People came from across Ireland, as well as the United Kingdom and the United States. At a rally on Free Derry Corner during the march, and in a protest meeting the previous evening, speakers called for the British government to tell the truth about the 1972 massacre. The Saville Inquiry into the killings—named for its chairperson—is not expected to issue its report until 2005, after seven years of hearings.

Lyons’s brother, William Nash, was one of those killed. “Bloody Sunday didn’t take place out of sight. It was a massacre at a public event that was witnessed by thousands, at close range,” she said.

“Whatever the outcome of Saville,” said Lyons, “whether or not this is the last stretch of the search for truth, we are going to get there in the end.” She noted that “some of the signs are not good” for prospects of an unbiased ruling.

“Bloody Sunday was significant because it demonstrated the openly repressive nature of British rule and the extent that they would go to in order to underwrite their discriminatory system,” Sinn Fein speaker Mary Lou McDonald told the marchers, referring to the second-class status inflicted on Catholics in Northern Ireland. McDonald is the party’s candidate for Dublin in the forthcoming European elections.

Recalling the 1972 British government inquiry headed by Lord Widgery, which cleared the British forces of blame, she said: “They thought that Widgery had done the job, but they hadn’t counted on the determination of the families of the dead and the people of Derry, and the clear-headedness of the Irish people, who knew that eventually the truth will out.”  
 
Meeting calls for justice
“We set up the Bloody Sunday Justice Campaign in 1992 and as a result we got the new inquiry,” said John Kelly at the public meeting the day before the march. Kelly’s brother Michael was one of those killed by British troops.

British officers and soldiers have testified before the tribunal, as well as former members of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA), which led an armed struggle to end British rule and unite Ireland.

“Disappointment and frustration is setting in among the families,” said Kelly. Among the developments that give the whiff of attempts at a cover-up, he said, was the fact that British courts had granted complete anonymity to soldiers who testify.

Kelly described how 135 family members had traveled to London last year to hear someone described as “soldier F” testify at the inquiry: “F killed between four to seven people on Bloody Sunday but he had total contempt for the inquiry.”

“For two days at the inquiry F says he remembers nothing,” said Russell Miller, who also spoke at the meeting. Miller, an attorney, has followed the inquiry for the British-Irish Human Rights Watch Group. Then, he said, “when an officer says he saw F shoot Bernard McGuigan, who was waving a white handkerchief in surrender, F admits that he could have killed him.”

Miller said that Gen. Michael Jackson, head of the British army, testified at the inquiry during last year’s invasion of Iraq, and “there was no way that he was going to be given a rough ride by Saville during an actual war.” Jackson was an adjutant to the paratroopers in Derry at the time of Bloody Sunday.

Not all the soldiers have attempted to hide the truth. The UK Guardian reported that soldier “027” said in his testimony in October 2002 that “unspeakable acts took place on Bloody Sunday. There was no justification for a single shot I saw fired.”

The soldier added, “The responsibility for the actions lies with those who selected and directed an outfit like that. It is noticeable that no one in authority has taken responsibility for orchestrating the situation.”

“Saville will protect the officers, but not the soldier,” Angela Hegarty, a law teacher and Bloody Sunday justice campaigner, told the January 31 meeting. “You cannot ignore the colonial mind-set of the inquiry. Bloody Sunday happened in the first place because the people of Derry stood up to imperial Britain.”

“The British were outraged at the assertion of Free Derry,” Hegarty explained, referring to the areas of the Bogside and Creggan that were barricaded by residents between the 1969 Battle of the Bogside and 1972, and made off-limits to the British army that was occupying the rest of Northern Ireland.

“It has been vitally important in the past months that IRA members have come forward to testify about Bloody Sunday, or they would have been accused of hiding something,” said John Kelly. During his testimony Martin McGuinness, Sinn Fein Member of Parliament for Mid Ulster, denied allegations that he was planning a nail bomb attack in Derry on Bloody Sunday.

Saville twice directed McGuinness to name other IRA members.McGuinness said later that he “would rather die” than give the name of any other IRA man.

Angela Hegarty urged the audience to “contrast the [tribunal’s] treatment of Edward Heath and Martin McGuinness.” Heath, who was British prime minister at the time of the massacre, “repeatedly refused to answer questions that he was asked,” she said, “but McGuinness was criticized for refusing to hand over names of other IRA members and refusing to locate IRA arms dumps.”

Meanwhile, on February 3 a meeting of Northern Ireland’s political parties, chaired by the British and Irish governments, began a review of the Good Friday Agreement signed in May 1998. Substantial majorities approved the accord in referendums in both the Irish Republic and the British-occupied north. Among other things the agreement led to the establishment of a Northern Ireland Assembly. Britain has worked with unionist forces to try to stall the implementation of central aspects of the accord, and has suspended the assembly on four previous occasions.

Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams explained January 15 that London has stalled because “the British government is a unionist government—not unionist of the Irish variety but British unionism.”

Sinn Fein, the party leading the fight to end British rule, has issued proposals for the review. They include the repeal of the Northern Ireland Act 2000 that gave powers to the British government to suspend the assembly and other institutions.

The party is also calling for an expansion of all-Ireland cooperation, a poll on both sides of the border on Irish unity, and the withdrawal of all British troops.

The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), led by rightist demagogue Ian Paisley, won the largest number of seats in the assembly in last year’s elections, which also saw a significant rise in Sinn Fein’s vote—a sign of the ongoing polarization. The DUP is currently refusing to talk to Sinn Fein. The DUP has recently won to its ranks several defectors from the rival Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), which prior to the November elections had been the leading pro-British party in Northern Ireland.

Pete Clifford in Edinburgh and Marnie Kennedy in Belfast contributed to this article.  
 
 
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