Valley Morning Star · 28 June 2010

CP-2010-029

Inquiries into Bloody Sunday or Mavi Marmara

Gwynne Dyer

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Transcribed from the clipping

In the aftermath of the bloody events on the aid ship Mavi Marmara, where nine pro-Palestinian activists were killed by Israeli commandos on May 31, Israel has set up a judicial inquiry into the affair.

Since Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who chose the members of the inquiry, has already described the victims as “violent Turkish terror extremists” on a “ship of hate,” some people doubt that the investigation will be impartial.

On 15 June, the second inquiry into “Bloody Sunday” in the Northern Irish city of Derry, where 14 civil rights marchers were killed by British paratroops on 30 January, 1972, delivered its report. The first people to see it were the relatives of the victims. On the whole, they seemed satisfied. The British inquiry was chaired by Lord Saville, a former High Court judge.

Since the inquiry involved the British Army, the other two members were senior judges from New Zealand and Canada, not from Britain. And the Saville inquiry’s report was utterly damning. It said that none of the casualties had guns, and that there were “no instances where it appeared to us that soldiers either were or might have been justified in firing.”

The report also said bluntly that the soldiers had lost their self-control, “forgetting or ignoring their instructions and training, and failing to satisfy themselves that they had identified targets posing a threat of causing death or serious injury ... There was a serious and widespread loss of fire discipline.”

Neither their commanders nor the British government wanted to kill innocent people, but they were to blame for it nevertheless. Prime Minister David Cameron, disclosing the conclusions of the report to the House of Commons in London, did not pull his punches either. “You do not defend the British Army by defending the indefensible. There is no doubt.

There is nothing equivocal. There are no ambiguities. It. Was. Wrong.” And he apologized on behalf of the British state, without qualifications. If a similarly impartial tribunal inquired into the events that occurred aboard the Gaza-bound aid ship last month, it would probably come to identical conclusions.

We know enough about confrontations where none of the soldiers or police die, but lots of the demonstrators/ protesters/rioters do, to understand the psychology and the crowd dynamics of it.

How this transcription was made

Read from the scan by a machine looking at the image of the page, not by optical character recognition and not by a person. The clipping carries no masthead and no dated folio line, so the date recorded here could not be checked against anything printed on the page. Nothing on the page contradicts it.

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