Violence flares in Northern Ireland
Police blame Orange Order for 'inspiring the riots.'
Northern Ireland's chief constable lashed out at the Protestant loyalist Orange Order for "
inspiring the riots" in Belfast and Counties Antrim and Down over the weekend that left 50 police officers wounded.
Ireland Online reports that, in a scene that "resembled the 1970s height of 'The Troubles'," gunmen fired
at least 50 shots over a 12-hour period across security lines, but most police wounds came from shrapnel from home-made grenades. "We have a situation ... with the police facing attempted murder and police facing violence which is
on a scale that we haven't seen for many years," Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Hain told
BBC Radio.
"This is taking Northern Ireland, or attempting to take it, back to a hideous dark past," [Mr. Hain] said. "These were serious attempts to kill police in some instances. This is really not loyalism but 'gangsterism' masquerading in this community. They are turning on themselves. These communities are being torn apart by their own paramilitary groups."
CNN reports that the rioting began Saturday when
the police prevented the Orangemen from marching near a "hard-line" Catholic part of West Belfast.
But police and analysts also agree that the march provided a pretext for Northern Ireland's two major outlawed Protestant paramilitary groups – the Ulster Defense Association and the Ulster Volunteer Force – to launch a pre-planned rebellion against police authority. The UDA and UVF are both supposed to be observing cease-fires and disarming in support of Northern Ireland's 1998 peace accord, just like the outlawed Irish Republican Army.
The
Independent [of London] reports that while most of the "political attention" over the summer has been focused on the Irish Republican Army "to fulfil the public promise it made some weeks ago to decommission all its weapons," there have also been several bouts of loyalist violence that precipitated the weekend's riots.
The
Scotsman reports that political leaders had hoped to "kick start" talks aimed at restoring the power-sharing assembly that had been set up by the Good Friday agreement of 1998. But the weekend's events showed that the two sides
have a long way to go before trusting each other.
At one frequently attacked church in Ballymena, north-west of Belfast, the parish priest opted to cancel Mass and refer worshippers to another church in a more middle-class area, where rioting did not occur.
"It's better to be safe than sorry," said the Rev. Paul Symonds of the Harryville church in south Ballymena, where Protestant mobs angered by restrictions on Orange Order parades frequently intimidated Mass-goers in the late 1990s.
The Belfast Telegraph reports that Grand Master of the Orange Order Robert Saulters said
he was unaware of any Orangemen attacking police. But the police responded by saying they would produce video in the next few days that showed men in orange sashes [the symbol of the Orange Order] among the rioters.
Columnist Jonathon Freedland writes in
The Guardian that this is what the skeptics of the Northern Ireland peace process had always feared – that the paramilitary armies would return to violence once they didn't get their way. Except everyone thought it would be the IRA, not the loyalist paramilitaries, that would return to violence. But when the replacement of David Trimble by the controversial Rev. Ian Paisley as the community's leading politican failed to "stem the flow of perceived concessions to republicans, they [the loyalists] decided to
take their fight to the streets."
This should shake those who have long regarded republicans as the sole obstacle to peace in Northern Ireland. In the lead-up to the 1998 Good Friday agreement, and in the years since, unionists and their cheerleaders in Westminster and the British press have piled the political and moral pressure on the IRA and Sinn Fein, demanding that they change. Much of that pressure was deserved. But it was also lopsided – as this weekend's events have proved. Now we have seen, in the most lurid colours, that loyalists have guns too. Freedland writes that the seed of the Protestant paramilitary violence is the perception, right or wrong, that the British government has "bent over backwards" for the IRA, while doing nothing for the loyalist community. The lesson is that "the search for peace in Northern Ireland needs to be more balanced."
In an analysis for the
BBC, correspondent Mark Devenport writes that "many loyalist areas are clearly suffering an
economic and social malaise." This isolation in inner-city working-class enclaves leaves many Protestants feeling alienated, says Mr. Devenport.
But if, as has been tried in the past, you throw money at these problems it may well end up in the hand of paramilitary bosses who are part of the problem, not part of the solution. In an editorial,
The Daily Telegraph writes it's time for the Orange Order to rethink its priorites, and do better than issue "
terse condemnations of violence."
Although this newspaper supports the right of the loyal orders to walk along their traditional routes - after all, the liberal ideal is surely one in which such marches happen without controversy, rather than one in which they are banned - choosing not to exercise that right so as to avoid bloodshed is sometimes the correct and Christian attitude; and thus, incidentally, the best way for an Orangeman to fulfil his vows.
The Belfast Telegraph said leaders of the Orange Order were "shocked" by the level of criticism the group received over the weekend and they would carry out
their own investigation into the weekend's events.
Also...
•
In a corner of Antrim another generation grows up on a diet of sectarian hatred (
Guardian)
•
Loyalist violence 'is appalling' (
BBC)
•
Blackwater mercenaries deploy in New Orleans (
Truthout.org)
•
Palestinians celebrate withdrawal (
Toronto Star)
• Feedback appreciated. E-mail
Tom Regan
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