Mon 18 Mar 2019, 09:53 AM | Posted by editor
LETTER from Harry Hutchinson, Labour Party Northern Ireland.
On January 30 1972 the 1st Battalion of the Parachute Regiment of the British Army moved into the Bogside area in Derry to clamp down on a protest organised by the Civil Rights Association.
Within 30 minutes the Paratroopers fired 108 bullets, killing 14 civilians (including one who died four months later), and wounding 28 others.
This 1st Parachute Regiment was already notorious for its use of excessive force. The previous year the Regiment had gunned down 11 civilians in Belfast, in what became known as the Ballymurphy massacre. A week before Bloody Sunday, an anti-internment march near Derry was stopped by soldiers of the Parachute Regiment and when some protesters threw stones and tried to go around the barbed wire, paratroopers drove them back by firing rubber bullets at close range and making baton charges. The paratroopers were so out of control that they badly beat a number of protesters and had to be physically restrained by their own officers. This was the regiment that was sent to Derry to similarly clamp down on civil rights demonstrators.
Under ‘Operation Forecast’, which banned all marches, Robert Ford, the head of the British army in Northern Ireland, claimed that “to restore order it is necessary to shoot selected ringleaders amongst the Derry Young Hooligans”. The Parachute Commander Derek Wilford, discharged the orders given, killing and wounding almost all the victims at an erected barricade on Rossville Street in the city. Six of the dead were 17 years old. Commander Wilford was awarded the Order of the British Empire by the Queen at the end of 1972.
A ruling from the Public Prosecution Service dashed all hopes of the victims’ families bringing the soldiers responsible for the killings to justice. It is known that pressure was put on the Prosecution service from the Government not to proceed with soldiers convictions. Only one soldier, soldier F, responsible for two of the killings and wounding four others, will now face trial. Of the other soldiers, there is allegedly a ‘lack of evidence to convict’.
Soldier F is being used as a single scapegoat to demonstrate what little justice there is in British law and to protect the upper levels of the chain of command, who were ultimately soldiers responsible for Bloody Sunday of murders.
Dispite the Saville inquiry, which ruled in 2010 that the Bloody Sunday killings were ‘unjustified’, the same inquiry cleared Army commanders of wrongdoing. Veteran Civil Rights activist Eamon McCann said “Bloody Sunday was a very British atrocity, the Top Brass got away with it”.
The victims’ families are shocked and disappointed by the ruling of the Prosecution Service. The families are determined to fight on to bring all of those responsible to justice almost half a century since the atrocity.
