AFTER four decades spent purveying death, Eta was finally put out of business by someone else’s act of terrorism: the bombing of Madrid commuter trains by Islamic fanatics in March 2004.

By then the organisation was already a fading force, but those attacks created such revulsion against terrorism in Spain that they destroyed any residual support for Eta’s violent tactics.

It was further weakened by the capture of many of its leaders, and will expire today having achieved little more than 800 murders — its founders’ idealism long forgotten.

Eta — meaning Basque Homeland and Freedom — was created in 1958, in the darkest days of one of Europe’s most oppressive dictatorships, by the disillusioned sons of the Basque Nationalist Party.

Their hopes of establishing a democratic republic had been crushed by General Francisco Franco’s advancing army at the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939. Under Franco the Basques’ language was banned, their culture suppressed and their leaders imprisoned.

Eta’s first act of violence came in 1961 when it sought to derail a train carrying Franco supporters. Its greatest moment came in 1973 when it assassinated Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco, Franco’s Prime Minister and anointed successor, with a bomb in a Madrid street. But with Spain’s relatively smooth transition to democracy after Franco’s death in 1975, and the granting of generous powers of self-government to Spain’s independent regions, Eta’s raison d'être began to crumble.

The extremist wing of what had once been a broad antifascist movement — fuelled by a potent mixture of Marxism, a nationalist version of history and a ready supply of disaffected teenagers — vowed to fight on to achieve a mythical sovereign Basque nation straddling the western end of the Pyrenees.

All it succeeded in doing was piling up the bodies of its “legitimate targets”: police officers, councillors and journalists.

By the late 1970s the organisation was murdering about a hundred people a year, prompting the Socialist government of Felipe González to set up and sponsor a shadowy group of mercenaries calling itself GAL to go after the Eta hitmen.

The most brutal attack happened in June 1987, when 21 shoppers were killed by a bomb in a Barcelona supermarket. The atrocity was such that Eta was forced to issue an apology, but the killing continued.

In the process, Eta drove ever deeper divisions between Basque and Spaniard — and between Basque and Basque. The silent majority of Basques seemed content to accept the 1979 Statute of Guernica that cemented the region’s autonomy.

In 1995 an Eta car bomb narrowly failed to kill José María Aznar, then leader of the conservative opposition People’s Party, who became Prime Minister the following year.

Two years later Eta scored a spectacular own goal when it kidnapped Miguel Ángel Blanco, 29, a Basque councillor and People’s Party member, and killed him with two shots to the head. In terms of its impact on public opinion, this was Spain’s equivalent to the IRA’s Remembrance Sunday massacre at Enniskillen. Support among even hardliners ebbed away as six million Spaniards took to the streets with their hands painted white.

In that same year, the IRA announced the ceasefire that led to the Good Friday agreement. Eta followed suit, calling its own ceasefire in 1998, but abandoned it in December 1999 after the Government refused to discuss independence.

Thereafter Señor Aznar’s Government began a sustained crackdown on the organisation. The Supreme Court banned Eta’s political wing, Batasuna, and France no longer offered Eta fighters a safe haven. Then came the Madrid bombings, which put paid not only to Eta but also to Señor Aznar’s Government, which swiftly blaimed the group fo the atrocities. It was voted out of office three days later.

In October 2004 Eta’s alleged leader, Mikel Albizu Iriarte, and his girlfriend were arrested in France. Eta continued to plant bombs, probably so that it could continue to extort money, but they were tiny and killed no one. Like the IRA, it was finally driven by exhaustion to yesterday’s announcement that the future belongs to political negotiation alone.

Independence War

After the September 11 attacks in the United States the organisation’s activities were squeezed, with scores of arrests