Bloody Sunday in Derry, 30 January 1972

This case is in an index otherwise about wars because it answers a question the others cannot. What happens when a state does eventually investigate itself properly, with full powers, unlimited time and no interest in protecting the original account? The answer turns out to be: the truth, and almost nothing else.

What happened

On 30 January 1972, a civil rights march against internment without trial took place in Derry, Northern Ireland. Soldiers of a British parachute regiment were deployed to make arrests.

They opened fire on the crowd, in daylight, in front of thousands of witnesses and several press photographers — conditions almost unheard of among the cases in this index. Twenty-six unarmed civilians were shot. Thirteen died that day, and a fourteenth died later from his injuries. Several were shot while fleeing, and some while going to the aid of people already hit.

The people who went to help

Among the dead were men who had gone forward to assist the wounded, in at least one case while waving a white handkerchief. The rule protecting them is the one set out in the glossary. That detail places this case alongside the others in this archive concerned with what happens to people who come to help.

The first inquiry

A tribunal was set up almost immediately and reported within about eleven weeks. It largely accepted the soldiers' accounts: that they had been fired on first and had returned fire at identified gunmen and bomb-throwers.

It was rejected at once by the families and by most of the population it concerned, and it stood as the official account for thirty-eight years.

The Saville Inquiry

It found that none of those killed had been armed, that no warning had been given before soldiers opened fire, that some victims were shot while fleeing or helping the wounded, and that soldiers had given knowingly false accounts to justify the shooting.

The British Prime Minister apologised in Parliament on the day it was published.

What a real inquiry requires

Twelve years, hundreds of millions of pounds, statutory powers to compel testimony, and a political decision at the highest level to allow it. That is the price of overturning one bad official account, and it explains why the other cases in this index never got one.

The prosecution

Findings are not charges. After Saville, one former soldier was charged with murder. The case collapsed on the admissibility of decades-old evidence, and no one has been convicted of any of the fourteen deaths.

Which category this belongs in

Deliberate, on the findings of the state's own inquiry. Saville concluded the soldiers fired without justification at people who posed no threat, and that some then lied about it.

It is not collateral damage in any sense. It is included in this index as the benchmark case: the one where a state eventually did the work properly, so the other outcomes cannot be explained away as the evidence being unobtainable.

Why the second inquiry happened at all

Nothing about the evidence changed between 1972 and 1998. What changed was the politics.

The Saville Inquiry was established during the negotiations that led to the Good Friday Agreement, at a point when addressing the original tribunal had become part of the price of a settlement. Families had campaigned continuously for a quarter of a century before that, and the campaign alone had not been enough.

That is the uncomfortable lesson buried in this case. A proper investigation into state killing happened because it became politically necessary, not because the case for it grew stronger. The families were right in 1972 and right for every one of the thirty-eight years that followed, and being right was not what produced the inquiry.

What Bloody Sunday proves about every other case here

That the obstacle is not usually the facts. Thirty-eight years after the event, with witnesses aged and memories contested, an inquiry with real powers still established what happened in detail and overturned the official version completely.

Which means that when an inquiry into Kunduz or Haditha or the 2007 Baghdad airstrike produces a thinner answer, the reason is not that the truth was unavailable. It is that nobody with the power to compel it was asked to look. That is a choice, and it is made every time.