CARMEN PROETTA – GIBRALTAR WITNESS TO IRA EXECUTIONS
CARMEN PROETTA – GIBRALTAR WITNESS TO IRA EXECUTIONS
A LONELY WITNESS TO MASSACRE
Window to Hell.
She stood elegantly before a hushed, restrained court, every inch the beauty Queen who had not asked to be there. Her composure was on the brink of collapse. She feared the worst but was determined to see it all through after the years of threats, defamation, and perhaps removal from the scene by sinister means. Carmen, a young Gibraltarian housewife, whose only claim to this unusual stardom was standing at her apartment window and seeing three people gunned down, in an act that challenged every nerve of her Christian mind. Carmen, an unduly sensitive woman with an iron will of her very own, survived the enormous ordeal of challenging the chicanery of the very State and the woman who later said with gusto, “I pulled the trigger” . This woman who happened to be no other than the Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher, in her unmistakeable manner, summoned every British sinew to support her every action in what she described as the fight for the integrity of the nation. The very President of Ireland himself, had no option, but to question that very intelligence when asked to bale her out. “If it had not been done with such lack of intelligence, I might have perhaps been able to help” or very similar words to that effect.
For the hapless, Carmen Proetta, the vision of horror with bullet after bullet exploding horrifically inches within the body surfaces and spouting human blood there was nothing British about it. Cries of help from people with hands held up clearly above their heads were to remain engraved forever on her mind. Innocent people in terms of presumed innocence, summarily mown down, without help or jury to determine their guilt, were clawing the air for life, right in front of her very eyes. A fleeing victim, shot in the back and a soldier`s boot smashing into a rib cage to stop that pumping heart, put the final authoritiative scenes into place and seen clearly by another silenced, unwilling witness. The young, happily married main witness, a woman looking forward to a life of glamour and sunshine frolics on the Costa del Sol where she had a second home, was spiritually dead. Her very life had just been forfeited in that very instant as she became a witness for the prosecution of the very State of Gibraltar and that of Britain of which she was a noble citizen. What was to follow eventually ended up in the Guiness Book of Records and hundreds of web pages to the effect. She won case after case against the hounding Press – no doubt forming part of that trigger that tragically, painfully and obscenely destroyed lives – lives which however perversive could not have merited such unconstitutional, fearsome, public executions. They were, after all, supposed terrorists – with an amount of apparent evidence with respect to one of them. They were supposedly (and inexplicably under the circumstances), about to blow up a car in the middle of nowhere or just when a parade was about to go by. Whatever, future evidence and indeed instant appraisal by those with a bit of British common sense, showed clearly that the whole scenario was a minutely planned exercise designed to produce a viable, publicly acceptable, shoot-to-kill decision.
An assault on the senses
For Carmen however, none of this had anything to do with the numbness and terrifying assault to her senses (and that of many others effectively silenced) that the scene from hell produced. Neither was she aware of the complete bag of tricks that would be thrown at her to deter her from her sense of duty, which her British and Gibraltarian supported scale of values made quite clear. Any mere mortal would have succumbed at the very first signs of public hatred whipped up by a manipulated British Press. What Margaret Thatcher and the various departments of state involved in her own, very exclusive manner of swatting irritants, did not know, was that Carmen Proetta, of diehard, Genoese descent, was as unbendable even to her own family, as any mere mortal could be. Carmen, possessed with the spirit and confidence of a naturally intelligent woman with a photographic mind, equalled the Iron Lady, in every respect except her loathing of lies and manipulated truths. It was this that was to later make her such a champion of British legal victims of the Coast. Thatcher had met her match and every attempt to destroy Carmen´s credibility fell on the very rocks that parody the part of the Peninsular itself. For Carmen, the lives destroyed had to be accounted for and every sleepless night, and admonishment, from terrified members of her own family, fell on those selfsame pillars which kept her alive, meaningful and happy.
In her early life, Carmen had always been a beauty Queen by right. Her leggy, voluptousness, much made of by the sleezy press, gave her instant access to the lights and critical