On how to view the past
Jun. 15th, 2010 11:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pecuniumDavid Cameron has just pissed off some friends of mine. I may be doing the same with this post (should they ever read it).
Today was the release of The Saville Report which is the result of 12 years, thousands of interviews and £195 million, of inquiry into the events of, Bloody Sunday (for those who have not the time, nor the inclination to read through 5,000 pages of detail there are the principal conclusions which only run to 60 pages).
How did David Cameron, who was five when it happened (just as I was), piss them off? He apolgised. More, he did not promise immunity to those implicated in the report.
That report says the dead were innocent. Guilty of nothing; that the soldiers had no legitimate targets, and were not acting out of fear for their lives, or the lives of others (it does say that of the 14 dead, 3 were shot by soldiers acting in "fear and panic" and 11 were not).
David Cameron said, ""Mr Speaker, I am deeply patriotic.
I never want to believe anything bad about our country.
I never want to call into question the behaviour of our soldiers and our Army who I believe to be the finest in the world.
And I have seen for myself the very difficult and dangerous circumstances in which we ask our soldiers to serve.
But the conclusions of this report are absolutely clear.
There is no doubt. There is nothing equivocal. There are no ambiguities.
What happened on Bloody Sunday was both unjustified and unjustifiable.
It was wrong."
I have friends in the British Army. Friends who, because of the price they, and their mates, had to pay in N. Ireland, have a bone deep antipathy to the Irish. The dislike of the French, is mostly teasing (they have a thousand years of genial hostility between them). Not so the way they feel about the Irish Republicans.
I understand it (though as someone of Irish descent I can't quite share it even to the point of being more than more than merely quiet when they are being angry, and not playing, "rebel tunes" when they are in earshot).
Unjustified, and unjustifiable.
I am not, actually, trying to lay blame on 1 Para (I don't think, as one person said, they need to be stripped of all awards. It was a single act, by a singular group, and; while 1 Para must, sadly, carry the shame of those people's actions; and that days deeds, it doesn't diminish the rest of their record). No, I am more interested in the response Cameron made to a MP who was trying to make an equivalence between "terrorists" (a term which is often problematic, one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, and while I think the Provos, esp. in the '70s and '80s were well beyond the realm of fair insurgency (bombs in London, no. Soldiers are legitimate targets; it's what we are paid for. The various supporting elements [e.g in this case, The Orangemen] are probably fair game, but random people, far from the actual area being contested... I don't think so).
The MP wanted to know why, if the soldiers were facing prosecution why the IRA members (some of whom are known; one of whom is an MP in N. Ireland), aren't in the same spot.
He said he didn't want to draw equivalence between soldiers and terrorists, because soldiers act under the rule of law.
This is where this touches home. Bloody Sunday made The Troubles worse. It strengthened the IRA. It's why the "help the Irish" jars in US bars were always full. The cover up, the assertion that the dead were bomb-throwers, the lack of accountability, all of that gave people a grievance; one they couldn't get redress for in other ways.
We are doing the same thing in Iraq, and Afghanistan.
I have personal knowledge of it. A guy we had in the pen was arrested in the plain sight of his brother. US MPs took him away. When his brother when to the Coalition Provisional Authority to ask why, he was lied to. Spun a tale of all the groups which might have done it, but no... No Way was is the US.
Only it was. The brother saw it. I know about this because the guy was a Big Deal in South Baghdad, and it made the papers. I got to read about it, and I compared the brother's account to what I'd been told when I talked to the guy, and they were the same (inside the variability of eyewitness accounts, it was the same story).
If he'd just disappeared, instead of being taken home... how many people would have lost all faith in the honest intentions of the US?
How many similar stories are there?
Soldiers act under the rule of law. Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, Khandahar... places the Gov't says the law has run out.
Bloody Sunday, as much as anything else; in the 400 years of struggle to reclaim independence, made The Troubles as bad as they were (and it's an interesting thing that the families of the victims are looking to the Crown Prosecution to give them redress... they don't want jail for the soldiers, just trials, and [they hope, even expect, convictions] that will be enough for them to say justice was done).
What troubles could we avoid, were we to take a good hard look at what we are doing, and treat the people who have legitimate complaint as if they had legitimate complaint?
Today was the release of The Saville Report which is the result of 12 years, thousands of interviews and £195 million, of inquiry into the events of, Bloody Sunday (for those who have not the time, nor the inclination to read through 5,000 pages of detail there are the principal conclusions which only run to 60 pages).
How did David Cameron, who was five when it happened (just as I was), piss them off? He apolgised. More, he did not promise immunity to those implicated in the report.
That report says the dead were innocent. Guilty of nothing; that the soldiers had no legitimate targets, and were not acting out of fear for their lives, or the lives of others (it does say that of the 14 dead, 3 were shot by soldiers acting in "fear and panic" and 11 were not).
David Cameron said, ""Mr Speaker, I am deeply patriotic.
I never want to believe anything bad about our country.
I never want to call into question the behaviour of our soldiers and our Army who I believe to be the finest in the world.
And I have seen for myself the very difficult and dangerous circumstances in which we ask our soldiers to serve.
But the conclusions of this report are absolutely clear.
There is no doubt. There is nothing equivocal. There are no ambiguities.
What happened on Bloody Sunday was both unjustified and unjustifiable.
It was wrong."
I have friends in the British Army. Friends who, because of the price they, and their mates, had to pay in N. Ireland, have a bone deep antipathy to the Irish. The dislike of the French, is mostly teasing (they have a thousand years of genial hostility between them). Not so the way they feel about the Irish Republicans.
I understand it (though as someone of Irish descent I can't quite share it even to the point of being more than more than merely quiet when they are being angry, and not playing, "rebel tunes" when they are in earshot).
Unjustified, and unjustifiable.
I am not, actually, trying to lay blame on 1 Para (I don't think, as one person said, they need to be stripped of all awards. It was a single act, by a singular group, and; while 1 Para must, sadly, carry the shame of those people's actions; and that days deeds, it doesn't diminish the rest of their record). No, I am more interested in the response Cameron made to a MP who was trying to make an equivalence between "terrorists" (a term which is often problematic, one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, and while I think the Provos, esp. in the '70s and '80s were well beyond the realm of fair insurgency (bombs in London, no. Soldiers are legitimate targets; it's what we are paid for. The various supporting elements [e.g in this case, The Orangemen] are probably fair game, but random people, far from the actual area being contested... I don't think so).
The MP wanted to know why, if the soldiers were facing prosecution why the IRA members (some of whom are known; one of whom is an MP in N. Ireland), aren't in the same spot.
He said he didn't want to draw equivalence between soldiers and terrorists, because soldiers act under the rule of law.
This is where this touches home. Bloody Sunday made The Troubles worse. It strengthened the IRA. It's why the "help the Irish" jars in US bars were always full. The cover up, the assertion that the dead were bomb-throwers, the lack of accountability, all of that gave people a grievance; one they couldn't get redress for in other ways.
We are doing the same thing in Iraq, and Afghanistan.
I have personal knowledge of it. A guy we had in the pen was arrested in the plain sight of his brother. US MPs took him away. When his brother when to the Coalition Provisional Authority to ask why, he was lied to. Spun a tale of all the groups which might have done it, but no... No Way was is the US.
Only it was. The brother saw it. I know about this because the guy was a Big Deal in South Baghdad, and it made the papers. I got to read about it, and I compared the brother's account to what I'd been told when I talked to the guy, and they were the same (inside the variability of eyewitness accounts, it was the same story).
If he'd just disappeared, instead of being taken home... how many people would have lost all faith in the honest intentions of the US?
How many similar stories are there?
Soldiers act under the rule of law. Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, Khandahar... places the Gov't says the law has run out.
Bloody Sunday, as much as anything else; in the 400 years of struggle to reclaim independence, made The Troubles as bad as they were (and it's an interesting thing that the families of the victims are looking to the Crown Prosecution to give them redress... they don't want jail for the soldiers, just trials, and [they hope, even expect, convictions] that will be enough for them to say justice was done).
What troubles could we avoid, were we to take a good hard look at what we are doing, and treat the people who have legitimate complaint as if they had legitimate complaint?
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no subject
Date: 2010-06-16 02:49 pm (UTC)IRA terrorism was never particularly strong. "Violence" in this context mostly meant stones, not guns. Much of the violence was Protestant on Catholic (much as "race riots" in 1918 were white on black).
One of the great ironies of the UK military presence in Northern Ireland was that they had gone there to protect the rights of the Catholics against the Protestants. Many of the riots took place in this context, and the march took place in the context of internment without trial.
You'll find a decent summary of the situation here (http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/recent/troubles/the_troubles_article_02.shtml).
no subject
Date: 2010-06-16 03:01 pm (UTC)And I do know they abducted and killed off-duty British Soldiers in 1971, and routinely sniped British Soldiers. They bombed an armory, and a soldier was killed trying to shield civilians from the blast. After the Bloody Friday bombings, there is NO way to say they weren't terrorists, and really whether a terrorist organization goes for blood in a big way or small, they're still terrorists.
Like I said, this is a textbook example of why soldiers should NEVER be police, beyond policing our own.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-16 03:08 pm (UTC)Re whether they were terrorists or not, that rather depends on whether you agree that partition was legal, An awful lot of Irish people thought that it was not. It deliberately created a Catholic minority out of a country with a Catholic majority.
And in the meantime, and before Bloody Sunday, the UK governent imposed detention without trial. Something that Magna Carta specifically forbids, and it was for years, not months.
(I am Jewish by the way, with no Irish connections other than friends.)
no subject
Date: 2010-06-16 03:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-16 03:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-16 03:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-17 02:42 am (UTC)http://report.bloody-sunday-inquiry.org/volume01/chapter003/
And as far as the "violence" goes you should perhaps read this section -- http://report.bloody-sunday-inquiry.org/volume02/chapter015/ on the rioting at Barrier 14 or familiarise yourself with previous rioting including maybe the violence surrounding the Falls Road Curfew.
BTW the marches began long before internment did, and there had been much violence long before internment began. Sadly no nations ever learn from history and the repressive knee-jerk reaction to terrorist violence has only got more impressively OTT with the passage of time.
The devil is always in the details.
*In 1971, the year before Bloody Sunday, the Provos had already declared British soldiers to be targets, and the first soldier was shot dead in February -- they also killed 5 civilians that same month because they mistook their landrover for an army vehicle. In May they killed another soldier injuring 2 more along with 7 policemen and 18 civilians.