Arms surrender ends years of conflict
FRANCE: The Basque separatist group ETA have given up their arms caches to French authorities - a definitive end to its decadeslong violent struggle to carve out a homeland on the French-Spanish border.
The group handed French authorities a list of eight caches where police found weapons, ammunition and explosives.
The Spanish government urged the rebel group to ‘‘ask forgiveness from its victims and disappear’’.
Paris prosecutor Francois Molins said police have searched each site and discovered, in containers and bags, ‘‘dozens of handguns and rifles, thousands of pieces of ammunition, several hundred kilograms of explosives and products that can be used to make explosives, several hundreds of detonators and timers’'.
A detailed inventory of the ETA weapons caches is under way and the results of French authorities’ technical examination and other elements of their investigation will be given to Spanish justice authorities, Molins said.
‘‘It’s a great step, an unquestionably important day,’' French Interior Minister Matthias Fekl said.
Inactive for more than five years, ETA said it would hand over its arms, a historic step following a 43-year violent independence campaign that killed 829 people, mostly in Spain. Disarmament is the second-to-last step demanded by France and Spain, which want ETA to formally disband. The organisation hasn’t said yet whether it would.
Spain ‘‘will not make any evaluation of the handing over of weapons today by ETA until they have been analysed by French authorities,’' Interior Minister Juan Ignacio Zoido said. ’’The government will not alter its position: Terrorists cannot hope to receive any special treatment from the government nor immunity for their crimes.’'
Spain called on ETA to ‘‘announce its definitive dissolution, ask forgiveness from its victims and disappear.’'
Representatives of the selfappointed Peace Artisans group, who are acting as mediators in the disarmament process, told reporters that ETA had surrendered 120 firearms and three tonnes of explosives and ammunition. The caches were in southwestern France, a region historically used as a support base by ETA.
Some 20,000 people gathered in the streets of Bayonne, in southwestern France, to celebrate the peace.
Reverend Harold Good, a Methodist minister who helped oversee the Northern Ireland peace process, urged authorities to ‘‘bring the prisoners home, to their families ... above all, those who are frail by sickness and by age’'. He was cheered by the crowd. - AP