Eta’s endless war

Isn't Eta washed up?
Officially, yes. In the past few years, the Basque separatist group has become a shrunken, splintered version of its former self, infiltrated by the Spanish and French security forces. Eta leaders have lasted only a matter of months before being arrested: four have been captured in the past year alone. But, somehow, the group continues to attract young men and women to its cause and to carry out attacks. In June, Eta assassinated the Basque region's anti-terror chief and in the run-up to its 50th anniversary last week, the group blew up a police barracks in Burgos, northern Spain, wounding 60 people, before killing two Guardia Civil officers with a car bomb in Mallorca, throwing the island into chaos just days before the King and Queen of Spain arrived for a holiday.

What does Eta want?
Eta stands for 'Euskadi Ta Askatasuna' ('Basque Homeland and Freedom'). The group wants four Spanish provinces (Biscay, Guipuzcoa, Alava and Navarre) and three French ones (Labourd, Basse-Navarre and Soule) to secede and form an independent state straddling the Pyrenees, hence the Eta slogan: "4 + 3 = 1".

Is this a long-standing goal?
As old as the hills. Although their exact origins are unknown, the Basques have always been a separate people. Many are recognisably distinct, with blue eyes, light brown hair and fair skin, while Euskara, or Basque, is one of Europe's only surviving pre-Indo-European language. For centuries, the mountainous Kingdom of Navarre enjoyed independence from France to the north and Castile to the south, but in the 19th century, Spain began to integrate the region into the rest of the country, collecting taxes and conscripting men for the army, sparking modern Basque separatism. In 1895, the writer Sabino de Arana y Goiri set up the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV) to agitate for a free, conservative state that would protect the Basques' racial purity.

How did Eta come about?
After his victory in the Spanish Civil War in 1939, General Franco tried to eradicate Pyrenean culture by banning the Basque flag, festivals and language. The region's political leaders went into exile, and in 1959, a group of middle-class students from Bilbao’s Deusto University broke away from the PNV to take direct action against Franco's regime. In 1968, Eta killed its first victim, a police commander, in Irun. In the years that followed, Franco's cruel reprisals and the popularity of some Eta actions – in 1973 the group blew up Franco's chosen successor, 'The Ogre', Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco – gave them a certain cachet abroad; above all in France, which looked the other way while Eta used the French