Vol. 74/No. 26      July 12, 2010

British troops were deployed in Northern Ireland starting in 1969 in an effort to break the rising civil rights movement, which fought British-imposed discrimination against Catholics. On Jan. 30, 1972, British soldiers opened fire on a march against the government’s use of internment without trial. The march had been banned by the British government, which deployed thousands of troops to prevent the demonstrators from reaching the city center.

From the Battle of the Bogside in 1969, where Catholic residents fought battles with cops and barricaded the Bogside and Creggan neighborhoods, until 1972, this area of Derry was largely off limits to the British army. Six months after Bloody Sunday British forces succeeded in taking down the barricades.

Carrying giant pictures of those who were killed, marchers June 15 retraced the route of the 1972 action. One woman shouted, “Set the truth free!” At the site of the massacre, relatives shredded copies of a previous government inquiry that had exonerated the army. Thousands cheered when British prime minister David Cameron, in a live broadcast televised to the Derry crowd, declared that the army’s actions were “unjustified and unjustifiable.” Many also booed when Cameron praised British soldiers as “the finest in the world.”

Cameron acknowledged that soldiers opened fire without warning and later lied about their actions. The government’s previous inquiry “was a whitewash from day one,” Olive Bonner, whose brother Hugh Gilmour was killed, told the Belfast Telegraph. “We proved that the British government was lying.”

Tony Doherty, son of Paddy Doherty who was shot down on Bloody Sunday, told the press, “When the state kills its citizens, it is in the interests of all that those responsible be held to account.”

“The only people I have an argument with is the British government and the British army,” John Kelly, brother of Michael Kelly, also killed in the army massacre, told the BBC.

It took decades of campaigning by relatives of those killed to force the current inquiry, conducted by Mark Saville. In the course of this fight, annual demonstrations in Derry protesting the killings attracted up to 40,000.

An editorial in The Times urged that none of the soldiers involved be prosecuted. But Joseph McCartney, who participated in the 1972 march shortly after his discharge from the British army, told the Belfast Telegraph that he wanted soldiers involved in the killings prosecuted. I saw people “shot dead by people who were supposed to protect them,” he said. “At that point the state became the enemy here.”

Saville’s inquiry covers up the responsibility of then-prime minister Edward Heath for the actions of the troops sent to Northern Ireland. The inquiry heard testimony from Gen. Michael Carver, the army’s chief of staff, who said that prior to the killings he had briefed Heath that restoring order in Derry would involve “numerous civilian casualties.”

It also exonerates British officers Gen. Robert Ford and Brigadier Patrick MacLellan. In a secret memorandum just weeks prior to the 1972 killings, Ford, commander of British Land Forces in Northern Ireland, had suggested that the army “shoot selected ringleaders” of those dubbed the “Derry Young Hooligans.”

The Saville inquiry indulges Sinn Fein’s “Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness by in effect, placing the Army on trial,” complained conservative military historian Max Hastings in a column in the Daily Mail, while “the long catalogue of [Irish] Republican atrocities against the British and Irish peoples goes unexplored.” Sinn Fein is the party that led the fight to end British rule in Northern Ireland.

Cameron said there would be “no more open ended and costly inquiries into the past.”  
 
 
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