Republican News · Thursday 31 January 2002

Campbell's Bloody Sunday bigotry

Derry DUP MP Gregory Campbell wrote in The Irish Times on 30 January, the 30th anniversary of the Bloody Sunday massacre, that "we are expected to believe that (the IRA) suddenly took rest and recuperation" on Bloody Sunday. The actual evidence suggests that two members of the Official IRA, reacting impulsively to the British Army's firing on unarmed civilians, fired a minimal amount of ineffective shots that had no effect on the massacre that was already in train.

The tenor of Campbell's piece reveals a complete inability to recognise the state's role in gunning down unarmed civilians. Is Gregory Campbell so dismissive of the legal rights and the pain of the victims and their relatives, because they are nationalists that his mind shuts down?

Were Gregory Campbell to take a lead as a public representative to call the authorities to account, he would be sending out a message to nationalists that his political opposition to their views does not imply wholesale disregard for their existence. It would also give positive leadership to his followers on the nature of citizenship.

Campbell implies throughout his piece that if justice is done, loyalists will be resentful. But all the victims are asking is that the culpability of the state is acknowledged and the line of political and military command resulting in the unwarranted killing of innocent civilians be revealed.

Campbell reveals a mindset where the rights of one section of the population count for nothing, while he attempts to whip the other section into a semi permanent frenzy of irrational resentment and fear.

It is significant that Campbell's leader, the Reverend Ian Paisley, has not made a single statement condemning the current campaign of violent attacks, up to and including assassination, against Catholics. Equally so is the failure of his ministers, Robinson and Dodds, to attend the recent ICTU protest against sectarian killings and threats against Catholic workers. If Gregory Campbell is afraid of the truth then he is afraid of his own shadow, and that unfortunately sums of the essence of the problem for unionism.

For his part, British Secretary of State John Reid spoke on the anniversary of drawing a line in the past. That line can only be drawn under Bloody Sunday when the British government, of which he is part, admits its murderous role in Derry that day.