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Belfast riots erase Northern Ireland's optimism
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By Brian Lavery The New York Times
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 2005
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BELFAST Each morning this week, the broken glass and burned-out cars have quickly disappeared from the streets of Belfast after the previous night's rioting by Protestant mobs.
But by late afternoon, fresh riots are again disrupting the city, as protests and impromptu roadblocks bring traffic to a standstill.
Commuters listen to news of the latest disturbances like weather forecasts. And the Northern Irish capital feels shaken by the realization that, despite recent optimism, the seven-year peace agreement between warring Catholic and Protestant factions is far from stable.
More than 80 police officers have been hurt in the riots, which saw security forces and paramilitaries exchange volleys of gunfire. The clashes often began with handfuls of teenagers gathered on street corners, calling friends on cellphones to gather a crowd.
On Wednesday afternoon, police officers wearing body armor and carrying plastic shields dispersed a roadblock in a gritty residential area, and locals were in fighting form.
Davy Reid, 28, said the violence was started by the police ban on a parade by a Protestant men's organization, the Orange Order, through a Catholic neighborhood last weekend. He listed a string of grievances ranging from the closing of a hospital's maternity unit to the lack of a shopping center nearby - both of which he said were available in Catholic areas.
"The government hasn't been listening," he said. "We're having our civil and religious liberties taken away."
The police and government officials blamed Protestant paramilitaries for organizing the violence, which have left one police officer partially blinded and two boys, both under 2 years old, with serious head injuries after bricks were thrown through car windows.
Britain's Northern Ireland secretary, Peter Hain, said Wednesday that the government no longer recognized claims by a major Protestant terrorist organization, the Ulster Volunteer Force, that it had called a cease-fire. His comment was widely expected, and was largely symbolic, since the group has been blamed for murdering four members of a rival Protestant gang this summer.
The violence was largely unexpected, since the Irish Republican Army, which is the larger Catholic enemy of the Protestant paramilitaries, declared an end to its 36-year armed campaign against Britain in July, prompting declarations from Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain that the province had entered a historic new era of peace.
Politicians, residents and analysts said the riots were due to a more significant disjoint between the British government, which wants to reconvene the local legislature that shares power between both religious communities, and the Protestants who still represent the majority of the population here.
"There is a fundamental anger and alienation within unionism, that runs right across Northern Ireland, not just in Belfast," said Nelson McCausland, a representative from north Belfast for the Democratic Unionists, a hardline Protestant party. "That sense of being marginalized and disempowered runs very deep."
Few Protestant representatives have come forward to condemn the violence, even though it has involved attempts to kill police officers.
Mitchell Reiss, the U.S. envoy appointed by President George W. Bush to monitor Northern Irish affairs, criticized those representatives for their failure to speak out against the violence after he visited riot-stricken areas.
Unionist disaffection is nothing new. Protestants held a privileged position in Northern Ireland for centuries, enjoying rights, jobs and housing that were denied their Catholic neighbors. That status has been gradually eroded since the 1960s, when a civil rights movement began gaining an equal footing for Catholics.
Their resentment, whether justified or not, has reached a dangerous level, said Adrian Guelke, professor of comparative politics at Queens University in Belfast.
"With these levels of anger, they might actually be able to make Northern Ireland a very unpleasant place to live very quickly," he said.
Protestants are also infuriated that the IRA has been rewarded by the British government - it released an imprisoned IRA bomber and began dismantling its military presence in Northern Ireland - even though the terrorist group has yet to fulfill the terms of its statement by disarming.
"The discontent has been festering for a very long time, and just needed an event to set it off," Guelke said. "Everything that has happened since July has just driven them mad."
While the IRA may officially have stopped operating, its members continue to exercise brutal control over the Catholics they have often claimed to defend.
The sisters and fiancée of Robert McCartney, the Belfast man who was beaten and stabbed to death by IRA members in January, staged an international campaign to bring his killers to trial but have been subjected to intimidation by neighbors who are attempting to force them out of their home.
A friend of McCartney's, Geoff Commander, was badly beaten with iron bars on Tuesday, apparently for his connections to the family.
Family decries intimidation
The intimidation against the McCartney family is getting worse, one of his sisters said Wednesday, Agence France-Presse reported from Dublin.
The campaign by McCartney's five sisters and the mother of his two sons, Bridgeen Hagans, to bring his IRA killers to justice won them meetings with President George W. Bush and other U.S. politicians earlier this year.
On Tuesday night up to 50 women staged a protest against the McCartneys outside Hagans's home.
"It was very, very frightening for her and the rest of the family and the vast majority of the community are absolutely disgusted about what happened," Claire McCartney said.
She said there had long been attempts to smear the family and to silence them, but the latest incidents were the "most visible and brutal way" of trying to intimidate them. Another sister, Paula, was in the process of moving out of her home in the Short Strand area of Belfast because "murderers and associates of murderers" are walking around the district.
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