Are British making same mistakes with Muslims they made with Irish?

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Gareth Peirce

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She believes no similar allies for the Muslim community are evident today, capable of pushing and pulling the British Government publicly or privately into seeing sense.

This summer the families of those killed in Bloody Sunday received the findings of the Saville Report.

“Saville’s conclusions are that one platoon of the Parachute Regiment and one commander bear responsibility and that the chain of command above them could not have foreseen the events of the day,” Peirce says. “There is no finding on the inquiry’s report either that foresight existed or could have prevented the bloody events of the day, which even at the time were immediately recognised by Irish men and women as the actions not of a few rogue soldiers but as actions authorities at the highest level.

“If so substantial an inquiry now could arrive at conclusions that allowed David Cameron to say to the House of Commons that the buck stops with foot soldiers, has the British state in fact owned up to the whole truth?,” she adds. “And how does the precedent set by the Saville Inquiry inform us so important as the second, announced only this summer, into torture? There is nothing in David Cameron’s announcement that guarantees that any of it will be heard in public.”

Peirce argues that the public has never been told what actually happened to lead to the conviction of al-Megrahi.

“Many of the families of those who died when Pan Am 103 exploded over Lockerbie in 1988 have urged for almost as long as the Bloody Sunday families, that there be a searching inquiry into what happened,” she says. “And not one focused instead on the decision, a proper one, and entirely customary on Britain, to release a terminally ill person from prison.”

She adds: “Another dying man in a British prison years before, Giuseppe Conlon, wrongly convinced on the evidence of the same discredited scientists who provided the forensic case against al-Megrahi, was forced to wait for such a decision until the day of his death, when the home secretary, fearful of a political backlash, agreed too late to his release on humanitarian grounds. But the desire for vengeance remained in the air.”

Peirce is solid in her convictions. “There will always be a hunger by a bereaved family and a need by society in general,” she says finally, “ to have an adequate searching enquiry.”  

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