Civil war in Northern Ireland. Today the bitterest anniversary, “Bloody Sunday”: a massacre without justice. And Brexit blows the heat
Bloody Sunday: January 30, 1972 was also a Sunday, the “Sunday of blood” in which the British army fired on the crowd during a demonstration in Derry killing 14. Exactly fifty years ago, which are many but it seems like yesterday. And we are still here humming the words of U2, so current, not only in Northern Ireland but in all the places in the world where the power takes up arms to shut the mouth of the citizens, to impose its law against those who take to the streets to ask for their rights to be respected.
“Sunday Bloody Sunday” sang Bono and the lines of that song were a denunciation of what happened (“broken bottles under the feet of children / bodies scattered on the streets of death”) but also a message of peace, hope and brotherhood (“I will not give straight to the voice of battle / how long will we have to sing this song / because tonight, we can be one, tonight “).
Peace is now there, at least on paper. But Brexit has once again turned the spotlight on Northern Ireland, the eternal thorn in the side of London’s governments, which are increasingly struggling to hold together the centrifugal forces of an increasingly disunited kingdom. And he who knows how it will turn out, because hatred still burns under the ashes and every now and then a spark is enough to make the violence between unionists and separatists, between the British and the Irish, break out again. Protestants and Catholics.
Yeah, how long will we have to sing this song?
On that Sunday fifty years ago, soldiers from the British Army Parachute Regiment’s First Battalion were sent to disperse the crowd gathered in Derry, Northern Ireland’s Bogside neighborhood, in a protest against a special law enacted by the government. Irish unionist which allowed opponents to be arrested without trial and for an indefinite period. It was the first years of the Troubles, it was a special law against IRA, it was a violation of the rule of law and of the elementary rights of justice: due process and just imprisonment.
D.they only had to disperse the protest march, but suddenly the soldiers started firing on the crowd and it was a massacre. They fired at eye level, to kill. Some were shot in the back at close range while trying to escape, others while rescuing the wounded, others overwhelmed by armored vehicles. On that bloody Sunday 13 people were killed – all Catholics – and another died after four months of agony in hospital: 14 deaths in total. A slaughter not worthy of a civilized country, of a great democracy. And even more unworthy was what happened next: the London government (the prime minister was Edward Heath) tried to cover up the investigation with an investigation entrusted to Judge Widgery, who acquitted the soldiers by supporting their thesis that the march was not peaceful. and that the demonstrators were armed and had bombs.
Only twenty-two years later, in 1998, then Prime Minister Tony Blair decided to set up a new investigation (chaired by Lord Saville) and it took another twelve years and £ 200 million to get to the truth, contained in a 5,000-page report. and presented in 2010: the demonstrators were not armed, the soldiers had fired first and not even to respond to provocations. Only a kid perhaps had a paper bomb, certainly not a real threat. Following the publication of the report, the prime minister of the time David Cameron was forced to publicly apologize to family members for the behavior of the British government. “An unjustified and unjustifiable attack,” he said to a startled nation. Although no one has ever officially admitted that it was precisely that unjustified and unjustifiable massacre that triggered the violent reaction of the IRA in the following twenty years. And although no one has ever paid for what happened: a soldier was investigated for murder, but after two years he was acquitted for insoffice of evidence.
Sunday Bloody Sunday sang U2, and it was 1983 and the song shot to the top of the English charts, even beating Michael Jackson’s Thriller. The collective imagination does not need official truths and that song was a cry of denunciation against violence. And already Paul McCartney had sung for the Bogside dead (and censored by the BBC) and also John Lennon. Because songs have this power, to speak directly to people’s hearts. Like the photos that become icons, indelible like the blood on the white handkerchief waved by the Catholic priest Edward Daly who was escorting the transport of a wounded boy. His name was Jackie Duddy, he was just 17 and died shortly after. The photo of the bloodstained handkerchief and that priest speak more than all the inquiries and controversies and still today, fifty years later, they give chills.
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