Some feeling but rather light politically

Rating: 8/10 (7 November 2006)

One more film on this Bloody Sunday, will you say. Shot for television in 2001. What can we add to the plain fact of 13 people killed in cold blood by the paratroopers of Her Majesty the Queen of England without any clear order to do so ? There is no excuse for this event, absolutely no excuse. The march should not have been banned and blocked in the first place. That was a total misunderstanding of the situation. And the English had never had anything to do in Ireland in the first place. The film though is not as effective as it could have been because the editing choice is pretty simple, not to say bizarre. Why try to produce a sloppy, amateurish and old TV documentary when everyone knows it is done on purpose by professionals in 2001 and with only filmed professional actors. It makes the film very chaotic and bumpy. The only thing that is clear is that the demonstrators were pretty amateurish in their non-violent disorganized organization whereas the paratroopers were pretty good professionals at obeying an order that never existed and the army was very good at covering up the event. And we have to keep in mind it will take more than 25 years to finally start moving towards a political settlement. And it is still fragile and could erupt again any time even if the situation is improving steadily day after day. We are still far from the end. Keep in mind that 13 dead people in Londonderry is probably more than in Tien An Men if we take into account the respective populations of Northern Ireland and China, and even one casualty would have been too many. As far as I know there was no casualty when Martin Luther King marched in Washington DC, and we can be absolutely sure that Martin Luther King's Baptist dream was just as valuable as that of these Northern Irish Catholic citizens, and vice versa of course.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University of Paris Dauphine & University of Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne