Third night of rioting in Belfast
Protestant hard-liners blocked roads all over Belfast in the Monday evening rush hour, causing massive traffic jams and threatening a third night of rioting with police and British troops.
Starting about 4 p.m. thousands of Protestant men, women and children staged sit-down protests on the main highway running through the capital and scores of other roads and intersections. Many Belfast shops and businesses closed early in fear that the illegal blockades would degenerate into violent attacks on police, as happened Saturday and Sunday.
Until early Monday, crowds of masked men and youths confronted police in dozens of hard-line Protestant districts in Belfast and several other towns. Gunmen fired on police and soldiers in at least two parts of the capital Sunday night, but nobody was hit.
Riot-hardened police units equipped with helmets, body armor and flame-retardant jumpsuits doused crowds with massive water cannons and fired several hundred plastic bullets.
The Police Service of Northern Ireland said 18 more officers were injured Sunday night and Monday morning, chiefly by shrapnel from homemade grenades, bringing the force's three-day casualty total to 50.
"This is a moment of choice for everybody. ... Whose side are you on?" the British governor, Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Hain, said before Protestant crowds resumed their street blockades Monday afternoon.
"Are you on the side of law and order, applied fairly and equally to every citizen? Or are you against law and order, siding with those firing bullets at the police, throwing petrol bombs and blast bombs at police and attacking them?" Hain said after receiving a briefing on the weekend chaos from Northern Ireland Chief Constable Hugh Orde.
Hain said Orde and senior detectives had presented "absolutely clear-cut" evidence that members of Northern Ireland's two biggest outlawed Protestant groups, the Ulster Defense Association and the Ulster Volunteer Force, were instrumental in directing the riots. He said he would announce soon whether Britain would continue to recognize the joint UDA-UVF cease-fire, officially more than 10 years old.
Sixteen Protestants appeared in court Monday to face to face a range of riot-related charges. One man who had been shot in the arm Sunday by British troops was charged with attempting to murder police and soldiers.
Orde has accused the Orange Order - a legal brotherhood with more than 50,000 members - of inspiring the riots. The violence began Saturday when police prevented Orangemen from parading near a hard-line Catholic part of west Belfast.
The senior Orangeman in Belfast, Dawson Bailie, said he would not condemn the rioters' actions.
"As far as I am concerned, the people to blame are the secretary of state, the chief constable and the Parades Commission," Bailie said Monday, referring to Hain, Orde and a Catholic-Protestant panel that imposes restrictions on Protestant demonstrations.
The American envoy to Northern Ireland, Mitchell Reiss, accused Protestant political leaders of half-hearted, ambiguous backing for the police.
Reiss said Protestant leaders should not be eligible to serve in any future power-sharing government - the central, unfulfilled goal of Northern Ireland's seven-year-old peace accord - unless they stood firmly behind the police and against the violence.
"All of us are pretty disappointed with the abdication of responsibility by many (Protestant) unionist leaders," Reiss said during a visit to Belfast.
Police and analysts agreed that the march provided a pretext for the UDA and UVF to launch a pre-planned rebellion against police. Their desire for street mayhem reflected their nearly total disconnection from the peace process.
Both are supposed to be disarming, like the outlawed Irish Republican Army, which is rooted in militant Catholic areas.
The IRA has built a support base through its Sinn Fein party and has grown central to negotiations, but the Protestant paramilitary groups have failed to win electoral support, and wield power through criminal graft and intimidating shows of force.
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