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Bilbao, Spain. Spain is claiming an end to four decades of violent bombings and shootings after the Basque separatist group ETA announced it would lay down its arms and try to negotiate its demand for a separate nation.

ETA, which has killed more 800 people in its drive for an independent state, stopped short on Thursday of declaring it was defeated. But in the historic announcement, the group said it was ending its armed struggle via a video of three ETA members wearing trademark Basque berets and masks with slits for their eyes. At the end of the clip, they defiantly raised their fists in the air demanding a separate Basque nation.

Spain in recent years has repeatedly refused any negotiations, but Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero hailed the ETA concession as a victory for Spanish democracy.

“At this moment, I’m particularly thinking of the Basque society,” Zapatero said, without mentioning any prospects of dialogue with ETA. “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 coexistence.”

Relatives of victims killed by ETA insisted that group must disband and tell authorities where its guns and bomb-making material are hidden.

“It is the hoped-for end, but not the desired one,” said Angeles Pedraza. “The victims want the attacks to stop, but we want them to pay for what they have done. We want the total defeat of ETA.”

In Bilbao, the largest city in the northern Basque region, Asuncion Olaeta said she now feels much safer and free to travel to pockets of the region where ETA has had strong support. Her family had received threats from the group after her husband became a lawmaker for Zapatero’s Socialist Party.

“It’s a relief, we are going to be normal citizens again,” she said. “We will be able to go to any place, to have our lives back. We could not go to some places so, from that point of view, it’s a relief.

Once a force that terrorized the country with shootings and bombings, Europe’s last armed militant movement has been both romanticized and vilified. But it had been decimated in recent years by a wave of arrests, declining support among nationalists and repulsion with raw violence, and the announcement had long been expected.

The group has killed 829 people since the late 1960s in a bid to establish an independent Basque homeland straddling provinces of northern Spain and southwest France.

ETA emerged during the dictatorship of Gen. Francisco Franco, who was obsessed with the idea of Spain as a unified state and suppressed Basque culture, banning the ancient and linguistically unique language — which sounds nothing like Spanish or any other language — and destroying books written in it.

Many Basques argue they are culturally distinct from Spain and deserve statehood, and arrests of independence sympathizers still prompt crowds to head to the streets clapping in support. But, the wealthy and verdant region also has many inhabitants who consider themselves Spanish, or both Basque and Spanish, and have long been opposed to the militants.

The group’s most spectacular attack came in 1973, when ETA planted a bomb on a Madrid street after weeks of tunneling, 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.

ETA became even more violent in the 1980s, shooting hundreds of police officers, army members and politicians, and occasionally killing civilians.

Classified as a terrorist group by Spain, the European Union and the United States, the group’s power and ability to stage attacks waned over the last decade, following the Sept. 11 attacks and the 2004 Madrid train bombings by radical Islamists. It has not killed anyone for two years, and recent media reports say it may have as few as 50 fighters, most young and inexperienced.

The announcement marks the first time the group has said it was willing to renounce armed struggle, a key demand by from Spain. It comes as the country prepares for general elections on Nov. 20, and some analysts had predicted it would be made to give the ruling Socialist Party a boost as it faces almost certain defeat amid a national unemployment rate of 21 percent, the eurozone’s highest.

In its statement, ETA said it had “decided on the definitive end of its armed struggle.” But significantly, the group did not suggest that it would dissolve in an unconditional surrender — as Spain has demanded for decades.

Instead, it said both Spain and France should negotiate with ETA to end the conflict, a demand that Spain has repeatedly said it would not honor.

Talks in 2006 went nowhere and ETA ended a cease-fire after just a few months with a thunderous blast that killed two people sleeping in cars at a parking garage at Madrid’s airport.

The ETA statement said talks should address “the resolution of the consequences of the conflict.” This language usually refers to the around 700 ETA prisoners held in Spanish and French jails, and ETA weapons.

Fernando Reinares, political science professor at Madrid’s San Pablo University and former chief counterterrorism adviser at Spain’s Interior Ministry, said Zapatero was correct in calling the ETA announcement as a victory for Spanish democracy.

“ETA has been defeated by the rule of law by the actions of civil society, by the actions of the victims of terrorism. Also, it is proof of the uselessness of violence,” he told Spanish National Radio.

Associated Press