specializes in ETA, the answer to why ETA continues its violent fight is more chilling. "From ETA's own internal communications we know that they themselves can no longer justify the violence," he says. "They realize they're not going to get negotiations. They realize they're not going to radicalize the [mainstream] Basque Nationalist Party. They have no theory of violence anymore. For the past three or four years, it's been purely reactionary. It's all they know...
...This inertia of habit may ensure that after 50 years, even a debilitated ETA could be hard to eradicate. "Think of those communist parties in Western Europe, or neo-Nazi groups, who don't have the slightest chance of ever returning to power - they're still around," Sánchez-Cuenca says. "An organization is a lot harder to kill than an individual...