Spain’s prime minister has vowed that Eta’s crimes will not go unpunished and called for victims of its five-decade terrorism campaign to be remembered as the group finally dissolves.

Speaking on Friday as Eta held a ceremony in southern France to mark its end, Mariano Rajoy said the day did not belong to the terrorists but to the 853 people they had murdered since 1968.

“Today, after 50 years, Eta has finally recognised that its whole story has been one of failure,” he said. “It has achieved none of the political aims of its long, criminal history. Not one.”

He said the terrorists had gained nothing from killing people and would not profit from the abandonment of their armed campaign seven years ago nor from their dissolution, finalised this week.

“We will carry on investigating Eta’s crimes. They will be judged and sentences handed down,” Rajoy said.

“There has not been and there will not be any impunity. We owe them nothing and we have nothing to thank them for when it comes to abandoning their violence, because they have waited too long in recognising their defeat.”

The prime minister said he would have liked to mention all of Eta’s victims by name but could not do so in his televised address. Instead, he urged Spain to remember them “one by one, along with the uniqueness of their stolen lives”.

“They’re not just another statistic,” he said. “They are unique individuals whose lives, like those of all of us, were full of sadness, happiness, hope and disappointment. But they were not allowed to live those lives; they were snatched away.”

Rajoy also paid tribute to the police, security services, judges, prosecutors and journalists who had helped in the fight against Eta.

He said the group’s defeat had begun when Spanish democracy started to listen to the victims’ stories and realised “the only possible story about the fight against Eta was the story of the victims, a story of cruelty and injustice, a story of the totalitarianism of those who tried to use force and criminal acts to impose something that the people rejected”.

In a pointed reference to Eta’s recent apology, which has been fiercely criticised for not going far enough in expressing remorse over the deaths of all its victims, Rajoy said there should be no distinction between civilian and police or military deaths.

“There is no room for justification nor for excuses,” he said. “There is nothing that can justify so much pain and so much cruelty.”



Eta, which stands for “Basque homeland and freedom”, was founded as a cultural organisation in 1959, but began its armed struggle the following decade in an attempt to establish an independent Basque state in northern Spain and southern France.

Its end came with Friday’s event in the French town of Cambo-les-Bains, which was attended by Eta members, Basque civilians and international mediators.

Two days earlier, a letter from the group had emerged in which it confirmed it had “completely dissolved all its structures and declared an end to its political initiative”.