Historic walk to Bogside estate by Protestants

Published on Wednesday 16 June 2010 23:09

PROTESTANT church leaders yesterday made a pilgrimage to Londonderry's Bogside in a moving and historic gesture they hoped would symbolise fresh hope for Northern Ireland after the Saville inquiry.

• From left, Protestant church leaders Norman Hamilton, Paul Kingston and Ken Good in Londonderry yesterday, on their way to meet relatives at the Bloody Sunday Memorial. Picture: PA

A trinity of clergymen representing the Anglican, Presbyterian and Methodist traditions travelled to the Catholic enclave where the Bloody Sunday shootings took place.

As lawyers for the victims' families called for prosecutions to be brought against members of the Parachute Regiment who were in Londonderry on Bloody Sunday, the city witnessed astonishing scenes that could hardly have been imagined a few years ago.

The nationalists of the Bogside applauded warmly as Church of Ireland Bishop of Derry and Raphoe the Rt Rev Ken Good, Presbyterian moderator Norman Hamilton and Methodist Church president Paul Kingston entered an area of the city that would have once been a no-go area for Protestants.

Age-old religious and political differences were set aside when the clergymen met victims' families at a monument to the 14 Bloody Sunday dead.

The church leaders handed the relatives a replica of Maurice Harron's Hand Across The Divide sculpture, which stands at the west end of the city's Craigavon Bridge.

Mr Good said a cloud had lifted from the city after the momentous scenes that greeted the publication of the 195 million report that cleared all the victims and strongly condemned soldiers for the shootings.

He said Lord Saville's report gave an historic opportunity for bitter rivalries to be settled.

"I want us to have a more open, more transparent, a more natural and a more easy relationship with one another in this town that we all love so well," the bishop said.

But the scathing conclusions of Lord Saville, who found that the Bloody Sunday dead and wounded had been victims of "unjustifiable firing" by the Parachute Regiment, led to calls for soldiers to be prosecuted.

Lord Saville concluded that some members of the Paras had "knowingly put forward false accounts" to justify opening fire on unarmed protesters.

Michael Mansfield, QC, who represented the families of some of the victims, urged prosecutors to consider bringing charges against soldiers accused of lying.

He said that while witnesses had been given immunity from prosecution if they incriminated themselves in evidence, that did not cover false testimony.

"Given the strength and clarity of the conclusions … the Director of Public Prosecutions should consider whether it is so serious – because the rule of law has been flagrantly breached on this occasion by a number of soldiers on a number of UK citizens – that consideration should be given to a prosecution," Mr Mansfield said.

Prime Minister David Cameron has said it will be up to Northern Ireland's Public Prosecution Service (PPS) to decide whether criminal cases ought to be pursued. If it did so decide, soldiers could conceivably find themselves facing charges.

Northern Ireland's PPS said it was investigating, along with Crown prosecutors, whether witnesses committed perjury at the inquiry.

Yesterday, some families of the victims indicated that they wanted to leave the issue of prosecution up to the authorities.

"The families have had 38 years of this hanging over their shoulders," said Jimmy Duddy, as he visited the grave of his uncle, John Johnstone, in Londonderry's hilltop cemetery.

"It would be better if the British government and prosecution service took that load off us and they make the decision," Mr Duddy said as he remembered his uncle, who was shot three times by soldiers when they opened fire during a civil rights march.

People were more interested in clearing their names than receiving damages for the losses they have suffered, he said.

"This was never about compensation, not a penny," said Mr Duddy, who has been deeply involved in the families' campaign for justice.

"If you had asked them (the families] to take that 200m they keep talking about (money spent on the inquiry], but that the families still had a slur on their name, they would have told them to keep it."

Lord Saville's 5,000-page report rejected claims the victims had been armed with guns and bombs, and said that some had been shot as they lay wounded or as they were trying to tend to the dying.

The report said none of the dead had posed a threat and the actions of the soldiers were totally without justification.

The withering account of events, which contradicted the findings of the 1972 Widgery report into the shootings, showed that soldiers lied about their actions and falsely claimed to have come under attack.

Col Richard Kemp, a former troop commander in Afghanistan, said the soldiers had behaved more like "Nazi stormtroopers" than British soldiers. His first instinct was that guilty soldiers should be jailed, but, on reflection, he said prosecutors should take into account the time that had passed since the incident and the fact that many Northern Irish paramilitaries had been released from prison early.

The controversy surrounding Bloody Sunday fuelled nationalist anger against Britain and turned many young men towards the Provisional IRA, the terrorist organisation that killed hundreds of innocents during the Troubles.

Some similarities to Lockerbie legal case

THIS is something that has some similarities to the Lockerbie case and Megrahi. It is a huge issue in international politics, but it goes straight to the heart of the devolved ministry of justice – this time at Stormont rather than Holyrood. Everybody assumed that Lord Saville would report long before he did and it would be published when Northern Irish justice was still reserved to Westminster.

So whether or not soldiers ought to be prosecuted is a very complicated local question, which is not made any simpler by the fact that the director of the Public Prosecution Service, Sir Alasdair Fraser, is to retire shortly.

How this is to be resolved is still unknown. However, we can take heart that the recent general election hugely strengthened what has now become the mainstream of Northern Irish politics at the expense of the extremes.

Dissident republican attempts to urge voters to boycott Sinn Fein did not come to much and the hardline Traditional Unionist Voice did not make too many inroads into Democratic Unionist Party support.

Therefore the devolved political institutions have been strengthened after the election. So, while the Saville report may cause some uncomfortable indigestion, the problems it creates are not insurmountable.

There will be Unionist resentment about the creation of a hierarchy of victims. A visitor from Mars just now could be forgiven for believing that the only victims of the Troubles were those who died on Bloody Sunday and a few others who were killed by the security forces. Actually, there were nearer 4,000 people who died. Those whose relatives were killed by the IRA are likely to feel resentment.

As far as the big picture is concerned, the aftermath of Saville may be messy, but the Stormont administration should be strong and secure enough to deal with it.

&#149 Lord Bew is Professor of Irish Politics at Queen's University, Belfast and a former adviser to David Trimble.

Murderous decades achieved nothing

FOR the relatives of the dead the Saville inquiry is vindication – confirmation of a state war crime on the streets of Derry.

But beyond Lord Saville's forensic examination of the actions of a handful of rogue killer paratroopers, and the ensuing disgraceful cover up by the British political and military leadership of the time, the purposeless history of Ireland's Troubles' remains unchanged.

Bloody Sunday was just one war crime, albeit a State war crime, amongst a drum roll of atrocity and one-off whackings (murders) by loyalist and republican gunmen that stretches back into the bowels of Irish history and still continues today, in intent at least, amongst a tiny handful of republican dissidents.

Bloody Sunday was neither the fount nor genesis of the IRA's campaign merely another marker on Ulster's long descent into near civil war and decades of counter-insurgency struggle.

Undoubtedly, Bloody Sunday made a bad situation worse – 467 were killed in Ulster in 1972. But 174 people had already been murdered in 1971.

But to distinguish Bloody Sunday as a unique atrocity is to further falsify Irish history.

The key but wider historical question, beyond Saville's remit, remains unanswered – what exactly was the fighting about? Who killed who? And what for? And what did the Troubles dead, all 3,500 of them, die for?

I can honestly say I am more confused today than I ever was about the IRA's war.

Apart from the dead nothing has really changed.

Northern Ireland is as British as ever even though the IRA's leaders now sit in Stormont.

&#149 Kevin Toolis is the author of Rebel Hearts: Journeys Within the IRA's Soul.

Justice for the dead could be long, complex process

How likely are prosecutions?

A complaint has to be made to the police or the prosecuting authorities in the aftermath of Saville, so much depends on the appetite of the families to pursue the soldiers of the Parachute Regiment.

If the families want to pursue them through the criminal courts, Northern Ireland's Public Prosecution Service could decide that to do so would be in the public interest.

Even though witnesses to the inquiry took the stand on the basis their evidence would not prejudice criminal proceedings, evidence from elsewhere in the inquiry and outwith the inquiry could be used.

In the event of a prosecution, what would the defendants be charged with, and what are the chances of convictions?

Legal experts believe murder charges are far more likely than manslaughter. To prove murder, a judge or jury would have be persuaded beyond reasonable doubt that the soldiers intended to kill the victims.

The defence of self-defence, which allows for the use of "reasonable force" could also stand in the way of a conviction, even though Lord Saville found the victims were blameless.

Lawyers for the soldiers could accept the innocence of the victims, but at the same time argue that in the melee of Bloody Sunday, their clients believed their lives were at risk and were acting in self-defence.

How likely are convictions for perjury?

Although Lord Saville said soldiers gave false accounts of their actions, there would still be substantial legal hurdles. Firstly, prosecutors would have to argue there is a realistic prospect of conviction – a formidable task given a trial could involve recalling hundreds of witnesses. They would also have to prove that this was in the public interest.

Would a criminal prosecution help the peace process?

As ever in Northern Ireland, there is the possibility of a violent backlash, if loyalist gangs perceive victims of the Paras are given precedence over the victims of the IRA.

On the other hand, Nationalists mistrusted the justice system throughout the Troubles, so encouraging their newly found faith in it by doing the right thing for the victims could play an important role in stopping the slide from mainstream Republicanism to the violent dissident groups.

What are the prospects of the families bringing a civil action?

Much will depend on whether the families are eligible for legal aid. A civil case could not send soldiers to jail, but the families could be awarded huge damages. Civil actions are often called to establish the truth. But with 191 million just having been spent on a 12-year inquiry, it is difficult to argue for another costly legal hearing.

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