The future of ETA

ETA in the modern era is very different both in organisation and support since its heyday in the early 1970s. In 1978 almost half of Basque adults thought ETA members to be patriots or ideologists, just 7% thought them to be criminals. By 2004 however 69% saw them as terrorists and 17% as criminals or murderers leading us to the conclusion that ETA are very much out of touch with public opinion.

Al Qaeda's 2004 Madrid train bombings was also a blow to ETA as it shifted public and political attention away from them and ETA saw the revulsion of Spaniards to al-Qaeda’s violence, and they for the first time qustioned whether violence was the best means to gain their demands.

An increasingly aggressive judicial and law enforcement crackdown is also severly hurting ETA's operations, with counterterrorism campaigns that include stepped up surveillance and intelligence sharing and police cooperation agreements with France severly disabled ETA's ability to commit attacks. The banning of the political party Batasuna which was seen as an ETA front also weakened the organisation. ETA is according to terrorist expert Reinares at its weakest in its 50 year history, helped in part with the arrest of its head Garikoitz Aspiazu Rubina in November 2008 and their political commander Javier Lopez Pena six months earlier.

The most recent ceasefire was announced in March 2006, yet this as with other ceasefires lasted shortly and ended with the Madrid airport attack just nine months later. As recently as 26th March 2009 a bomb exploded in Amorebieta, Vizcaya and has been attributed to ETA, so they are still very much active.

So what does the future hold so ETA? Can they be totally eradicated? These are hard questions to answer given their history, and it seems unlikely given the persistent reservoir of Basque public sympathy they enjoy. A perhaps more likely scenario is that ETA will endure, but diminished, inflicting a low but perhaps politically tolerable level of violence.