As my colleague Raphael Minder reports , an international verification commission said on Friday that the Basque separatist group ETA had disabled “some of the weapons that allowed it to wage a lengthy terror campaign for independence that has claimed more than 800 victims.”

In video recorded at an undisclosed location and provided to the BBC by an intermediary, masked members of the Basque separatist group showed some of the decommissioned weapons to two members of the commission, Ram Manikkalingam, a Sri Lankan peace activist, and Ronnie Kasrils, a former guerrilla leader of the African National Congress.

While the significance of the gesture is open to debate — and Spain’s interior minister dismissed the presentation as “theater,” suggesting that it would be more convincing for the militants to reveal the locations of their weapons caches — one detail in the video caught the eye. On the wall behind the militants, there was a replica of Picasso’s “Guernica.” The Spanish painter’s mural depicts the brutal bombing of an ancient Basque town by the Nazis in 1937, in support of their fascist ally, Franco.