I'm really very happily shocked that Britain has been this honest (at last) about one of the more shameful moments of its past. As someone who's read quite closely on the events of that day in 1972 in Derry and who followed the Troubles closely when I was a young man, I find the conclusions that the Saville Enquiry have come to quite extraordinary...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/ju...ers-prosecuted
http://www.theage.com.au/world/look-...0616-ygbh.html
I'm just wondering if there's a chewer perspective on this, because as I said, I sort of figured something as momentous as this would never happen. I mean, the paratroops that lied under oath may now be up on charges 38 years later, that's pretty incredible.
Justice at last for the innocent victims of that day. Best news story I've read all year.
Quote:
| After a 38-year struggle for truth and justice campaigners for those killed in Derry on Bloody Sunday tonight celebrated the Saville Report's exoneration of the victims and the report's unequivocal conclusion that the shootings were "unjustified". The Bloody Sunday tribunal's repeated use of the term "unjustifiable" throughout the 5,000-page report, and its verdict that soldiers had lied to the inquiry, now opens up the possibility of legal action against former troops involved in the atrocity. Fourteen unarmed civilians were shot dead by the Parachute Regiment which had been sent into Derry's Bogside on 30 January 1972. The deaths propelled a generation of nationalists into the Provisional IRA. Saville's conclusion that none of the 14 dead was carrying a gun, no warnings were given, no soldiers were under threat and the troops were the first to open fire, marked a final declaration of innocence for the victims of the biggest British military killing of civilians on UK soil since the Peterloo massacre in 1819. |
Quote:
| WE FIRST knew that something truly remarkable, something historic, was about to occur when the hands began to appear, squeezing through the window grilles of the old Guildhall in Londonderry. First one, then three, then 10 - and as they eased their way painfully under the barely open Victorian stained glass, so all raised their thumbs, pointing to the sky. They were the hands of the victims' relatives, of men and women from the Creggan and the Bogside who had been allowed in early to read the long-awaited report. There was a brief moment of bewilderment below, then suddenly the crowds realised and, as one, they went wild in a paroxysm of uncontained joy: the Saville report had vindicated the victims. Lord Saville had pronounced his verdict: the dead and the injured were all innocent, the soldiers had done them a terrible wrong, and a foul crime had been committed on the streets of Londonderry, 38 years before. Minutes later, in perhaps the most hauntingly memorable of all of Britain's post-imperial moments, the Prime Minister got to his feet in the House of Commons and publicly apologised for what his country's soldiers had done, all those years ago. It was impossible to defend the indefensible, he said. Men of the support company of the 1st Battalion, the Parachute Regiment, had shot without justification. Victims had been shot in the back, or while they were crawling away. Soldiers had lied under oath. The episode would never be forgotten, could never be forgotten. There was a roar of cheering at the high points of David Cameron's speech - and barely no jeering, even during the obligatory utterances of praise, destined for the shires, for other soldiers in other places. But when it was over, the square was filled with a vast silence. It was as though they could scarcely believe what they had just heard, a British prime minister, a Tory at that, offering a formal and sincerely meant apology for what his soldiers had done nearly four decades ago to men and women who were guilty only of protesting at the excesses and longevity of British colonial rule of Ireland. It was a speech unprecedented in its tone, its scope and its content. For the 30 minutes following, and in an episode for which one can forgive the slick choreography, the victims' closest surviving relatives spoke, one by one, quoting from the report and then ending with one cry: innocent! There were fists punched in the air, whoops of joy - and tears. Many, many tears. I met an elderly lady spilling out of the square, weeping uncontrollably. I smiled at her, and she grinned back. ''We did it!'' was all she said, dabbing at her cheeks. And someone had the good sense and taste publicly to tear up the blue-backed copy of the Widgery report, the 1972 travesty, a document giving politically motivated credence to the soldiers' now proven lies, and produced by the Lord Chief Justice of England, a man of shameful memory. The woman who tore it into shreds tossed it into the air like confetti. It drifted down in front of the Guildhall doorway, allowing us to see the motto carved on the lintel a century and a half ago: Vita. Victoria. Veritas, it read. Life. Victory. Truth. |
I'm just wondering if there's a chewer perspective on this, because as I said, I sort of figured something as momentous as this would never happen. I mean, the paratroops that lied under oath may now be up on charges 38 years later, that's pretty incredible.
Justice at last for the innocent victims of that day. Best news story I've read all year.
