Here I shall outline the context of that bitter conflict within the UK and shall expand on the intricate strands and major incidents later. This context is necessary for readers from other societies who perhaps vaguely recall specific incidents but are unfamiliar with the background; but also for a new domestic generation for whom the Troubles are but diminishing history. And it is particularly important to use the distance since the end of hostilities with the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) of 1998 to stand back and emphasise the key role of the state. Why did a part of the UK slide into 30 years of strife with much suffering and destruction; why was the state seemingly impotent to halt this process and find a political solution; and, crucially, in what ways did the state itself play a dubious if not illicit role in the conflict? The criminological importance of this analysis is that it provides a case study of state crime as defined by Green and Ward (2004:2) as ‘state organisational deviance involving the violation of human rights’, and in which the British state is in the dock.

The fundamental starting point is that in its principles, values and institutions the democratic state promises legality, justice, accountability, redress for citizens, limitations to its use of force and access to power by fair means. It is precisely the blatant absence of these within a number of despotic states that sparked the current rash of rebellious insurgency in Arabic societies in North Africa and the Middle East. For decades dictatorial regimes have employed secret police, brutal incarceration, torture, execution without trial, pervasive surveillance and a constant barrage of propaganda to impose their will on the people. In early 2011, starting in Tunisia but spreading rapidly to neighbouring countries and the Middle East, mass demonstrations suddenly took to the streets demanding basic democratic rights. The initial conditioned response of such repressive regimes has been for the security forces to shoot indiscriminately at demonstrators and to use gross violence against its own citizens. Television and internet viewers have been horrified by this wanton violence as the new media afford us instant, frontline images of the carnage; and world leaders have lined up to condemn the killings by state-led forces.

Yet for many people that is effectively what happened on Sunday 30 January 1972 in Derry³ in Northern Ireland at what became known as ‘Bloody Sunday’⁴, with the British state employing illegitimate violence against its own citizens.

I shall refer to the conventional police and army units in Northern Ireland as the ‘security forces’; the intelligence units of the police and Army as the ‘intelligence agencies’; the central government’s Security Service (MI5) as the ‘Intelligence Service’. The police and Army also made use of covert, proactive units that I call ‘counter-insurgency units’ (CIUs). I shall refer to the entire control apparatus as the ‘security community’.

For this particular day, however, the two IRA movements stated that they would refrain from hostile activity. The march had originally been banned but was allowed to reach the outskirts of the city centre, where its path was blocked by barriers manned by army units to prevent it spreading into the centre. The estimate of the number of demonstrators is 10–20,000 according to the exhaustively documented Saville Report (2010), which is the essential mine of detail for this event. The Saville Inquiry dealt both with the Sunday itself and with the build up to it.⁷ It is plain that there were complex, shifting processes at the political and security levels taking place that need to be located in the context of that period. However, the conclusions of the Inquiry ring crystal clear and are indisputable.

The Army had become the primary agency for maintaining security and public order in Northern Ireland in place of the much-troubled police force, the RUC (Ellison and Smith 2000; Weitzer 1995). The Army was not seriously trained for dealing with public order disturbances, but most units had learned to adapt to this challenging situation.⁸ However, there was concern about a perceived deterioration in the security situation while the tolerance of the so-called ‘no-go’ areas, controlled by the IRA in Belfast and Derry, had not led to a diminution in violence.⁹ The iconic mural ‘You are now entering Free Derry’ was, to some, an affront to the right, and duty, of the authorities to exert control anywhere. There was consequently a meeting between the military and government in London with talk of toughening the approach to the IRA. On the 6 October 1971 at ‘Gen 47’, the Whitehall committee dealing with Northern Ireland, the Prime Minister (Edward Heath) was reported as saying, ‘the first priority was the defeat of the gunmen by military means and the inevitable political consequences must be accepted’ (Saville Report 2010:Vol. I: Ch. 8: parag. 89). The Commander of Land Forces in Northern Ireland at the time, General Ford, later testified before the Saville Inquiry of a discernable ‘change of gear’ in that period and of adopting a ‘more offensive attitude’. The military hierarchy then decided to mount a substantial arrest operation, with 300–400 arrests, in the event of disturbances. This was transmitted as an order from General Ford himself along with his choice of ‘1 Para’ (1st Battalion, Parachute Regiment) for the arrest operation. Prior to the march, then, there were plainly several factors leading towards a robust show of strength from the Army. This was known at the highest level of government, as Prime Minister Heath later acknowledged.

The newly assertive focus to the operation led to one of the most disastrous decisions taken by the security forces during the 30 years of the Troubles. This was to employ soldiers of the Parachute Regiment in the event of an arrest operation. In tough situations in conventional warfare the ‘paras’ were viewed by many including Asher (2004:155), himself once a paratrooper with service in Northern Ireland and later with the Special Air Service Regiment (SAS), as the ‘best and the bravest’. But he adds ‘in peace-time they were murder’ (emphasis in original). Indeed, he conveys this image of his first tour of duty as a paratrooper in Northern Ireland in the early 1970s:

When the march commenced on that Sunday the main body of demonstrators turned away from the barricades and followed the route to Free Derry Corner to hold a rally. But a smaller group rather predictably split off and confronted troops at what was known as ‘Aggro Corner’; this had become almost a daily ritual in Derry. Stones and missiles would be thrown by youths and the Army would respond with a mix of CS gas, water cannon, baton rounds and charges. There was a peaceful demonstration going in one area while close by there was a riot that had reached its peak; people from both events were drifting away and mingling. What changed everything was that the ‘Support Company’, comprising paratroopers, was sent in to arrest demonstrators. The plan was to wait until the riotous youths were dispersing and had separated from the main group so that soldiers could move in with snatch squads.

In fact both groups had become intertwined, which made the swoop hazardous. Eyewitnesses recalled the sudden revving of the motors of armoured personnel carriers (APCs) and when these suddenly moved across the barriers towards the demonstrators they sensed that this was unusual; it caused concern and people started to run away. But what was unprecedented was that soldiers came out of the APCs, took aim and started to fire. By now there was blind panic and people were desperately looking for cover. This manoeuvre clearly went against the paras’ instructions not to conduct a ‘running battle’ in the Bogside area of Derry. Moreover, the officer commanding the paras, Colonel Wilford, deviated from the plan and without authorisation dispatched two units instead of one into two areas. If this had been known, that the two fleeing crowds were mixed and that Wilford was sending in a second unit without permission, then quite probably this arrest operation would have been aborted. The soldiers were equipped with their high-velocity, 7.62 mm ‘SLR’ (self-loading rifle), which was the standard North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) battlefield weapon, and with other handguns.

When sent into action, ‘changing gear’ for the paras meant opening fire and killing 13 unarmed people. A fourteenth victim died later of his wounds while twelve people were wounded by gunfire. The official account was that 21 soldiers fired 108 rounds. The soldiers of 1 Para in Derry shot unarmed civilians attempting to flee; shot people trying to tend to the wounded, including a man waving a white handkerchief; killed a man who was already wounded; shot five of the wounded in the back; and several victims were shot on the ground while soldiers stood over them. Yet there was no direct threat to these soldiers: no shots were fired at them and no nail-bombs were thrown; the Saville Report is quite resolute on this.

There are, however, several convincing accounts of occasional shots being heard and of gun-men being seen during the day. PIRA activists even removed one freelancing OIRA gunman. But any shots fired were not aimed at these paratroopers and did not hit any soldiers elsewhere. In fact, some paras had opened fired from a building just before the two para units went into action while an officer unwisely fired several warning shots. The advancing soldiers had been told that weapons were present and may have become confused by the sound of gunfire; they were in open ground and exposed to potential fire from high buildings. But in what the Saville Report refers to as a ‘loss of fire discipline’ the paratroopers shot people who were unarmed, posing no risk to them, running away or who were desperately seeking cover.¹¹

Some soldiers continued to maintain vehemently at the Inquiry later that they had responded to incoming fire. This goes against the evidence, but it is possible that the soldiers came to believe that this ‘really’ was the case.¹² It is also generally recognised that there is much perceptual and auditory confusion during shootings when people see and hear things that did not happen or else did not see and hear things that did happen (Collins 2008). There is, too, considerable evidence about the unreliability of memory, especially here after a long period and with extensive media exposure. But it was evident during the Inquiry that the eyewitnesses had vivid recollections of specific events whereas the military, including senior officers, were chronically vague and suffering from memory loss. This was despite the fact that the soldiers had been offered anonymity and immunity. This reticence can be interpreted as suspect, and probably rightly so, but it could also convey that for the eyewitnesses this was an indelible, life-changing event whereas for the soldiers it was just one engagement among many. The soldiers may have initially stuck to an agreed story and became determined not to deviate from a collective version that also absolved them from blame. Several admitted that as young privates they felt intimidated by the military police questioning them and gave them the answers they thought they wanted to hear, while one said he simply signed a prepared statement. Indeed, they may eventually have come to believe in this as true and really ‘real’. Vaclav Havel has referred to this as coming to ‘live in the lie’; and before the South African Truth and Reconciliation Committee (TRC) the notorious former Minister of Police, Adrian Vlok, persistently denied knowledge of, and responsibility for, the extensive and well-documented brutality of the South African Police during his period of office (Cohen 2001:127). This echoes the denial of knowledge of war crimes by senior Nazi members and high-ranking German soldiers after the Second World War with the words, ich habe es nicht gewusst (‘I was not aware of this’). A reserve police officer who in Poland in WWII had been in a command role during the shooting of 1,100–1,600 Jewish people on a single day, claimed 25 years later that he could recall ‘absolutely nothing’ about it (Browning 2001:117). In what appears to be an extreme form of amnesia he had completely blotted the mass murder out of his memory.

The Derry coroner, however, was quite blunt about what happened on Bloody Sunday. He was a retired major of the British Army and chaired the inquests into the deaths. He stated in 1973, ‘I would say without hesitation that it was sheer, unadulterated murder. It was murder’ (Conflict Archive Internet [CAIN] 2011b). The shootings were truly appalling and went against the clear legal restrictions on the use of potentially fatal force by police and military in Northern Ireland. Yet the Director of Public Prosecutions decided not to recommend prosecutions of any soldiers involved. Indeed, prior to Bloody Sunday the security forces had killed 62 people without a single prosecution of a soldier or police officer (Rolston 2006, 2010).¹³

What gravely compounded the massacre, and exposed the duplicity of the British state, was that the Lord Chief Justice, the head of the judiciary of England and Wales no less, wrote with indecent haste what most unbiased commentators acknowledge to be a blatant whitewash. The respected journalist/historian Max Hastings has called the Widgery Report (1972) a ‘shameless cover-up’.¹⁴ This inquiry effectively cloaked the crimes of the soldiers and painted out the operation’s accountability trail among the military and political hierarchy. Moreover the Army ‘waylaid’ or destroyed evidence; the soldiers involved lied to the Inquiry about being fired on, about the victims being armed and about the presence of nail-bombs; some of them later admitted this before the Saville Inquiry (Rozenberg 2002). Reginald Maudling (Home Secretary) subsequently informed Parliament that the Army, ‘returned the fire directed at them with aimed shots and inflicted a number of casualties on those who were attacking them with firearms and nail-bombs’. The Ministry of Defence (MoD), moreover, issued a statement that must have been crafted by lawyers, maintaining the soldiers had followed the legal rules on fatal force: ‘Throughout the fighting that ensued, the Army only fired at identified targets – at attacking gunmen and bombers. At all times the soldiers obeyed their standing instructions to fire only in self-defence or in defence of others threatened’ (CAIN 2011b:6).¹⁵ Both statements from high representatives of the state were untrue: there simply were no attacking gunmen and there were no bombers.

It is clear that an eminent member of the British legal establishment – the second highest judge of the courts after the Lord Chancellor and a functionary who should epitomise impartiality – neatly covered up the massacre in the interests of his political masters. Indeed, the Prime Minister reminded hi...