Posted at 7:09 p.m. PST Saturday, December 6, 1997
New calls for the truth of N. Ireland's Bloody Sunday
New York Times News Service
LONDONDERRY, Northern Ireland -- This is the less belligerent part of
Northern Ireland, an old city in the isolated west more famous for
storied resistance to sieges, lilting folk music and municipal
architecture than for the sectarian violence that has scarred much of
the province.
The massive 17th century walls that surround the city stand intact, and
its many historic buildings and narrow streets bear the spiffy touch of
civic pride. If ``Danny Boy'' is the world's favorite Irish song, then
this city can be said to be the fount of Irish melody. The famous tune
is called ``Londonderry Air.''
For a long time the biggest fight in Londonderry, Northern Ireland's
second-largest city, has been over what the place should be called, a
dispute that is almost quaint by the turbulent standards of this
conflicted part of Britain.
Roman Catholics, the majority here, say they live in Derry -- the name
comes from ``doire,'' the Gaelic word for oak grove. The city was known
as Derry until 1613, when Londoners sent money and master builders to
restore a medieval town destroyed by fire and asked that its name be
prefixed to reflect their contribution. Protestants cling to
``Londonderry.''
Disputes between Protestants and Catholics here center on patronage and
politics rather than terrorism and killing. The Catholic leadership
prides itself on putting projects like factories, a hospital, a
deep-water port and the airport in Protestant neighborhoods, although
Gregory Campbell, 44, the most prominent Protestant on the city council,
dismissed the claim of benevolent treatment as ``nice P.R. packaging.''
But the relatively benign state of this community of 103,000 harbors a
hurt from the memory of an outbreak of violence 25 years ago and a deep
suspicion that the full story has not been told. On Jan. 30, 1972, a day
known since as Bloody Sunday, British paratroopers killed 14 marchers
protesting the British policy of internment without trial on the main
street of the city's working-class Catholic community, the Bogside.
The Catholic leadership of the city and the government of the Irish
Republic are pressing the British government of Prime Minister Tony
Blair to reopen a hasty and widely denounced investigation of the
episode by Lord Widgery, then the Lord Chief Justice of Britain.
His report, issued less than three months after the event, exonerated
the troops and faulted the protesters, saying ``there is no reason to
suppose that the soldiers would have opened fire if they had not been
fired upon.'' It said there was a ``strong suspicion'' that the marchers
had handled bombs and fired weapons even though none were ever recovered
or detected in the many photographs of the episode.
Campaigners believe the moment is crucial because hundreds of accounts
by witnesses, recordings of army and police messages and forensic
evidence that were not taken into account by Lord Widgery have just come
to light and because Blair has shown himself amenable to
confidence-building measures to keep the momentum of the peace talks now
under way in Belfast.
``We talk so much about the peace process, but as well as a peace
process we must have a healing process,'' Mayor Martin Bradley, 33, said
in his neo-Gothic office in the waterfront Guildhall.
The leader of the campaign is John Hume, head of the Social Democratic
and Labor Party, a member of the British and European parliaments and
the most widely admired political figure in the peace effort.
``All we want is the truth of what happened on Bloody Sunday,'' he said.
``We on the streets of Derry know what happened.''
The shock and anger of that day provoked hundreds of young Catholic men
who had grown up in this city's less tribally contentious society to
enlist in the Irish Republican Army and join in the fight to end British
control. Mitchel McLaughlin, 52, a member of the city council and a
negotiator in the present talks in Belfast as a member of Sinn Fein, the
IRA's political wing, said there was little tradition of Republicanism
here before Bloody Sunday.
Edward Daly, 64, a retired bishop, said, ``Many young people I have
talked to in prison have told me they would have never joined the IRA
had it not been for what they witnessed on Bloody Sunday.''
Daly was himself a witness, captured in photographs that have inspired
murals now on Bogside walls showing him helping to carry a fatally
wounded teen-ager and waving a bloody handkerchief at the troops to make
them stop firing.
``I know what happened, I saw it, I was there,'' he said. ``Innocent
people were murdered without justification by heavily armed
paratroopers.''
That the incident still has the power to divide the Irish and the
British became clear recently with a promise from Bertie Ahern, the
Irish prime minister, to publish new conclusions his government has.
``We have given the British government a great deal of time and space in
which to consider the matter,'' he said in a speech in Dublin with an
impatience uncharacteristic of his normal attitude toward Blair, an
ally.
The closest a British government has ever come to a reconsideration was
a letter from Prime Minister John Major to Hume in 1992 saying that
``those who were killed should be regarded as innocent of any allegation
they were shot whilst handling firearms or explosives.'' The expression
was seen here as evasive because it left unchallenged the ``strong
suspicion'' put forth in the formal investigation that the marchers
might have been handling weapons or bombs earlier.
On a recent raw day, Tony Doherty, 34, a community worker whose father,
Patrick, then 31, was killed in the shooting, visited the stark gray
Bloody Sunday monument in the Bogside accompanied by Joe Friel, 46, who
was wounded with a bullet in his chest, and Linda Roddy, 39, whose
brother William Nash, 19, was shot dead. A new piece of evidence, based
on the direction of fire and the trajectory of the bullets, suggests
that Nash and two others were killed not by the advancing paratroopers
but by soldiers above on the city walls who picked them off as they
tried to flee.
``I never come here unless I have to,'' Mrs. Roddy said with a shudder,
looking at the bleak landscape with the whitewashed wall from a
demolished tenement that proclaims ``Now You Are Entering Free Derry.''
Twenty-five years later, she grows tearful and bites her lip as she
thinks about the official verdict of her brother's death. ``You know
what they're saying?'' she said. ``They are saying that my brother was
responsible for his own killing.''
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