The Saville report on Bloody Sunday: Another act of imperial penitence

The finding by the Saville inquiry that British troops were guilty of the massacre of 14 unarmed civil rights activists in January 1972 in Londonderry, Northern Ireland has been met with the usual acts of ritual penitence by the British government. Such rites of contrition seek to assuage public opinion that lessons have been learnt and that there will be no repeat of the latest horror - that is, until the next imperial atrocity comes to light.

Jeremy Seabrook

AT a cost of almost œ200 million, and after 12 years of inquiry, the truth about Bloody Sunday comes at a high price; the more so, since what  happened on 30 January 1972 in Londonderry has always been an open secret (see box on p. 31). The publication of Lord Saville's report, and the apology in the Commons by David Cameron were indeed significant events; but what we witnessed was familiar - yet another epic exercise in the management of repentance; an admission that 'we' got it wrong. The Saville inquiry represents a pledge that such a tragedy, error or misjudgment will never again occur. 

Publication of the Saville report brought jubilation to the families of the dead, many of whom had been teenagers when they were shot. The bereaved were, for the most part, magnanimous and disinclined to pursue individual soldiers; showing a generosity of spirit quite different from that exhibited by the Widgery Tribunal, whose version of events stood as solemn truth for 38 years. It reported within weeks of the bloodiest massacre of British civilians by the army since it opened fire on a demonstration of workers in St Peter's Fields in Manchester in 1817. In 1972, Widgery's remit had been 'to conduct a fact-finding exercise'. It 'was not concerned with making moral judgments; its task was to try to form an objective view of the events and the sequence in which they occurred, so that those who were concerned to form judgments would have a firm basis to reach their conclusions'.

Conclusions already provided by that ostensibly impartial exercise: 'There would have been no deaths, if those who organised the illegal march had not thereby created a highly dangerous situation in which a clash between demonstrators and the security forces was almost inevitable.' That this event and its misrepresentation led to an intensification of violence over the following decades lay at the heart of Tony Blair's recognition that lordly conclusions and lofty judgments must sometimes be set aside in the interests of justice; and this was his motive for Saville, which would amend the approved version of history as part of the Good Friday agreement. 

The clarity of Cameron's apology and the relief of relatives who had lived for almost four decades, not only with grief but also with the stigma that their children, brothers and husbands had been culpable, armed rioters, confirm that the British government regularly resorts, with the passage of time, to rituals of penitence. Nothing ever happens, no matter how shocking or calamitous, that cannot sooner or later be turned into an object-lesson, a source of chastening instruction and humility.

'Distance-contrition' is something of a speciality in Britain; and selective apologies for past wrongs and evils are a stock-in-trade. Cameron, it was pointed out, was five years old at the time of the shootings, and therefore blamelessly untainted by events. The time-lapse is important: there must always be someone securely dead who can be blamed in such exercises; in this instance, Lt Col Derek Wilford, who, apparently without the knowledge of his superiors, sent in the paratroopers to arrest 'rioters', before the first shot - probably by a soldier firing over the heads of the crowd - was fired. This led troops to believe they were under fire, and they turned their weapons on the civil rights marchers, gunning down some who had gone to help the injured or were fleeing or, in one case, was lying, already mortally wounded, on the pavement.

Imperial killings

That these events took place on 'British soil' - contested, of course, by many protesters at the time - was a late example of Britain practising at home what it had done for centuries, not only in Ireland, but in most countries then under its imperial jurisdiction. As for the massacres, shootings and elimination of lesser beings in foreign lands, if any inquiry was ever set up, it was usually perfunctory, and undertaken in order to blame the victims or, if the evidence was overwhelming, to scapegoat a solitary individual; the recurring metaphor of the 'bad apple' has proved serviceable in this context.

Among the toll of unrepentant imperial killings, we might remember the slaughter of 22 villagers under the 'Emergency' in Kenya at Chuka village in 1953; the Hola Camp massacre of 1959, when 11 detainees were bludgeoned to death and scores injured by guards. The British hanged more than a thousand Kikuyus in Kenya before the imperial retreat, detained more than 150,000 and killed over 12,000. In December 1948, 24 Chinese rubber-tappers were killed by troops at Batang Kali in Malaya. Perfunctory inquiries failed to determine whether these were revenge killings for the death of British soldiers by 'Communist terrorists' or whether it was a pre-planned operation. The British in Malaya also forcibly resettled hundreds of thousands of people, bombed villages, interned thousands and killed an unknown number of civilians. One of the most notorious events in British imperial history was the massacre of almost 400 unarmed civilians at Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, India in 1919.This was not an event which, as Churchill declared, 'stood in singular and sinister isolation', for it was equalled by the Qissa Khawani bazaar shootings in Peshawar in 1930, where several hundred peaceful, non-violent Pashtun supporters of Ghaffar Khan were slain.

But we don't do contrition abroad. In 1997, the Queen took off her shoes and paid 30 seconds of homage to the victims of Jallianwala Bagh. She did not apologise. Then-Foreign Secretary Jack Straw spoke in 2005 of his 'pain' at the event. Tony Blair, on the eve of the 200th anniversary of abolition of the slave trade, could only express his 'deep sorrow' at such a blemish on our past. And of course,  there was no show of remorse for the famines in India which, the scholar Mike Davis estimates, killed between 12 and 33 million people between 1876 and 1908; while the Bengal famine of 1943, which left two million dead, followed Churchill's refusal to divert shipping to Calcutta, reportedly under the racist conviction that Bengalis would soon replenish themselves.

On the other hand, Blair did apologise on the 150th anniversary of the Irish potato famine; but not for the doctrines of laissez-faire which contributed so significantly to starvation. These imperial misadventures have been the object of considerable revision in recent years. Not only was laissez-faire revived by the exultant formulators of the Washington Consensus, but in the protective shadow of later US imperial excursions, Britain has sought, with the help of historians like Niall Ferguson and Andrew Roberts, to rehabilitate some of its own imagined past glories. In 2005, Gordon Brown said 'the days of Britain having to apologise for its colonial history are over.'

But in the domestic - or semi-domestic - arena, atonement is unstinting. There is, at least in these islands, if not in the wider world, no official blunder, no act of violence that cannot transcend itself and be enlisted in the interests of perpetual improvement and progress. It sometimes seems that great wrongs are even welcomed for the occasion they offer for remorse and soul-searching.

Authentication

There is another curious element in this laborious document, and that is the question of how truths which are obvious to everybody cannot be acknowledged until they have been authenticated by an amorphous Authority, significant personages, usually judges or titled luminaries, whose certification is required before anything can be formally known. Many journalists who were in Londonderry in January 1972 were as familiar as the bereaved families with the innocence of the dead; but this remained, as it were, under embargo, until the superseded wisdom of Widgery had been re-assayed and re-tested by a later representative of the ruling elite of Britain. This is by no means confined to such melancholy events as those which absorbed so much of Lord Saville's time (Lord Saville was chosen by Tony Blair because of his efficiency and, perhaps surprisingly, youth: he was 62 in 1998). The Daily Mail pointed out that the inquiry enriched the most highly-paid QCs and solicitors to the tune of œ100 million. Much of life in Britain is like this: common knowledge is irrelevant; only that counts which has passed the scrutiny of Those who Matter; which is why what was generally known was outlawed, and the now-disgraced report of Lord Widgery substituted for it.

Not that even this belated recognition of what everyone knows went uncontested. Max Hastings in the Daily Mail said, 'To those of us who were there, in battered and riot-torn Derry on that chilly Sunday afternoon in January 1972, the findings seem as remote from the 21st century as an archaeologist's gleanings from an Egyptian tomb.' No doubt the writer did not suffer the loss of a son or brother on that day he is now anxious to consign to the mists of history, together with the other 3,500 deaths during what is euphemistically called the 'Troubles', which are referred to as though these were some existential visitation.

Public recognition of error takes place in Britain only long after the event, following extensive cover-ups, concealment and denial, when assurances have been given and the word of honour of the dishonourable accepted. Thus it becomes possible to feign astonishment that things had for so long gone 'unnoticed'; because by that time, those responsible have fled the scene, received their recognition, honours, memorial services and fulsome obituaries.

Contrition becomes another aspect of complacency. We can rest assured. Lessons have been learned. Early warning systems are in place; alarm bells have been rung and wake-up calls have summoned Authority from its slumberous self-satisfaction and alerted it into an unwinking watchfulness.

These penitents of governance, administration or economics flagellate themselves with feathery scourges. They fall on cardboard swords and use replica pistols to purge their shallow shame; and the virtuous cry 'Never again' receives a constant echo 'Semper eadem'.               

Jeremy Seabrook is a freelance journalist based in the UK.

*Third World Resurgence No. 237, May 2010, pp 29-31