Echos of Ireland’s Bloody Sunday

Indiscriminate violence against Malian civilians by French forces and their local allies belies the ostensible claim of “protecting lives” and points to an alternative purpose – a criminal imperialist power-grab. If this is so, then inevitably there will be further reports of violations, in which case, the French will find their African intrigue facing a turning point of rising popular armed resistance in Mali, as the British found on Bloody Sunday in Derry in 1972.”

Ireland’s bloody Sunday: A warning for Mali
29 January, 2013 – By Finian Cunningham

This week sees the anniversary of one of the worst massacres in modern Irish history, when British paratroopers murdered 14 unarmed civilians in cold blood.

On 30 January 1972, the British troops opened fire on a civil rights march in Derry City, Northern Ireland’s second city after Belfast, in full glare of the international news media.

Half of the victims that day were teenagers, shot in the head or in the back by British snipers. Some of the fatally wounded were shot multiple times as they tried to crawl to safety. Others were cut down in a hail of bullets as they tended to those lying wounded, bleeding on the ground.

One iconic image from that horrific day shows a Catholic priest, Fr Edward Daly, holding up a bloodstained white cloth, pleading with the British soldiers to cease-fire as he helped carry a dying youth.

Bloody Sunday, as it became known, was a watershed event. From then on, the conflict in Northern Ireland exploded. Some 3,000 people would lose their lives in the ensuing decades of violence – a huge death toll for the tiny population, equivalent to 240,000 in Iran or 900,000 in the United States.

Many Irish citizens, outraged by the British army slaughter, went on to join the ranks of the newly formed Provisional Irish Republican Army, the armed guerrilla movement that would kill hundreds of British troops and police and take the war to the very streets of London, with massive bombing campaigns in the British capital and other major cities.

On 27 August 1979, seven years later, the IRA exacted its revenge for Bloody Sunday with a devastating double attack on the British establishment. Lord Louis Mountbatten, cousin of Queen Elizabeth, was murdered when his pleasure boat was blown to pieces off the west coast of Ireland. Meanwhile, on the same day, over on the east coast, in Warrenpoint, Co Down, a convoy of British paratroopers – the army’s elite regiment – was ambushed in a multiple explosion claiming the lives of 18 soldiers. It was the biggest single loss of British troops in the Northern Ireland conflict.

Looking at France’s current military offensive in the West African country of Mali one wonders if the same kind of blowback awaits the French government? News media restrictions by the French authorities over air and ground attacks in Mali have failed to conceal disturbing reports of civilian casualties and atrocities – only three weeks into that conflict.

Human rights groups, such as Amnesty International, say they have “credible evidence” of dozens of extrajudicial killings of Tuareg civilians by French-backed forces in Mali. Atrocities are being reported from at least three locations in central Mali, in Mopti, Sévaré and Konna, the latter being the town which separatist Tuareg rebels overran on 10 January, thus allegedly sparking the Paris government to launch a full-scale military invasion of its former colony.

There is a disquieting parallel with past events in Northern Ireland, in particular the massacre of Bloody Sunday. The turning point of that event was that the bloodshed exposed the myth for why the British army had been officially sent to Northern Ireland in the first place – “to restore peace and protect civilians.”

Prior to the arrival of the British troops, the British-controlled Northern Ireland saw an outbreak of violence in the summer of 1968 when Nationalists began agitating for equal civil rights under the corrupt pro-British Unionist administration. Peaceful demonstrations by Nationalists were subsequently attacked by Unionist gangs and paramilitaries, aided and abetted by the sectarian state police force. Many civilians were killed as Nationalist communities were shot at and burned out of their homes and workplaces in reprisals over their political demands.

The Unionist-dominated province of Northern Ireland brought international disgrace to the United Kingdom, and the London government was obliged to post thousands of British soldiers “to restore order”. At first, Nationalist communities welcomed the British troops when they were deployed in August 1969, believing the army to be affording protection from marauding Unionist paramilitaries and police. …more