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Bloody Sunday
Innocent protesters murdered by the British
army
THE
PUBLICATION of the report of the Bloody Sunday Inquiry, more commonly
known as the Saville inquiry, has brought to light, once again, the
murderous and brutal lengths the British capitalist state is prepared to
go to defend its interests. The Saville inquiry, which cost nearly £200
million and lasted twelve years, has officially confirmed what everyone
has known all along: that those who were murdered by the British army on
Bloody Sunday were innocent.
What the inquiry has failed
to expose or even attempt to explain, is the role of Edward Heath’s Tory
government and British army chiefs in the events of Bloody Sunday and
the subsequent cover-up. On these crucial questions, the Saville inquiry
is silent. In that respect, it is another form of official cover-up of
the role of the British state in the events of that day and their
aftermath.
On 30 January1972, 27
innocent people were shot on the streets of Derry by British soldiers.
Their crime was to march against internment without trial and to demand
civil rights. Thirteen people died that day. A fourteenth died several
months later, as a result of a bullet-wound.
A tribunal was quickly
established by the Heath government, headed by Lord Widgery. In April
1972, the infamous Widgery Report concluded that the soldiers from the
Parachute Regiment were justified in shooting marchers, that shots were
first fired at soldiers from the crowds on the streets in Derry, and it
implied that those killed had been in close contact with weapons. Both
the Unionist government in Stormont, the seat of local power in Northern
Ireland, and the British government in Westminster shared no blame. The
Widgery report was a complete whitewash, a cover-up for murder carried
out by the British state on the streets of Derry.
Incidentally, four years
later, Widgery was to turn down the first appeal by the Birmingham Six –
six Irishmen who were framed by police and wrongly imprisoned for 16
years for IRA Birmingham pub bombings. From the British ruling class and
Unionist establishment point of view, the Widgery report was the last
word on Bloody Sunday.
For the past 38 years, the
families of the Bloody Sunday victims have campaigned tirelessly to
uncover the truth and for the British government to recognise the
innocence of the victims. Thousands joined the families on the day the
Saville report was released to retrace the march they and their murdered
relatives took part in, back in January 1972. On their way to the
Guildhall, in central Derry, where the victims’ families would hear the
conclusions of the Saville report, they stopped at the spots where
demonstrators were gunned down by the paras.
Eight of those killed were
aged under 22. Six of them were aged 17. The Saville report describes
the brutal manner which the paratroopers shot unarmed demonstrators.
Kevin McElhinney (17) was shot as he crawled away from the soldiers in
the direction of Rossville flats for cover. William McKinney (27) was
shot in the back. Hugh Gilmore (17) was shot in the back as he was
running away from the soldiers. Jim Wray (22) was shot twice in the back
in Glenfada Park, the second bullet fired as he lay mortally wounded on
the ground. Gerald Donaghy (17) was also shot as he was attempting to
escape the scene. Four nail bombs were claimed to have been ‘found’ on
his body after being examined by soldiers. Eyewitnesses have
consistently denied this. They pointed out that there were no nail bombs
on Gerald Donaghy when he was examined in the Bogside, but that they
were planted on his body at an army regimental aid post. Jackie Duddy
(17) was also shot in the back.
Brian Doherty, a young member
of the Militant (forerunner of the Socialist Party), at the time in
Derry, participated on the civil rights march. He gave an eyewitness
account to the Saville inquiry: "I had been watching the riot for a few
minutes when the scene changed. This was when a number of foot soldiers
came through the barrier towards the crowd. The soldiers seemed to come
from nowhere, and I remember being surprised at how many of them there
were. I could see by the way in which the soldiers were dressed that
they were different from normal riot containment troops. They were
wearing full combat gear and were not carrying riot shields. After I had
been looking at the soldiers for perhaps a second or two, a young man
appeared in my field of vision. I believe he came from my right and was
running hard in the direction of the gap between Block I and Block 2.
All at once, the young man fell. I remember seeing his body roll over
more than once when he fell because he had been running fast. At the
same time, I heard the sound of a shot which seemed to me to have come
from the direction of the soldier who was standing at Point D. I also
saw this soldier’s rifle appear to recoil, as if he had just fired".
The Parachute Regiment was
sent to Derry from Belfast, where it had a reputation for brutality. The
journalist, Robert Fisk, recounted how, shortly before Bloody Sunday, he
was in Belfast and witnessed paratroopers viciously beat Protestants in
the Shankill Road area, after they had blocked a street with vehicle
tyres, peacefully protesting over a lack of security. Fisk also
tellingly recalls a protest march to the internment camp on Magilligan
beach, near Derry, on 22 January, when peaceful protestors were brutally
battened by British troops. Internment without trial had been introduced
in August 1971 and all marches were deemed illegal. John Hume, who was
to become an MP for Derry and leader of the Social Democratic Labour
Party (SDLP – a mainly middle-class nationalist party), represented the
middle-class, right-wing section of the leadership of the Northern
Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) and was on the Magilligan
protest. Fisk recounts how "a para officer walked up to Hume and – in a
very English public-school accent – threatened him. I realised something
new was happening. Hume was to tell me years later: ‘Some decision had
been taken by the military. I was very worried about this. These were
very hard men. There was no way of negotiating with them’." Hume chose
not to participate on the march on Bloody Sunday.
In the weeks leading up to
Bloody Sunday, there were signs that the establishment was preparing to
shoot protestors. The British army commander for land forces in Northern
Ireland, at the time, Major General Robert Ford, was on record
supporting the shooting of selected ringleaders of rioters, to set an
example. It was Ford’s decision to send the paras to Derry, a city with
a large nationalist population, major parts of which were ‘no-go’ areas
for the RUC police force and the army. Ford had visited Derry in January
1972 and wrote a confidential memo to the general officer commanding,
Sir Harry Tuzo, in which he stated that he was disturbed by the attitude
of the officers commanding residing troops. Ford referred, in
particular, to the so-called ‘Derry Young Hooligans’, as a factor in the
continued destruction of the city, and expressed the view that the army
was virtually incapable of dealing with them.
Derry Young Hooligans was a
derogatory name given to the young people involved in fighting against
state repression, many of whom were members of Derry Young Socialists,
the youth wing of the Derry Labour Party. This grew rapidly in
opposition to the Unionist state and the right-wing Nationalist Party.
What deeply concerned the British and Unionist establishment, at the
time, was the rapidity with which socialist ideas and organisations
inspired by the revolutionary events in France 1968 and the civil rights
movement in the US, for example, were beginning to grow and challenge
the poverty and class discrimination which blighted not just Catholic
areas but also Protestant workers and youth.
One of the soldiers who gave
evidence to Saville, known as Private 027, has written in his memoirs
that as a 19 year-old soldier in Derry, on the night before Bloody
Sunday, a lieutenant told his platoon: "We want some kills tomorrow".
Private 027 also went on to claim that he did not write ‘his’ statement
that was given to the 1972 Widgery inquiry whitewash, but that this
‘account’ was actually written by crown lawyers and that it was an
untrue account. Yet Saville concludes: "In our view, what is likely to
have happened is that Private 027 felt that he had to invent a reason to
explain providing a statement for the Widgery inquiry that was
inconsistent with his later accounts; and chose to do so by falsely
laying the blame for the inconsistency on others".
Given Private 027’s evidence,
it is not a minor but a fundamental flaw of the Saville report that it
concludes that neither the Unionist government in Northern Ireland nor
the British government in 1972 was directly or indirectly responsible
for Bloody Sunday. Saville claims that Bloody Sunday was the result of
several soldiers deciding independently to deliberately kill unarmed
peaceful demonstrators in the Bogside, which had been a no-go area for
the state, without orders from above. This conclusion simply does not
explain anything and lacks credibility. Likewise, there appears to be no
comment whatsoever in Saville’s findings on why the Widgery report,
which it strongly contradicts, was supported for so long by the
establishment.
Unfortunately, while the
Bloody Sunday families have succeeded after 38 years to clear their
loved ones’ names, the truth behind who ordered the shooting of innocent
people with live rounds, how far it went up the command chain and who
was involved in covering it up, still remain to be discovered. Prime
minister David Cameron has stated there will be no more inquiries into
the past in Northern Ireland. It is clear that the establishment wants
to bury the remaining questions. You can have an apology, but do not ask
any more questions! This does not just include the British government.
The Irish taoiseach (prime minister), Brian Cowen, praised Cameron’s
"brave and honest words". Irish president, Mary McAleese, paid tribute
to the families’ 38-year battle for justice while she was visiting the
butchers of Tiananmen Square, in China, on an official state visit.
Sectarian politicians in Northern Ireland, on both sides, will also
attempt to cloud the issues with their sectarian poison.
Questions have been raised
about why there has been no inquiry into the deaths of other innocent
victims of the Troubles, including many people killed by paramilitaries,
often for no other reason than they happened to be Catholic or
Protestant. The families of these victims also deserve to hear the
truth. The issue of victim’s rights to justice and the truth cannot be
dealt with satisfactorily by politicians who were part of sectarian
bloodshed, on both sides. They are more interested in defending their
own positions of privilege than unearthing the role sectarian parties,
paramilitaries and the state played throughout the Troubles. The working
class in the North paid the biggest price for the Troubles. A genuinely
independent inquiry, consisting of representatives of the working class,
which examines the role of all participants in the conflict, is needed
to find out the truth.
Bloody Sunday was a defining
moment in the history of Northern Ireland. Brutal state repression, in
the form of the Lower Falls army curfew, internment without trial (which
saw hundreds of innocent men jailed for months and years, and tortured)
and Bloody Sunday, pushed thousands of young people into the Official
and Provisional IRA. The Bloody Sunday murders, in particular, created
the idea among some of the most radical sections of the Catholic youth
that the civil rights era was over, that it and ‘politics’ had failed,
and fostered the mistaken belief that individual terrorism was the only
way to take on the British state.
Due to the absence of a mass
socialist alternative, and the failure of the labour and trade union
leaders, some of the most combative Catholic youth followed the false
and counterproductive ideas of individual terrorism, which ultimately
failed and cultivated greater sectarian division among the working
class.
Bloody Sunday was an outrage
and tragedy for which the families of the victims and the working class
of Northern Ireland paid an enormous price. Over the next weeks, as the
entire 5,000 pages of the Saville report are dissected and analysed, it
will become clearer to many that crucial questions still remain about
what happened on Bloody Sunday and who should be held responsible.
Gary Mulcahy
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