First Love Ulster, now the March for Truth. More one-sided commemoration and marshalling of the dead for political advantage, writes Susan McKay.
Two years ago, unionists paraded their suffering at the hands of the IRA in Dublin, and pushed a version of the Troubles which saw a peaceful and just Protestant community mercilessly slaughtered by republican terrorists in pursuit of a united Ireland. Now Sinn Féin is playing a similarly cynical game with victims of the British security forces and their loyalist paramilitary allies.
Announcing tomorrow's march and the rally at Belfast's city hall, which he will address, Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams appealed to people to wear black ribbons.
This is to show solidarity with the families of victims and "as an expression of support for the campaign for truth".
But what is the campaign for truth? Adams, who says he was never in the IRA, referred to the fact that some of the victims' groups taking part in the march and rally are calling for "an international-based, independent truth commission". He adds that this is something that Sinn Féin "will look carefully at". But why the caution? Perhaps because although Sinn Féin needs to reassure the victims from its own community that it hasn't left them behind, the truth is, it doesn't want a truth commission any more than the British government does.
Remember the on-the-runs legislation a few years ago? Sinn Féin signed up for that to get its exiles back, and then had to abandon it when victims' groups and the SDLP pointed out that this was a law that would make it impossible to pursue the truth about collusion. The party is not going to make that mistake again.
All the signs are that the British and Irish governments both take the shabby view that the new powersharing regime at Stormont is best protected by leaving the past alone for the foreseeable future.
Sinn Féin can safely seem to support calls for a commission, confident it isn't going to happen.
The DUP blatantly divides victims into the innocent and the guilty - victims of the IRA are the innocent. Sinn Féin claims it does not support the idea of a "hierarchy of victims". However, there are truths it refuses to face about victims of the IRA, not least in relation to "tit-for-tat" killings.
The British army shot dead 13 innocent civilians on the streets of Derry on Bloody Sunday in January 1972, then denied any wrongdoing. Six months later, IRA bombers killed innocent civilians on the streets of the Derry village of Claudy, then denied it.
The British colluded with loyalists in a murder campaign against innocent Catholics in south Armagh in the mid-1970s and still deny their role. The IRA retaliated with the Kingsmills massacre of innocent Protestant workmen. It never admitted responsibility.
Cruelty was met with cruelty, war crime with war crime. The British government has done everything in its power to cover up the appalling record of its security forces in the North. Despite these efforts, we now know that throughout the Troubles, soldiers and police killed with impunity, and used loyalist paramilitary gangs as proxies to murder on behalf of the state. Killers, informers and agents were protected all the way through the justice system, even if innocent people had to be sacrificed in the process. Most of the victims were Catholics. In the interests of defeating the IRA, nothing was taboo.
We know parts of this murky history largely because of the determination of the families of those victims to find out the truth and, in many cases, to clear the names of their loved ones. Groups like Relatives for Justice, British and Irish Rights Watch and the Pat Finucane Centre do brilliant, dedicated and underfunded work, and have succeeded in drawing international attention to the issues. Sinn Féin has played its part, too, while unionists have rubbished what they continue to call republican propaganda.
Police Ombudsman Nuala O'Loan has also been a formidable champion of the truth, refusing to be deflected by obstacles the Northern Ireland Office and the police put in her way. Mr Justice Barron, Judge Peter Cory, Sir John Stevens, John Stalker and successive coroners are among those whose efforts to find out the truth about collusion and state killings have been thwarted.
Lord Saville was faced with collective amnesia from the military at the Bloody Sunday tribunal. Many of those who will march tomorrow have been grievously hurt. Their loved ones have been killed, written off as terrorists, and forgotten by all but their families. They are justifiably angry that victims of the IRA have got more public sympathy and media attention than victims of the British state which, after all, claimed them as its citizens and had a duty to protect them.
However, Love Ulster was divisive and so is this March for Truth.
For a start, it is in memory of the 10 republicans who died on hunger strike in 1981, so to take part is to show solidarity with the IRA as well as with the victims of the British forces. Black armbands have a history. Those campaigning to force Britain to tell the truth on its vicious part in the Northern violence need all the support they can get.
This is a just cause, and Sinn Féin's appropriation of it serves it badly.