British troops were psyched up on Bloody Sunday with the belief that the Bogside was swarming with heavily-armed IRA men, writes DICK GROGANin Derry
WHATEVER LORD Saville sets out in his mammoth report today, he is unlikely to deal adequately with one still pertinent issue – the bald fact that disasters like the Bloody Sunday killings can always happen when the unwritten rules observed in urban civil conflict are forgotten or flouted.
This unspoken and ever-shifting code is known only to the combatant parties themselves and those media observers in regular and close attendance. In Northern Ireland, from the early days of the Troubles, you had to learn that code fast in order to function and survive.
From 1969 on, street disturbances developed and intensified in identifiable stages. Despite the apparent mayhem, each stage was moderated and contained by understood protocols. They kept the body count low and the savagery within more-or-less acceptable limits.
Short of the ultimate descent into remorseless guerrilla warfare – when all bets were off and most rules of engagement went out the window – these shadowy protocols generally enabled the press, in particular, to know where they stood. More precisely, they helped you decide where you could stand.
In the Saville inquiry hearings it was obvious that the panoply of pinstripe-suited lawyers found it impossible to grasp the openness and ease of contacts at every level in, say, the “no go” area of Derry’s Bogside. Any journalist only had to make a few casual inquiries to find himself ushered into the presence of an IRA active service officer.
There, the etiquette was: no names, no pack drill, just “sit down over there beside the consignment of new carbines and tell us what you want to know”. Later on, of course, the naivete was swept away. The introduction of substantial cash and blackmail ushered in a “dirty war”, and a new world of informers and “spooks”, which made a press card as dubious in republican areas as an Irish passport might be in a Hamas stronghold today.
In the theatre of the streets the stage directions were simple at first. A line of baton-wielding police or soldiers with plexiglass shields and helmets faced a motley group of stone-throwing youths, and – in nationalist areas at least – an observer could stand behind the rioters and expect nothing more inconvenient than a lungful of choking CS gas.
Then the rubber bullet guns arrived and the ground rules changed perforce. The press made their excuses and moved behind the security force lines, now keeping a weather eye for the odd over-thrown half-brick.
Now the IRA got more guns and sniping became frequent. The thin line of riot-control troops placed a single rifleman at each end to scan the neighbouring houses for gunmen. The writing press kept its hands out of its pockets and, ideally, clutched a large notebook very prominently – offering up silent thanks that it was not called upon to be a photographer carrying long lenses.
Fast-forward to Derry in January 1972; a street fighter’s paradise with alleyways and terraces of old buildings, many derelict or semi-derelict, and multiple patches of rubble-strewn waste ground.
The protocols of confrontation had mutated further. The petrol bomb became less ubiquitous on the rioters’ side, for it could now – and sometimes did – get you shot, even if you were a pre-teen. The irritant of choice became the blast bomb, contained in a small flat tin and slid underneath a passing armoured troop carrier for shock effect.
The resident battalion, the Eighth Infantry Brigade, were jittery and content to patrol only the fringes of the “no go” areas, but in general – and with occasional highly controversial exceptions – the Yellow Card rules of engagement were observed: no soldier could open fire on his own initiative unless he believed his own or other lives were threatened.
Nonetheless both sides, the IRA and the army, were taking casualties – perhaps two or three a month – and tension was ratcheted up by the introduction of internment without trial.
At high level behind the scenes, as we now know, army strategists were considering a new policy of shooting ringleaders among the so-called Derry Young Hooligans – “yobbos” in the idiom of army radio operators.
City centre business owners were pressing for more drastic measures to protect their premises, and the unionist establishment constantly demanded forceful military action to eliminate the insult they perceived in the continuing existence of “Free Derry”.
On the Sunday of the planned mass civil rights march to protest against internment, as coaches brought contingents of civilians in festive mood from all parts of Northern Ireland, nobody seemed to have an inkling that a reckless – not to say irresponsible and even lunatic – military operation had been planned and sanctioned at the highest political level.
Elements of the crack combat unit of the army, the First Battalion of the Parachute Regiment, had been drafted in with operational instructions for an incursion into the “no go” area at the very time civilian crowds would be starting a mass meeting.
The troops, pumped with testosterone, were psyched up with the belief that the Bogside was swarming with heavily armed IRA men, and it has emerged that their officers exhorted them that they should “get some kills” when they surged into the “no go” area on what was described as a “scoop up” operation to arrest rioters.
These units were held in readiness out of sight behind the army barriers. When they were let loose – and the Saville report must address why – the immediate and terrible fusillade of high-velocity fire left 27 bleeding bodies, 13 dead and 14 injured, on the streets in the space of 20 minutes.
The press, for once, were caught all over the place – some at the mass meeting, others behind the army lines, still others scattered throughout the Bogside. The rules of low-intensity engagement had been thrown to the winds and a new ethic soon supplanted the civil rights hopes for reforms through passive resistance and peaceful protest.
From then on, and for almost 30 years, it would be an era of remorseless and pitiless conflict, with horror piled upon horror, and atrocity succeeding atrocity.
With the sweeping aside of all previous protocols for the management of civil dissent and protest within the state, a lasting heritage of implacable disaffection was born.
Why and how this happened, and what – if anything – has been learned from it, is at least as important a question for the inquiry to answer as the actual detail of which soldier shot whom.