Ballymurphy story must be told 

Posted by Jim on September 15, 2018

 

Before Bloody Sunday there was Ballymurphy. Its story must be told,
according to Callum Macrae, the director of The Ballymurphy Precedent,
a shorter version of which was broadcast on Channel 4 last weekend.
(For the Guardian)

Investigations into the actions of British soldiers during the Troubles
were branded a “macabre charade” by Lord Bramall, Britain’s former
defence chief, earlier this month. Sir Nick Carter, the current head of
the armed forces, also weighed in against “a clutch of vexatious claims”
against soldiers, and warned against what he reportedly dismissed as
attempts to “rewrite history”.

There is a very real problem with these comments. I have just made a
film that is not an attempt to rewrite history, but an attempt to tell a
hidden history. Neither Bramall nor Carter will like it, but this is a
story that needs to be told. Not just for the record, not just to help
redress a terrible damage done to the victims and their families, but
because the failure to acknowledge this history remains a block on
Northern Ireland’s painful road to peace and reconciliation.

On 10 September, a renewed inquest begins into the Ballymurphy deaths.
It can establish whether violence was justified

My film, The Ballymurphy Precedent, investigates a shocking series of
killings that took place over three days in west Belfast’s Ballymurphy
estate in 1971.

The incident is doubly significant because most, if not all, of those
killings were carried out by members of Britain’s elite Parachute
Regiment less than six months before Bloody Sunday, when the same
regiment shot dead 13 unarmed people in Derry’s Bogside.

The victims in Ballymurphy included a priest who was attending another
man who had been shot (the other man survived) – and a mother of eight
children. Several of the dead were shot more than once – some several
times. No credible evidence has been presented suggesting they were
armed. Autopsy reports reveal that several were shot in the back as they
ran away from the paratroopers. Ten of the victims died of gunshot
wounds – an 11th died of a heart attack during a confrontation with an
armed Para patrol.

Just as they did on Bloody Sunday, the army immediately released
statements describing the victims as gunmen and terrorists. Those claims
have never been withdrawn.

It was four decades before the Saville inquiry concluded that all the
victims of the Bloody Sunday killings in Derry were innocent. But
Saville also emphatically rejected any suggestion that the army sent 1
Para to Derry knowing what they were likely to do, or even that they
intended to do it. That effectively suggested Bloody Sunday was not the
fault of either the government or the Ministry of Defence, and largely
placed the blame on the commander of 1 Para.

Scuffles at Ballymurphy memorial hall in August 1971 I believe that what
happened in Ballymurphy makes that conclusion unsustainable. The army
chiefs in Belfast who decided to send 1 Para to Derry in January 1972
(to help control a massive anti-internment march), knew only too well
what the Paras had already done in Ballymurphy – and if they didn’t they
certainly should have. Police and British army commanders in Derry,
committed to a more conciliatory approach than those in Belfast, had
also warned of the dangers posed by importing the Paras’ hardline
tactics.

But I would suggest that Belfast’s hardline strategy was an inevitable
product of Britain’s whole approach to “peacekeeping” in Northern
Ireland. The Northern Ireland civil rights movement, which evolved in
the late 60s, had virtually identical demands to those of Martin Luther
King in the US. They boiled down to an end to discrimination and a
demand for an end to anti-Catholic gerrymandering – “one man, one vote”
as it was quaintly known in those days.

When loyalist mobs and unionist police responded to those civil rights
marches with violence and repression, rather like their white
equivalents in the deep south of the US, the UK sent in the army
ostensibly to “restore law and order”. They were welcomed by most
Catholics. In my film, Briege Voyle, the daughter of Joan Connolly, the
mother of eight who would later be shot dead in Ballymurphy by the
Paras, remembers her mother giving the soldiers tea and biscuits when
they first arrived. Voyle’s sister married one of the soldiers.

But where federal forces in the US effectively (albeit inadequately and
belatedly) took the side of the civil rights marches and enforced laws
banning segregation, the UK’s “federal forces” – the army – set about
restoring “law and order”. This was the law and order of an avowedly
sectarian, Protestant state, with all its panoply of discriminatory
practices.

It was therefore inevitable that many Catholics who had initially
welcomed the army as protectors soon began to see them as oppressors.
And after events like Ballymurphy and Bloody Sunday, it was equally
inevitable that many began to turn to the IRA.

There is another reason why the truth about Ballymurphy needs to be
told; and in the long term, it is probably the most important reason of
all. If the culture of impunity, licence and, frankly, indiscipline that
allowed these killings to happen is not acknowledged and addressed then
the clear danger is that these kind of events could happen again.

For that reason alone, I would suggest, Carter – as chief of the defence
staff – should stand wholeheartedly behind the search for truth and
justice over Ballymurphy, and all other incidents of concern involving
British forces during the troubles. Anything else would be an abdication
of his responsibilities.

On 10 September a renewed inquest begins into the Ballymurphy deaths.
While an inquest cannot establish criminal responsibility, it can
establish whether the violence was justified. For the relatives that
would be a start.