The new inquiry into Bloody Sunday, which is to resume in March, must not be a "Widgery Mark II", one of those injured during the original anti-internment march 28 years ago told a commemorative rally in the city.
Several thousand people gathered in Derry yesterday to commemorate the anniversary of Bloody Sunday. Led by young relatives of the 14 people who died as a result of the shootings, they retraced the route of the original anti-internment march.
They marched from the Creggan down to the Bogside and instead of congregating as usual at Free Derry Corner, they paraded on to the Guildhall in Derry city centre, where the original march was intended to conclude, but never did because of the shootings.
They side-stepped Free Derry Corner, as the site is being landscaped. Among those who joined the crowd, estimated at over 10,000, were the Sinn Fein president, Mr Gerry Adams, and the party's two ministers, Mr Martin McGuinness and Ms Bairbre de Brun.
The main concentration was on remembering those killed by the British paratroop regiment in 1972. Nonetheless, there was no avoiding the potential crisis in the peace process over IRA decommissioning.
Just before the march began Mr Adams told reporters if the political will was present to resolve the difficulties there should be no cause for gloom. "There is no reason whatsoever why the institutions should be put in any jeopardy. Let's keep making the progress that has been made," he said.
Mr Adams said if the institutions were collapsed or if the executive went into shadow form he suspected the IRA would withdraw from dealing with Gen John de Chastelain's decommissioning body. The reason the IRA appointed an interlocutor was because the institutions were up and running.
"It strikes me that it would be very difficult to keep the IRA in there if the institutions were removed," added Mr Adams. The crisis was being caused because the Ulster Unionist Party might decide to walk away from the process.
Mr McGuinness said the decommissioning issue should be left with Gen de Chastelain. "There is no reason in this wide world - while ministers are moving on and doing their job and working actively on behalf of the overwhelming majority of people - why the institutions should be brought down," he added.
Ms Alana Burke, who was injured on Bloody Sunday, said she was still angry and bitter when recalling what happened 28 years ago. She was proud, however, that the Saville Inquiry was established and that the original Widgery Inquiry was "exposed as the sham we always said it was".
But she was concerned that the British government would collude in ensuring key witnesses or vital information were withheld from the inquiry. "A word of warning to the British government, we are not interested in a public relations exercise, and we won't settle for a Widgery Mark II," Ms Burke told the crowd.
Mr Alex Attwood, the SDLP Assembly member for West Belfast, said it was the courage of the bereaved, the wounded, and the people of Derry that had created the circumstances whereby the Saville Inquiry would begin its main work at the end of March.
He said the British government had a responsibility to ensure the truth was fully revealed. Dr Robbie McVeigh of the Rosemary Nelson campaign called for international independent inquiries into the murders of the solicitors Pat Finucane and Ms Nelson. He said that as part of the healing process, a truth commission must be established in relation to all killings.
He said there was no possibility of healing until it was fully realised that the events of Bloody Sunday "condemned all of us . . . to 30 years of militarism on all sides".
Ms de Brun was enthusiastically applauded by the crowd when she was introduced as the first Minister of Health to address a Bloody Sunday commemoration. She said everyone would require healing from the "intensity of what we have all been through" over the past 30 years in Northern Ireland.
She said 28 years on there was still no recognition of the role the "British government played in what was a premeditated attack on unarmed demonstrators by members of the paratroop regiment".
"Worse still, there are still those who would try to peddle the fallacy that the dead and the wounded of Bloody Sunday were the authors of their own misfortune, that somehow the responsibility for what happened lay with them rather than with those who pulled the triggers or those who gave the order," she added.
"That fallacy must be reversed once and for all," said Ms de Brun.
On the decommissioning impasse Ms de Brun said: "The approach which we in Sinn Fein have had all along to this question, the approach we have urged upon others, is that if we want to create a society where we have taken the gun out of Irish politics then we have to make politics work."
