Tribunal smear inflamed injustice of Derry shootings

ONE hour after the squall of slaughter passed, a deathly silence enveloped the Bogside. The bodies were gone, the living fled indoors. On the empty pavement outside Rossville Flats, the blood stained Civil Rights banner was spread, dimly lit by street lamps.

Fresh flowers formed a circle on the banner, a strange impromptu shrine. At the centre of the floral ring lay an open matchbox. Up close, its stark contents could be discerned - an intact human eyelid and eyelash.

Later, as the pervading shock eased and the sequence of events began to be assembled, it became evident that the eyelid must have been that of Barney McGuigan, cut down at that spot by a high velocity bullet through the brain as he moved out from cover holding his white handkerchief aloft, to go to the aid of a dying man.

The death of Barney McGuigan on a short mission of mercy epitomised the futility, the senselessness, of the orgy of killing on Bloody Sunday.

From the multiple testimony of witnesses, it is plain that a high proportion of those who died or were injured had been shot as they acted with extraordinary courage in a terrifying situation, trying to rescue the wounded and protect others from death or injury.

What capped the deep trauma of that tragic day for all who were there was the manner in which the report of Lord Widgery, following the official Tribunal of Inquiry, systematically constructed the suspicion or insinuation that many of the victims had been using firearms.

In the case of Barney McGuigan, the Widgery report relied on forensic tests which claimed to show that he had lead deposits on his hands and on a scarf - not his own - which covered his head as he lay dead.

Lord Widgery did not "pile up" the multiple witness statements which described Mr McGuigan's act of bravery. While concluding that "it is not possible to say that McGuigan was using or carrying a weapon at the time when he was shot, the judge closed the chapter on this victim with the extraordinary comment: "The paraffin test, however, constitutes ground for suspicion that he had been in close proximity to someone who had fired."

There is an absurd implication in this that the killing of Barney McGuigan was in some way justified. Widgery did not discuss why a man clutching a white handkerchief should have his brains blown out by an aimed shot fired by a soldier.

NO serious effort was made to bring the rigours of the law to bear on this soldier, or any of the others who killed and maimed on Bloody Sunday.

Again and again, the eyewitness accounts gathered by Don Mullan for his book, Eyewitness Bloody Sunday, published this week, document how fleeing civilians, or people going to the aid of others were shot in cold blood.

Many witnesses recount how uniformed paramedics of the Knights of Malta were battered to the ground or fired upon as they tried to render medical assistance.

At the tribunal, the anonymous soldiers in turn recited a well rehearsed mantra. Each one, it seemed, had fired upon "a bomber", "a gunman", "a sniper" or "a nail bomber". By their accounts, not one of the many people they targeted was unarmed.

Lord Widgery said: "Those accustomed to listening to witnesses could not fail to be impressed by the demeanour of the soldiers of Para."

With great equivocation, he concluded that in their firing "some soldiers showed a high degree of responsibility" while in other cases, notably in Glenfada Park (where four men were cut down and two of them, according to witnesses, "finished off" at close range), "firing bordered on the reckless".

He left a subtle smear upon the victims with his finding that: "None of the deceased or wounded is proved to have been shot whilst handling a firearm or bomb. Some are wholly acquitted of complicity in such action; but there is a strong suspicion that some others had been firing weapons or handling bombs in the course of the afternoon and that yet others had been closely supporting them".

The British army had done similar spadework at an early stage after the killings. A spokesman fed to the British press, which duly headlined it the allegation that four of the 13 killed on the day were "on the security forces wanted list".

This lie was withdrawn, and apologised for, towards the end of the tribunal hearings, but it had already served its purpose in moulding British opinion.

THE Widgery Report also served its purpose. After it was published, the Daily Express trumpeted: "The Army emerges from the Widgery Tribunal report with its reputation enhanced. Bloody Sunday in Londonderry was principally the fault of the march organisers and the IRA."

Capt L.P.S. Orr, the leader of the Unionist MPs at Westminster, said Lord Widgery had done a great service "in bringing the cold light of truth into the Celtic twilight of myth that had surrounded so called Bloody Sunday".

The then Northern Ireland prime minister, Brian Faulkner, said: "Those who organised this march must bear a terrible responsibility for urging people to lawlessness and for providing the IRA with the opportunity to again bring death to our streets".

What, then, are we to make of the first partial and grudging official recognition of the innocence of the victims, made by the British Prime Minister, John Major, in December 1992.

In a letter addressed to Mr John Hume, Mr Major said: "The Government made clear in 1974 that those who were killed on `Bloody Sunday' should be regarded as innocent of any allegation that they were shot, whilst handling firearms or explosives. I hope that the families of those who died will accept that assurance.

If Mr Major's admission was sincere, then, in spite of the equivocal phrase "should be regarded as innocent", the conclusion must be that the soldiers had lied to the Widgery Tribunal and that the Widgery Report was, at the very least, deeply flawed and erroneous.

THE apparent omission of any rigorous police inquiry into the individual deaths is inexplicable.

There were, after all, plenty of witnesses apart from the soldiers, and there was much physical evidence.

There were RUC officers on the city walls, who must have had direct knowledge of the firing from there. The most senior officer in Derry at the time, Chief Supt Frank Lagan, was present alongside the army commanders in the city centre as the paratroopers' operation was launched.

He told the Tribunal he had appealed to the officers that the paratroopers should not be sent in. Last week Chief Supt Lagan, now retired, declined to be interviewed.

The paras made some 50 arrests. The bizarre treatment of these people is well documented in the witness statements in Mr Mullan's book. All were told they would be charged with riotous behaviour. But six months after Bloody Sunday the then British attorney general, Sir Peter Rawlinson, said he had decided that "it would not be in the public interest" to proceed further with the charges of riotous behaviour.

He also said he had decided, in conjunction with the Director of Public Prosecutions for Northern Ireland and "after consideration of the evidence", that there was not sufficient evidence to warrant prosecution of any members of the security forces.

The significance of Bloody Sunday, and of the subsequent exoneration of the British army, was enormous in terms of the political and security situation in the North from 1972 on.

It has left a simmering and potent legacy of bitterness, an abiding sense of injustice, and, above all, a deep resentment that the truth was perverted and hidden, that innocent victims were - and still are - smeared with the suggestion of criminal activities.

In asserting that the soldiers' accounts of what they did were truthful, Lord Widgery plainly implied that the many hundreds of witnesses who made statements either to the tribunal or to the Civil Rights Association were either lying or totally mistaken in what they thought they saw.

Lord Widgery, himself a former army officer, went out of his way to rebut the criticisms of the senior army officers and the assertions that there was some breakdown in the chain of command.

The closest he came to indicting an officer was his comment on the decisions taken by the 8th Infantry Brigade Commander, Brig MacLellan.

The Widgery Report said: "The Brigade Commander, in giving evidence, told me that he had considered the possibility that if a shooting match developed there would be risk to innocent people but he described this risk as `very bare'. On the whole he considered that the arrest operation was essential in the interests of security and gave the order accordingly.

"Whether the Brigade Commander was guilty of an error of judgment in giving orders for the arrest operation to proceed is a question which others can judge as well or better than I can. It was a decision made in good faith by an experienced officer on the information available to him, but he underestimated the dangers involved."

He recorded, however, the evidence of Chief Supt Lagan "who was in the Brigadier's office at the relevant time and who formed the impression that 1 Para had acted without authority from the Brigadier".

Widgery did not formulate a clear and unambiguous conclusion on the conflicting evidence concerning the chain of decisions at command level, and in failing to do so he failed totally in one of his primary and most vital tasks.

The first and most prominent of his conclusions was baldly aimed at twisting the responsibility for the tragic events away from those who had actually carried out the killing and the maiming.

He concluded: "There would have been no deaths in Londonderry on 30 January if those who organised the illegal march had not thereby created a highly dangerous situation in which a clash between demonstrators and the security forces was almost inevitable."

The same simplistic logical device was used repeatedly by much of the British media to divert the blame from the troops and place, it on the organisers and the participants in the Civil Rights march.

It boils down to the bland and incontrovertible assertion so often resorted to by those who have presided over terrible events: you wouldn't have been shot if you hadn't been there.

A similar version of this theme was the impeccably loaded question which this reporter heard a British radio journalist put to a badly wounded Bloody Sunday victim in Altnagelvin Hospital only 48 hours after the event.

"Well, Mr - ," he asked the injured man, "in view of what happened, do you think this march should have taken place?"