Ireland's OWN: History

January 30th 1972 in Derry witnessed a premeditated slaughter of peaceful civilian demonstrators at the hands of the British Army's First Parachute Regiment. When the imperialist guns fell silent, thirteen marchers lay dead or dying, while seventeen others were seriously wounded. The British media told an unsuspecting world that their troopers had been fired upon, yet as the coffin lids were being nailed down amid a nation stopped by general strike and stunned by grief, not one British solder had been treated for any injury received on that date.

Slowly the world began to realise that the truth will always out. That something very different from the version beamed across the globe by British radio and television transmitters, or the crude versions adopted by the lie machines of Fleet Street, had occurred on that historic date in the working class area known as the Bogside. Unlike our dead, the truth could not be buried under the clay, but rather, like the blossoms on their graves, it burst forth from the soil to expose its reality to the full view of civilised humanity in the four corners of the earth.

The British, under the guise of an "impartial jury" led by a former high-ranking imperialist army officer, and current Territorial Army officer, Lord Widgery, vainly endeavoured to pluck the flower of truth by all manner of distortion, omission and calumny. At all costs the British establishment and its lackeys within this artificial statelet, conscious of an international audience, adopted the stance of Pontius Pilate. As with this biblical figure, history will condemn in spite of public ablution.

The sun shown that day as over 25,000 peaceful demonstrators marched under the civil rights banner to protest against the arrests, torture and imprisonment of suspected opponents of the Stormont junta, without so much as a charge or a trial. This was the only that working class people could express their abhorrence of government policy. The streets became their parliament, and their political desires were expressed in chants, the carrying of placards, or the singing of "We Shall Overcome". The power of the masses, which existed between kerbstones of our streets and the ditches of our country roads, was a force that the British government was determined to crush. Like on so many other occasions, the British ruling elite could only respond to passive resistance on the part of a colonised people by us of brutal state terror in the form of its standing army. On January 30th 1972, the city of Derry witnessed the latest organised massacre in the long and bloody history of the British Empire, which in previous times committed similar atrocities in Asia, Africa, the Americas, the sub-continent of India, and many other lands which were colonised, and over which its Butcher's Apron once triumphantly flew.

Before Widgery and the world, two sets of witnesses appeared. On the one hand, the "soldiers" who had performed this dastardly deed, every one conflicting every other soldier's account. On the other, civilian witnesses who told a different story. There were unanimous and quite explicit that the army opened fire without provocation.

*Edinburgh: AK Press. April 1999. pp 97-98.