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Reflections from an eye-witness reporter

Thursday, June 17, 2010

FOR A NATION TO DENOUNCE PUBLICLY an action by its own army as “unjustified and unjustifiable” is by any standard extraordinary. But then, Bloody Sunday was and has been extraordinary. And the new British Prime Minister David Cameron’s apology for it is – of course – long overdue.

Even taking into account British military views, and those of the Protestant majority community’s spokespeople about all of Northern Ireland’s other, perhaps less widely remembered deaths … it remains true that the 13 citizens of Derry killed that wintry afternoon decades ago - and a fourteenth who died of his injuries later - have held an understandably vise-like grip on the province’s aggrieved Catholic minority population and on British-Irish politics overall. 

As a very distanced American writer - Henry Chu of the Los Angeles Times - put it yesterday, employing a commendable tone of journalistic non-involvement and 38 years’ hindsight: “Many historians believe the slaughter in Londonderry spelled the death of the non-violent movement for civil rights in Northern Ireland by hardening nationalist sentiment and galvanizing young activists who joined militant groups such as the Irish Republican Army.”

Bloody Sunday is certainly seen as having marked a seriously more violent turn in what was by then already a war, though given a heavily ironic euphemism, “The Troubles”. And I’d endorse that perception, recalling that I sensed at the time how Northern Ireland’s entire political climate was altered decisively by those 108 rifle rounds loosed off around 4.15pm on January 30th, 1972.

Through the days that followed, no doubt still traumatized from cowering in the crowd being shot at, I wrote for London’s New Statesman magazine my observations that the British Army had suddenly become the most effective recruiting sergeant the IRA had ever had. And in an image whose luridness I worried about then, but have since felt was appropriate, I described how the words on the crowd’s protest banner, “Civil Rights”, had been almost completely obscured by the blood that stained it.

The enormous and obvious question raised by Bloody Sunday, but unanswered through the decades, is the one I focused on as I wrote much later, in 2001, for the New York Times, when on my way to give eyewitness testimony to the current (and remarkably, 12 years-long) inquiry: “I still have no doubt that ... British soldiers opened fire, unprovoked, on innocent British citizens. But unlike the hordes of conspiracy theorists that Bloody Sunday has attracted, I still have no idea why”.

The question was “examined” insufficiently (or mendaciously) by the first government inquiry completed within 11 weeks of the killings - and to which I’d also given evidence - under then-Chief Justice Lord Widgery. It was quickly condemned as the "Widgery Whitewash" for leaving the lingering pernicious suggestion that the victims may have presented a threat to the soldiers.

But now this central question is finally and authoritatively answered by this week's report from the present-day "Law Lord", Lord Saville - a fresh look originally commissioned by Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair back in 1998.

 

No, the men killed were definitively not shooting, about to shoot, nor throwing bombs at the troops (and actually, there’s nothing technically new here – a previous Prime Minister, David Cameron’s last Conservative predecessor, John Major, had already formally acknowledged that). So why, then, did the paratroopers fire? The further, more fundamental answer given in painstaking detail by the 5,000-page report is that "a serious and widespread loss of fire discipline" broke out, in which soldiers were “losing their self-control” and “forgetting or ignoring their instructions and training”.

   

The Tuesday after the killings, while I worked in the streets, my British Independent Television co-worker, Peter Williams, enterprisingly gained access to the paratroopers’ mess-hall and interviewed a group of them. Their stories were at the least contradictory to all the other evidence, as they offered accounts (fantastical to those of us who had been there) of gunmen at open windows firing on them, and the like.

The new report’s conclusion on this? Soldiers "knowingly put forward false accounts in order to seek to justify their firing". In other words, they lied under oath. Some soldiers acted under a "mistaken belief" that they were under threat, but others fired "either in the knowledge or belief that no-one in the areas into which they were firing was posing a threat of causing death or serious injury - or not caring”.

That is a very clear answer. And sometimes, as here, the answer to even long-lasting intractable questions can be this simple – and all too brutally human. Men lost their heads, did terrible things, and then lied about it.

   

 

ONCE AGAIN - ALTHOUGH IT SEEMS odd to employ Richard Nixonian allusions here - it’s the cover-up even more than the original crime that can do the greatest damage. The lying and evasions over time have inescapably aggravated the massacre’s toxic legacy.

Families of those killed have told me several times that they were “not looking for an apology”; all they wanted was for the real truth about their loved ones' deaths to be established, and asserted clearly and loudly. And again yesterday Henry Kelly, brother of the dead 17-year old Michael Kelly, repeated that thought in a message - adding also the grim comment: “You cannot apologize to the dead”.

Words come easy, family members believe, even to a government that can accept responsibility. Ensuring that actual amends get made is another matter entirely. Criminal prosecutions against soldiers (of whatever rank) could, just possibly, flow from this report; and - maybe more likely - civil suits could be pressed by the long-suffering families.

It’s taken a lot - $280 million in inquiry costs, and a lifetime of psychic harm for countless individuals - but for me every penny and every single day of delay has been worth it to achieve this powerful step forward. Retired Bishop Edward Daly, whose efforts as a local priest to help victims were captured in a quickly iconized image from the carnage (pictured above, waving handkerchief as white flag), speaks for many when he says he now feels "a sense of enormous relief that this burden has been lifted from my shoulders and off the shoulders of the people of this city. It's wonderful when the truth emerges."

Now, though, what gets done with the truth?

 

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