I'm in Derry, Northern Ireland (or the North of Ireland, depending on who you ask.)
Today I spent most of the day hanging around the Bogside, the working-class neighborhood that was the center of Derry's Civil Rights movement and the site of the Bloody Sunday massacre. Since I was still getting my bearings yesterday, I didn't realize it was basically around the corner from where I was staying (although everything is kind of around the corner from everything else here--it's a small place.)
There's a small museum with artifacts from the Civil Rights era, directly across from a spot where several people were shot on Bloody Sunday (my tour guide describes how soldiers flanked the march and took aim at the fleeing crowd.) The man who runs the museum is the brother of one of the martyrs, Michael Kelly, murdered at age 17.
Uniquely chilling among the museum's small collection is the raw audio recording taken by a journalist on Bloody Sunday, which plays in a continuous loop throughout the small space. Sound has an unmatched ability to bring you into the immediacy of a moment. I listened to nearly the whole thing, lingering long after I'd read all the plaques on the walls. You can hear the day begin with jubilation, chants, speeches, songs, the joy of mass resistance. Somewhere along the line, there is a transitional moment, when it's clear to those on tape that something is kicking off but the full horror of the day is not yet apparent. Voices take on an eerie, detached calm--interspersed with hacking tear-gas coughing--that I recognize from my own thankfully far less lethal confrontations with police. Go here, move there, get down. Are you all right? Can you see what's going on? And then the screams begin and all dissolves into terror, rage and grief; audible shock from people who are not unused to political violence; a mother of four being talked down from running out into the streets to extract revenge (with her bare hands?) in between instructions to her children to stay away from the windows or they'll shoot you.
I wonder what affect it has on Mr. Kelly, listening to this day on continuous repeat every day. He seems used to it.
As in many places where there have been sustained periods of oppression, there are former political prisoners who now give tours to tourists. My guide, who was seven years old on Bloody Sunday, at age seventeen was given a 14-year prison sentence for suspected membership in the IRA. He served 7 years before being released. As a teenager he was arrested, he says, "14 or 15 times," held for a week of interrogation before being released. Every single time they arrested him at home, the soldiers broke down the front door, because they could. It was only years later that he found out his mum had also been active in the IRA while raising nine children. Neither one of them knew of the other's involvement at the time.
He gives me a tour of the sundry murals and monuments, and other landmarks less obvious. I wonder what it's like, walking around every day through the markers of battles and massacres in which your community was intimately involved. I suppose it is like this in every conflict/post-conflict zone. This is the street where I was searched. This is the corner where we threw rocks. This is the car park where there, against that fence, unarmed people were shot while fleeing. This is that intersection, now a benign traffic circle, where for three days and two nights during the Battle of the Bogside, the rooftop of the Rossville Flats delivered a non-stop barrage of rocks and Molotov cocktails, defending the barricades that kept the police out, a people's version of the cannons protruding from the fort the settlers built on the hill above the neighborhood.
From settlement patterns and enforced residential segregation to house raids, internment (which we would today call administrative detention) and hunger strikers, to tear gas, "rubber bullets" the size of Red Bull cans and rock-throwing teenagers, there are many, many similarities to Palestine. It's no coincidence that the Palestinian flag flies over the Bogside along with the Irish and several others from oppressed nations. In this context it's quite interesting to see a peace process that has contained some actual peace and not just process, and a divided city trying, slowly, to put itself back together again. But that's the subject of another post.
Today I spent most of the day hanging around the Bogside, the working-class neighborhood that was the center of Derry's Civil Rights movement and the site of the Bloody Sunday massacre. Since I was still getting my bearings yesterday, I didn't realize it was basically around the corner from where I was staying (although everything is kind of around the corner from everything else here--it's a small place.)
There's a small museum with artifacts from the Civil Rights era, directly across from a spot where several people were shot on Bloody Sunday (my tour guide describes how soldiers flanked the march and took aim at the fleeing crowd.) The man who runs the museum is the brother of one of the martyrs, Michael Kelly, murdered at age 17.
Uniquely chilling among the museum's small collection is the raw audio recording taken by a journalist on Bloody Sunday, which plays in a continuous loop throughout the small space. Sound has an unmatched ability to bring you into the immediacy of a moment. I listened to nearly the whole thing, lingering long after I'd read all the plaques on the walls. You can hear the day begin with jubilation, chants, speeches, songs, the joy of mass resistance. Somewhere along the line, there is a transitional moment, when it's clear to those on tape that something is kicking off but the full horror of the day is not yet apparent. Voices take on an eerie, detached calm--interspersed with hacking tear-gas coughing--that I recognize from my own thankfully far less lethal confrontations with police. Go here, move there, get down. Are you all right? Can you see what's going on? And then the screams begin and all dissolves into terror, rage and grief; audible shock from people who are not unused to political violence; a mother of four being talked down from running out into the streets to extract revenge (with her bare hands?) in between instructions to her children to stay away from the windows or they'll shoot you.
I wonder what affect it has on Mr. Kelly, listening to this day on continuous repeat every day. He seems used to it.
As in many places where there have been sustained periods of oppression, there are former political prisoners who now give tours to tourists. My guide, who was seven years old on Bloody Sunday, at age seventeen was given a 14-year prison sentence for suspected membership in the IRA. He served 7 years before being released. As a teenager he was arrested, he says, "14 or 15 times," held for a week of interrogation before being released. Every single time they arrested him at home, the soldiers broke down the front door, because they could. It was only years later that he found out his mum had also been active in the IRA while raising nine children. Neither one of them knew of the other's involvement at the time.
He gives me a tour of the sundry murals and monuments, and other landmarks less obvious. I wonder what it's like, walking around every day through the markers of battles and massacres in which your community was intimately involved. I suppose it is like this in every conflict/post-conflict zone. This is the street where I was searched. This is the corner where we threw rocks. This is the car park where there, against that fence, unarmed people were shot while fleeing. This is that intersection, now a benign traffic circle, where for three days and two nights during the Battle of the Bogside, the rooftop of the Rossville Flats delivered a non-stop barrage of rocks and Molotov cocktails, defending the barricades that kept the police out, a people's version of the cannons protruding from the fort the settlers built on the hill above the neighborhood.
From settlement patterns and enforced residential segregation to house raids, internment (which we would today call administrative detention) and hunger strikers, to tear gas, "rubber bullets" the size of Red Bull cans and rock-throwing teenagers, there are many, many similarities to Palestine. It's no coincidence that the Palestinian flag flies over the Bogside along with the Irish and several others from oppressed nations. In this context it's quite interesting to see a peace process that has contained some actual peace and not just process, and a divided city trying, slowly, to put itself back together again. But that's the subject of another post.
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