The protest followed by a couple of days the annual Bloody Sunday parade in Derry, Northern Ireland, marking the anniversary of the 1972 massacre of 14 civil rights marchers by British paratroopers.

Most of the families at the London protest live in Belfast, although participants pointed out that the death squads have been active across Ireland, including in the republic. One banner read, “Who sanctioned Britain’s death squads? Time for the truth.”

The crowd, which numbered more than 80 people, picketed outside the headquarters of MI5, London’s equivalent of the CIA. “We are here because this is where decisions got made for generations of murders,” Paul Crawford told the Militant. His father had been brutally murdered by the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) in the nationalist area of Milltown, West Belfast, in 1974. Four people were involved, including one former British soldier, said Crawford, but only one person was sentenced.

“After the murder our house was raided every week for a whole year,” Crawford said. “My brothers and I were arrested frequently. I was hospitalized at one stage through one of these arrests. I want to tell the British government I’m here, I am not going anywhere, I hold them responsible, and I want answers.”

Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams was the featured speaker. He condemned British officials’ refusal to investigate incidents of state and state-sponsored violence, and their continuing cover-up of their responsibility for the Bloody Sunday massacre—including in the current Saville Inquiry.

“The murder of citizens through collusion with Unionist death squads has been and remains a British state policy in Ireland,” Adams said. “Collusion—the control, resourcing and direction of loyalist death squads by British state agencies—was sanctioned at the highest level of the British government. It resulted in the deaths of hundreds of Republicans, nationalists and Catholics.”

Adams emphasized that “the British apparatus, which operates the policy of collusion, continues in existence…. There must be a full disclosure of the truth about Britain’s war in Ireland.”

Others talked of their direct experience of the death squads’ activities. Mark Sykes said that 12 years earlier he had been shot four times by loyalist gunmen in an attack on the Ormeau Road in South Belfast. Among the five killed was his 18-year-old brother-in-law, Peter Magee. The gunmen’s weapons had been in the hands of the security forces in Northern Ireland just weeks earlier.

Laura Hamill described the murder of her husband Patrick, carried out in front of his family by the Ulster Defense Association using intelligence supplied by the British army’s covert Force Research Unit.

Carol Kane explained, “My father Edward Kane was murdered in North Belfast in an explosion that killed 15 other people in 1971. [The British government] tried to say it was someone in the bar. It only came to light over the last few years that there was collusion” between British officials and the UVF, which carried out the murder.

Carol Kane’s brother Billy was murdered in the family home 17 years later at the age of 19. She said that he had been searched by British troops in the adjacent street half an hour before the killing. Soldiers were billeted above the apartment, from where they “would have seen everything,” she said.

A week earlier Sinn Fein leader Martin McGuinness told a Belfast press conference, “British intelligence recruited and placed large numbers of agents within Unionist paramilitaries…. In December 1987, over 300 weapons were brought into the north of Ireland, with the full participation and knowledge of British intelligence and distributed among the Unionist death squads. The British state created an efficient sectarian murder machine and set it loose on the northern nationalist community.”  
 
 
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