Republican News · Thursday 5 December 2002

MoD wants to scapegoat soldiers - Bloody Sunday families

BY FERN LANE

The Bloody Sunday families have submitted a lengthy document to the British and Irish governments detailing their concerns about the conduct of various British government departments in relation to the Saville inquiry.

In the document, which is particularly critical of the British Ministry of Defence, they say that a number of "difficulties and obstacles have been put in the way of the inquiry which have been designed to obstruct it in its duty to establish the truth and restore public confidence."

Specifically, the families view the decisions to grant anonymity to soldiers and others, and the decision to relocate to London, as "part of an incremental strategy employed by the soldiers and their lawyers, of taking judicial reviews in relation to key tribunal decisions in the favourable environs of the English courts in order to dissipate the resolve of the families and wounded to continue with the inquiry and undermine public confidence".

The move to London has caused massive disruption to the families, who now have to contend with constant travel and separation from their families in addition to the strains of the inquiry itself.

The 'threat assessments' on which the decision to grant anonymity was granted "were scurrilous" say the families in their submission to the Irish and British governments. "The suggestion which was implicit in these witnesses' applications to the courts, and which the courts readily accepted, is that the families are still part of a suspect community."

In the document, the families say that the MoD "has been instrumental in attempts to frustrate the inquiry getting to the truth.

"Not one of the well over 1,000 photographs taken on Bloody Sunday which were given to the army legal team at the Widgery inquiry has been produced to the Saville inquiry. Unsurprisingly, not one of the former employees of the Widgery tribunal or of the army legal team was able to shed light on this mystery when they appeared before the tribunal here in London."

They are also particularly angry at the destruction of army rifles used on Bloody Sunday and the non-production of crucial cine film and hele-tele footage, commenting that "No one seems to know how these incidents occurred".

"In our view, the MoD have treated the inquiry with contempt," they say. "The soldiers who committed murder on our streets in 1972 were not individual soldiers acting on their own initiative. They were acting under orders, employed by the MoD, yet they are not represented by it. There is a clear strategy being employed to brand a small number of soldiers as scapegoats while the British government is not held accountable or properly scrutinised."

The families are also highly critical of the decisions to grant Public Interest Immunity certificates on certain material. "These are political decisions being taken by faceless persons within government departments to suppress important evidence," they say.

However, they believe that the most significant evidence to the Saville inquiry thus far has been that of General Robert Ford and his admission that his plan for a mass arrest operation on Bloody Sunday was "fatally flawed". The families say that during his evidence to the Saville inquiry, his plan was exposed as "nothing more than a full frontal assault on peaceful civil rights demonstrators".

The families are pressing the Dublin government to support them and to exert whatever political pressure it can on British government agencies in both the Six Counties and in Britain so that their concerns can be properly addressed.