Bloody Sunday: truth vital for all workers

By Eamonn McCann

In every other atrocity of the Northern
Troubles with which Bloody Sunday is compared, the victims were acknowledged as
innocent and the perpetrators deemed evil.

But in the case of Bloody Sunday the State
stood by its own. Paratroopers who had killed or wounded 28 unarmed civil
rights demonstrators were cleared by an official inquiry while the victims were
dismissed as gunmen and bombers. It is this which drove the families to wage
their long campaign for a new inquiry.

The Saville report was finally handed over
to Northern Secretary, Shuan Woodward, on 22 March. But the bad faith of the
British Government remains evident.

 Ministry of Defence officials and members
of MI5 have been allowed to pore through the report before publication and ask
for changes. This despite the fact that the MoD was the killers’ employer, and
MI5, through false information and cover-up, had a hand in bringing the
massacre about. 

 Nationalist parties in the North, particularly
Sinn Fein, have been remarkably easygoing about people who were complicit in
the killings being invited to read and suggest changes to the report before the
families of the victims are allowed a look-in.

 The problem for the Nationalist parties is
that in the 12 years since Tony Blair appointed Lord Saville to head the
inquiry, a DUP-Sinn Fein coalition has been established at Stormont - based on
tacit agreement that nobody who supports the new institutions of state will be
held accountable for offences in the past. So the truth about Bloody Sunday has
become an even hotter potato.

They argue that creating uproar about
Bloody Sunday now would risk the breakthrough which has given Nationalism a
place in government for the first time. This suits Shaun  Woodward and the
shameless government he is a part of as much as it suits Nationalist leaders.

Britain’s rulers have good reason to fear
the truth of Bloody Sunday. Their forces face allegations of torture and murder
in Iraq and are still fighting a dirty war in Afghanistan.

A report which detailed the Derry massacre,
apportioned blame and described the government’s role in covering up for the
killers and libelling the dead, would lend plausibility to claims of torture
and murder against British soldiers today. This is the main reason Woodward
wants the report out in as bland a form as possible, and - after an inevitable
flurry of comment - forgotten about.

 So the interests of the Nationalist
parties and of the British government coincide.

 To look at Bloody Sunday solely in a
Nationalist perspective is to avoid the fact that when the State murders its
citizens it is in the interests of all that it be held to account.

The issues arising from Bloody Sunday go
much wider and deeper than Orange-Green politics. Wherever we look around the
world, it’s working-class people who bear the brunt of State injustice. Every
worker or member of a marginalised group – Protestant, Catholic, Irish,
British, whatever - has an interest in discovering how and why the Derry atrocity
came about and what it tells us about conflict in the present.

 It is not a matter of politicians of this
or that party “selling out”. It has to do with the way Nationalism, of its
nature, tries to bind the mass of the people to the elite of the same
community. The leaderships always settle for a place in the existing power
structure. Rank and file followers are left behind, frequently embittered. 
Only parties based squarely on the interests of those at the bottom of society,
whatever their community, can fight the issues emerging from Bloody Sunday
through to a conclusion.