Bloody Friday (Belfast)

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As Bloody Friday a series of about 20 bombings is known that the Belfast Brigade of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) on 21st July 1972 in the Northern Irish capital Belfast performed. Nine people were killed and 130 injured. Two other people later died from their injuries.

prehistory

In August 1969, the British Army was first used during the Northern Ireland conflict to end unrest in Belfast and Derry . Regardless of the use of the army, the number of bombings, shootings and riots increased in the following years. The Provisional IRA, which was newly formed at the end of 1969, was held responsible for numerous attacks. After the introduction of detentions without trial in August 1971 and the shooting of 13 unarmed demonstrators on Bloody Sunday in January 1972, moderate nationalists also sided with the IRA. Barricaded no-go areas emerged in Belfast and Derry , which were largely under the control of the IRA and to which the British Army could only gain access through major operations.

On June 26, 1972, an IRA ceasefire came into effect. On July 7, negotiations broke out in London between senior IRA members and a delegation from the UK Ministry of Northern Ireland. On July 9, the IRA announced the end of the ceasefire following disputes over housing allotment in western Belfast. After the end of the ceasefire, IRA Chief of Staff Seán Mac Stíofáin ordered an intensification of the IRA campaign to make it clear that the IRA was not weakened and that it had negotiated from a position of strength.

course

On July 21, 1972, between 19 and 22 bombs exploded in Belfast within less than two hours, according to various sources. The highest number of victims was an attack on a bus station on Oxford Street. Four employees of the bus company and two British soldiers who tried to defuse the bomb died here . Over 100 people were injured. An attack on a shopping center in north Belfast left three people dead and many seriously injured. Further bomb attacks were directed against train stations and bridges, a bar, a bank, a hotel and Protestant residential areas.

According to press reports, the attacks caused panic among shoppers in downtown Belfast . Hours later, groups of people wandered through the city center who, in view of the explosions in different places, did not know where to seek refuge.

In the aftermath of the attacks, the IRA insisted that there had been adequate telephone warnings and that there was never any intention of killing civilians. When the car bomb attack on Oxford Street bus station, there was a warning 20 minutes before the explosion that did not contain a detailed description of the location and the vehicle used. According to Seán Mac Stíofáin, Republicans were convinced that the British deliberately ignored the warnings for political and strategic reasons. According to IRA member Brendan Hughes, who helped organize the bombings, the IRA had overestimated the military's ability to respond to many warnings at once.

consequences

The Bloody Friday marked the beginning of the political isolation of the IRA followed by their military decline. Moderate nationalists in both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland turned their backs on the IRA. Many parallels have been drawn between Bloody Friday and the shooting of demonstrators by British paratroopers on Bloody Sunday .

From the point of view of the British government, Bloody Friday eliminated the need for restraint vis-à-vis the IRA, which was previously supported by large parts of the nationalist minority. The government issued a leaflet with a print run of 250,000, detailing the bombings. Northern Ireland Minister William Whitelaw ruled out further negotiations with the IRA.

In addition, the British government saw the opportunity to implement existing plans to eliminate the no-go areas: On July 31, around 12,000 British soldiers in Operation Motorman cleared the barricades in Belfast and Derry and occupied the no-go areas. In the three weeks prior to Operation Motorman , there had been 180 bombings and 2,595 shootings; In the following three weeks, 73 bomb attacks and 380 shootings were counted. By eliminating the no-go areas, the IRA was no longer able to continue its previous strategy of building up psychological pressure through as many attacks as possible and thus achieving political gains. Nevertheless, the number of attacks remained at a relatively high level: In Derry, Northern Ireland's second largest city, the IRA largely destroyed the city center between mid-1972 and mid-1973 without any deaths. At times, 20 out of 150 shops in Derry were still open. The Northern Ireland conflict thus developed into a military stalemate over 22 years, which dissolved in 1994 with the IRA's declaration of a ceasefire.

On July 16, 2002, the IRA issued a written statement apologizing for injuring civilians on Bloody Friday . Despite the restriction to civilian casualties, the IRA declaration was viewed internationally as a historic step.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ MLR Smith: Fin de Siècle, 1972: The Provisional IRA's Strategy and the Beginning of the Eight-Thousand-Day Stalemate. In: Alan O'Day: Political violence in Northern Ireland. Conflict and conflict resolution. Praeger, Westport, Conn. 1997, ISBN 0-275-95414-5 , pp. 15–32, here p. 21.
  2. Smith, Fin de Siècle , pp. 24, 28.
  3. Referring to Seán Mac Stíofáin: Memoirs of a revolutionary. Gordon Cremonesi, London 1975, ISBN 0860330303 : Smith, Fin de Siècle , p. 28.
  4. ^ Ed Moloney: Voices from the grave. Two men's was in Ireland. Faber and Faber, London 2010, ISBN 978-0-571-25168-1 , p. 103.
  5. Peter Taylor: Provo. The IRA and Sinn Féin. Bloomsbury, London 2002, ISBN 0-7475-3818-2 , p. 149. List of bomb attacks in Details of the Main Events of 'Bloody Friday' at CAIN - Conflict Archive on the Internet (English, accessed on December 21, 2011) .
  6. ^ Report by a journalist from Raidió Teilifís Éireann , quoted in Moloney, Voices , p. 303.
  7. Taylor, Provos , p. 149.
  8. Taylor, Provos , p. 150.
  9. Bloody Friday: What happened on BBC News (accessed December 22, 2011).
  10. Conversations with Hughes 2001/2002, cited in Moloney, Voices , p. 105. See also Taylor, Provos , p. 150.
  11. This assessment in Moloney, Voices , p. 93.
  12. ^ Moloney, Voices , p. 104.
  13. ^ A b Peter Taylor: Brits. The war against the IRA. Bloomsbury, London 2002, ISBN 978-0-7475-5806-4 , p. 125.
  14. ^ Peter R. Neumann, MLR Smith: The strategy of terrorism. How it works, and why it fails. Routledge, London 2008, ISBN 978-0-415-42618-3 , p. 89.
  15. Kevin J. Kelley: The Longest War. Northern Ireland and the IRA. Lawrence Hill, Westport 1988, ISBN 0-86232-764-4 , p. 184. Cover image of The Terror and the Tears leaflet from the British Library (accessed December 22, 2011).
  16. ^ Smith, Fin de Siècle , p. 28.
  17. ^ Smith, Fin de Siècle , p. 29.
  18. ^ Taylor, Provos , 158.
  19. This assessment in Smith, Fin de Siècle , p. 30.
  20. Irish Republican Army (IRA) Statement of Apology, July 16, 2002 at CAIN - Conflict Archive on the Internet (accessed December 21, 2011).
  21. Marcel M. Baumann: Zwischenwelten: Neither war nor peace. About the constructive handling of phenomena of violence in the process of conflict transformation. Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 2008, ISBN 978-3-531-15948-5 , p. 236.