Blair offers to advise Spain as Eta lays down arms

“Eta has decided the definitive cessation of its armed activity,” the group said in a statement through Basque-language newspaper Gara and an online video.

Eta also called for immediate talks with the authorities, declaring “Eta calls upon the Spanish and French governments to open a process of direct dialogue with the aim of addressing the resolution of the conflict”.

Three masked Eta members sat behind a table to read the statement, raising their fists in the air at the end of the video.

The announcement is a significant shift for the Basque group, which has killed more 800 people in its drive for an independent Basque homeland in northern Spain and southern France, and takes it far beyond the permanent ceasefire it announced in January.

Spain has repeatedly refused any negotiations, but although Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero sounded a note of caution, he hailed the Eta concession as a victory for Spanish democracy.

And he suggested that the whole of Basque society could benefit.

“I am convinced that from now on it will finally enjoy a coexistence that is not anchored on fear or intimidation. It will be a fully free and peaceful co-existence,” he said.

Eta weakened?

It is a sign that Europe’s last armed militant movement has considerably weakened in recent years, after hundreds of arrests and declining support among nationalists.

The group’s most notorious attack came in 1973, when ETA planted a bomb on a Madrid street after weeks of tunnelling, and blew up the car of then Prime Minister Luis Carrero Blanco.

He was killed in the blast that sent the vehicle into the air and left it as smoky debris atop the roof of a nearby building.

Blair offers personal help

Victims of Eta attacks say they do not trust the group to stick to their ceasefire – and Spain’s opposition leader Mariano Rajoy said he still needed proof that Eta had been “irreversibly dissolved and completely dismantled”.

And it’s still got a list of demands, including the release of hundreds of Basque militants from French and Spanish jails: it offered no apology to the victims, and it hasn’t renounced it’s goal of independence.

But the declaration has been widely welcomed. The Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams said dialogue was essential to resolve a huge range of issues, from reconciliation to the rights of political parties.

And the former British prime minister Tony Blair said he was willing to offer his personal help. “The last armed confrontation in Europe is finally over”, he said. “We should all welcome this and work together to make peace irreversible.”