| From Unity, 2 June 2007 |
EditorialThirty years too lateThis week the BBC Television programme “Spotlight” interviewed a number of former soldiers to mark the end of the British army’s “Operation Banner,” the role that provided support for the police for more than thirty years. One person interviewed was a former commander of the British army, General Sir Mike Jackson. His statement comes as no revelation to those of us who have studied the history of the British army down the years. Jackson, who was an officer with the Parachute Regiment in Derry on Bloody Sunday, says that he had “no doubt that innocent people were shot.” As a senior soldier in the British army he should know well what he is talking about; but in the past he insisted that those killed during the civil rights demonstration had been “gunmen.” Reference is always made to the fourteen people who were killed in the Bogside on 30 January 1972, but there were in fact about twenty-eight people shot, and there could have been more fatalities. Jackson also admitted that the Fall Road curfew in July 1970 had been a “mistake.” This three-day curfew, involving about three thousand soldiers searching houses in the Falls Road area for IRA weapons, resulted in the death of five people and injury to sixty, including fifteen soldiers. This situation sparked off one of the first all-women demonstrations, described at the time by the Central Citizens’ Defence Committee as “Upper Falls women [outside the curfew area] who banded together to break the blockade and take bread and milk and other necessities to people who had suffered so much.” It has taken General Jackson some thirty years to come to a conclusion that the Communist Party of Ireland has had for over thirty years, and that is that “you cannot see it in a simplistic military ‘side A beats B,’ because I think it is true to say that the ‘military dimension of the campaign’ could have gone on indefinitely with neither side gaining what might be perceived as some sort of victory. I go back to my original premise: the source of the problem is political, therefore the solution is political.” Whilst welcoming this statement, the CPI can categorically say that, like Paisley’s recent commitment to politics and power-sharing, it comes thirty years too late for those who are now dead and buried as a result of the “Troubles.” No doubt we will have similar revelations about Iraq and Afghanistan; just give us another thirty years. |
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