| From Unity, 19 June 2010 |
Lighting the blue touch-paperby Lynda WalkerThe Saville Inquiry may be the longest public inquiry in British legal history, but it would be a hell of a lot longer if it included the so-called Indian Mutiny, “blowing Sepoys through our guns”; if it included the other, 1921 Bloody Sunday in Croke Park, with the killing of fourteen Gaelic football spectators; if it included the victims of the so-called “Malayan Crisis,” some of whose photographs appeared in the Daily Worker with “Brits” holding the severed heads of Malayan independence fighters; if it included those eleven people killed in August 1971 in one day in Ballymurphy, victims of plastic bullets, like Carol Ann Kelly from Twinbrook, and other children killed; and if it included the torture and killing of Mousa in Iraq and many others too numerous to mention.The history of the British armed forces is one of an imperialist army—of course, none of our readers needs to be told that. However, last week Cameron to told the people of the UK that he “reveres” the British forces and “pledges to put the armed forces at the centre of national life.” For some in Northern Ireland that is akin to lighting a blue touch-paper. The report British Violations of Human Rights in Northern Ireland, published by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association in 1973, quotes the Crompton Report in its definition of brutality as “an inhuman or savage form of cruelty, and that cruelty implies a disposition to inflict suffering, coupled with indifference to or pleasure in the victim’s plain.” With the publication of the Crompton Report, such violation was to end. However, many of us here have experienced the brutality that was dished out by the British army and the RUC, which did not end. People from the loyalist section of the community have also experienced repression, and death, at the hands of the British army. The NICRA report states that “the British army continues to act as Judge and executioner in all working class areas—Alexander Howell was recently murdered by a uniformed British soldier on the Shankill road while trying to act as a peacekeeper between an angry mob and a British Army patrol.” In Derry on 30 January 1972 twenty-eight people were shot, and fourteen of these were killed. Some of the relatives of those who were shot say that they want justice for their loves ones, others just want the truth. Some believe that this inquiry will help to stop future violations around the world. Unfortunately this is hardly likely to influence, for example, Israel and Colombians or, for that matter, the British and American governments, with their involvement in Afghanistan. Lord Trimble,* the former Unionist leader, had no problem in admitting that when Labour agreed to the inquiry in 1998 he warned Tony Blair that any conclusion that deviated “one millimetre” from the Widgery Report into the killings would lead to “soldiers in the dock.” We wait to see. *the same Lord Trimble who has been asked by Israel to act as an independent observer in the inquiry into their recent attack on the ships bringing aid to Gaza. |
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