Republican News · Thursday 23 January 1997
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Twenty five years of cover-ups
By Mary Nelis
A reporter contacted me last week regarding Bloody Sunday. She wanted to know how the people of Derry would respond if the British government apologised. Would that be enough for the people to lay to rest the ghost of Bloody Sunday, to really bury our dead, once and for all?
People who don't live in Derry or who have never been here, ask questions like that. They haven't seen the blood flowing in the street, they haven't smelt the fear. They haven't witnessed the raw courage of those crawling along the ground to the aid of the wounded and dying. They haven't tasted the silence which hung over this city for three whole days, and they do not understand that Bloody Sunday was not just about the murder of innocent people. Nor was it just about killing off the Civil Rights Movement by shooting the masses on the street.
Bloody Sunday was more than that. It was about testing the theory that in the interests of national security the state could murder anyone and cover it up.
It was a while before the people of Derry realised that the Bloody Sunday cover-up was but a fine tuning for the cover-ups to come, for Bloody Sunday was a declaration of war by the British government on us, the nationalist community, in the last remnants of its Empire.
It was a while before we understood the implications of that terrible day, for we had to bury our dead and we had to mourn. We mourned the loss of fathers, husbands, sons and friends and we mourned the loss of our innocence.
It was also a while before we saw clearly that the cover-up of mass murder and the part played in that murder by the British government of the day, was planned in advance. For it is only in recent years that evidence has emerged which shows that the success of the cover-up hinged on a ``first strike'' PR operation by senior British Army personnel. The dead had to be robbed of their reputations. They were not human beings, they were nail bombers and gunmen.
By the time the Widgery Tribunal began, we knew that this British Lord would preside over the greatest cover-up in the long and bloody history of British involvement in Ireland. And some of us knew that this would be the shape of things to come.
By the time the first anniversary of Bloody Sunday came around, the British government was already engaged in intimidation and terrorisation of the working class communities in the nationalist areas of the North, and another Lord - Diplock - was preparing the way for the cover-up of torture in the RUC interrogation centres.
The years after Bloody Sunday were one of the darkest periods in the North's history. Those were the years of the Shankill Butchers, the Dublin, Monaghan bombings, the psy-ops operations. Those were the years of pain and isolation for the relatives of Bloody Sunday.
But by the 10th anniversary the tide was beginning to turn against the British and cracks began to appear in their elaborate cover-up operation. The death squads operations during 1982-85 when thirty five people were murdered, twenty three of them in undercover operations, again focused attention on state killings in the name of national security.
International pressure forced the British government to set up yet another enquiry.
It began much the same as Widgery, as a vehicle by the British for the cover-up of death squad operations but ended in disaster for Sampson, who became the victim of an elaborate RUC cover-up of his investigations.
The then Attorney General, ``cheer up'' Paddy Mayhew, announced that there would be no prosecutions of the RUC men involved on the grounds of national security. The wheel had come full circle from Bloody Sunday. National security, enquiries, the Official Secrets Act, the whole cult of secrecy and cover-ups of Britain's dirty war, were now exposed for the world to see.
The 20th anniversary of Bloody Sunday saw 30,000 people march through the rain-soaked streets of Derry still demanding justice for the dead, and the truth for the living. The rainbow which stretched across the skies of Derry, the skies which wept on the day we buried our dead, became a symbol for hope and for peace, and a message to the British soldiers looking down from Derry Walls. There would be no more Bloody Sundays, no more cover-ups.
The truth, which the relatives have demanded for the last 25 years, will out and it will set us all free.
``The gentle rainfall drifting down, over Colmcille's town, could not refresh, only distil, the silent grief from hill to hill''. Thomas Kinsella - Butcher's Dozen.
We still grieve.
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