When is a justice campaign over? Transitional justice, ‘overing’ and Bloody Sunday

This article explores the political, strategic and emotional issue of victim groups deciding to continue or discontinue central components of a justice campaign in the aftermath of receiving ‘truth’. Drawing on in-depth interviews, the article focuses on relatives and other stakeholders’ varying positions on (dis)continuing the annual Bloody Sunday commemoration march after the publication of the Report of the Bloody Sunday Inquiry and the UK Prime Minister’s apology for the massacre. I demonstrate that there has emerged an, at times, acrimonious schism between those who feel the apology and report were sufficient to stop the march and those who believe them to be insufficient. Thus, while much of the literature on political apology evaluates its effects on the dyadic relationship between victim and perpetrator, this article develops Sara Ahmed’s concept of ‘overing’ to demonstrate that the ostensible moment of truth can create unanticipated and deleterious intra-victim tensions. The article concludes by suggesting practical measures emerging from the findings that other justice campaigns may consider.

Legal Culture on Justice and Truth: The Tribunals of Inquiry about Bloody Sunday

Almost 50 years ago, in the events that happened during the so-called Bloody Sunday (Derry 1972, 30th January), 13 Catholic civilians were killed because of the actions of the British army during a civil rights march against internment without trial in Northern Ireland. Other 13 civilians were injured. While the circumstances were unclear, these civilians were considered to be terrorists, which seemed to justify the gunfire. The findings on Bloody Sunday from two Tribunals of Inquiry (1972 and 1998-2010), and the reactions that their resulting reports raised are an excellent example of cultural impregnation in law. In this regard, it is possible to find a general notion of justice as truth. Guaranteeing such notion (or, at least, the willingness to ensure it) seemed to facilitate the peace process in Northern Ireland. Under the light of these events, the following pages aim to analyse how that legal culture of justice as truth is displayed in the two Bloody Sunday Tribunals of Inquiry as well as its contribution to the contestation of the British legal system or its legitimacy. This paper starts by reviewing previous studies about the conceptual framework of the analysis — it examines the concept of “legal culture” and the understanding of justice as truth, as well as the definition of Tribunal of Inquiry. Next, it argues cultural perceptions regarding Bloody Sunday Inquiries. The conclusions exposed reveal that the legal culture of justice as truth is also embodied in legalism and colonialism.

Between Petersburg and Paris, 1905–11

This chapter narrates Natalia Ilyinichna Tcherniak's time in St. Petersburg with her mother, Polina Osipovna and her lover Kolya after spending the summer with her father, Ilya Evseevich Tcherniak. It describes Natalia's stay in an apartment at No. 8 Ulitsa Bolshaya Grebietskaya in an up-and-coming new neighbourhood on the Petrograd Side. It also reviews Polina and Kolya's return to Russia during a time of increased political unrest that was triggered in January 1905 by the Bloody Sunday incident. The chapter recounts Natalia's annual visits to her father in Paris after her Uncle Yasha's association with the Fonarny raid. It also talks about how Ilya rebuilt his life in Paris and acquired a new personal life after marrying Vera Sheremetievskaya.

Aftermath

This chapter highlights the national outpouring of grief and anger over the death of Heather Heyer. It discloses how Heyer's ashes were buried in a secret location in order to protect the grave from desecration by neo-Nazis. It also mentions the placement of Heather Heyer's name on a memorial wall at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama that honors martyrs of the civil rights movement. The chapter recalls Martin Luther King Jr. and his civil rights organization that staged demonstrations in Alabama and Jimmy Lee Jackson, an African American participant in the protest demonstrations, who was fatally shot by a white Alabama state trooper. It reviews the infamous “Bloody Sunday” on March 7, 1965 that was stimulated by Jackson's shooting.

Flesh and Blood

Chapter 5 explores how people used photographs to make sense of violence. From the late 1960s, there is a notable increase in the number of people going out onto the streets with newer, faster, lightweight cameras, to record crime and injustice. In so doing, they attempted to provide those without power with a new way of holding authority to account. However, the impact of their photographs was not always as they anticipated. The central focus of this chapter is on the collection and use of images at the Scarman Tribunal, which investigated the disturbances of the summer of 1969, and the Widgery Tribunal, which sought to ascertain the sequence of events surrounding Bloody Sunday. Through close readings of how photographs were used at these two tribunals, the chapter explores how the existence of certain photographs served to anchor discussions of trajectories of violence around certain places and moments, illustrates how photographs taken for publication in newspapers were reread as evidential documents, and indicates the range of plausible truths each photograph was understood to provide. Photographers, who saw themselves and their medium as working to tell stories of injustice, instead found that their images were read to reinforce the actions the state and security forces had already taken.

The KGB and Ireland

A potential espionage threat to Britain from Dublin-based Soviet agents arose as the establishment of Irish-Soviet relations became a probability. This chapter examines perceptions of the communist-influenced Official republican movement as the Troubles escalated in 1971-2, with officials expressing fears for the stability of the Dublin government – the ‘Irish Cuba’. British and American officials used a Cold War prism here. The Russians could be expected to exploit the northern crisis, the American ambassador warned, using the Official movement as their ‘natural vehicle’. Following Bloody Sunday, when British paratroopers killed thirteen unarmed civilians, the British prime minister, Ted Heath, warned Dublin that the Soviets would cause as much trouble as they could, using the Official IRA as a proxy. The Irish revolutionary left too used a Cold War lens when opposing Ireland’s membership of the European Economic Community (EEC): it would lock Ireland into a NATO-dominated bloc.