Bloody Sunday
On January 30, 1972 — immediately dubbed Bloody Sunday — soldiers of the 1st Battalion Parachute Regiment (1 Para) opened fire on a crowd of unarmed civil rights marchers and bystanders in the Bogside area of Derry, Northern Ireland. The march had been organized by NICRA to protest internment without trial, introduced in August 1971. Approximately 10,000 to 15,000 people participated. After the march was redirected away from the city center by British Army barricades, soldiers moved into the Bogside in force. In under 30 minutes, paratroopers fired 108 rounds. Thirteen people were killed outright; a fourteenth, John Johnston, died of his wounds four months later. All were civilians. Many were shot in the back while fleeing. Among the dead were teenagers. No soldier fired at was hit; no soldier was injured by gunfire. The official British Army position at the time claimed soldiers had responded to attacks by IRA snipers and nail bombers — a claim witnesses, journalists, and participants uniformly denied. Within days, the Widgery Tribunal — a hastily convened official inquiry — largely exonerated the soldiers, accepting Army accounts and dismissing eyewitness testimony. The report was condemned by nationalists as a whitewash and inflicted lasting damage on Catholic trust in British institutions. In Dublin, a crowd of 30,000 marched to the British Embassy, which was subsequently burned to the ground. IRA recruitment surged dramatically in the weeks following; Bloody Sunday is widely credited with generating a generation of volunteers and hardening republican opinion against any political solution. The Saville Inquiry, announced in 1998 and reporting in June 2010 after 12 years and testimony from over 900 witnesses, reached the opposite conclusion from Widgery: all those killed were unarmed, none posed any threat, and the shootings were unjustifiable. On June 15, 2010, Prime Minister David Cameron delivered a formal apology in the House of Commons, calling the events 'unjustified and unjustifiable' — the first time a British government acknowledged state culpability for the killings. No soldiers have been successfully prosecuted.
- Year: 1972 CE
- Category: Military
