Protestant extremists attacked police and British troops into a third day yesterday, littering streets with rubble and burned-out vehicles in an orgy of violence sparked by anger over a restricted parade.
Crowds of masked men and youths confronted police backed by British troops in dozens of hard-line Protestant districts in Belfast and several other towns. Gunmen opened fire on police and soldiers in at least two parts of the capital on 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 blunt-nosed plastic bullets.
The Police Service of Northern Ireland said 18 more officers were injured on Sunday night and yesterday morning, chiefly by shrapnel from rioters' homemade grenades, bringing the force's three-day total to 50.
Paramedics said they have treated several civilians for gunshot and shrapnel wounds and burns, but only three of them have checked into hospitals -- where rioters risk being identified and arrested. One Protestant man, who had been shot in the arm on Sunday by British troops, was arrested on suspicion of attempted murder.
Engineers at Northern Ireland's bus service scrambled to repair shattered windows and other damage on several dozen buses. Two were hijacked at gunpoint and destroyed over the weekend, but services -- suspended in about half of Belfast since Saturday -- returned to normal yesterday.
Chief Constable Hugh Orde, commander of Northern Ireland's mostly Protestant police, has blamed the Orange Order -- a legal brotherhood with more than 50,000 members -- for inspiring the riots. The violence began on Saturday when police prevented Orangemen from parading 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 (UDA) and the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), to launch a pre-planned rebellion against police authority. Their current desire for street mayhem reflects their near-total disconnection from the province's decade-old peace process.
The UDA and UVF are both supposed to be observing ceasefires and disarming in support of Northern Ireland's 1998 peace accord, just like the outlawed Irish Republican Army rooted in militant Catholic areas.
But while the IRA has built a major base of support through its Sinn Fein party and has grown central to ongoing negotiations on Northern Ireland's future, the Protestant paramilitary groups have dismally failed to win electoral support and barely register in political talks. Instead they wield power through criminal graft backed by occasional intimidating shows of force.
These days, while IRA veterans are being encouraged to pursue their aims through politics and appear poised within weeks to resume disarmament, the UVF and UDA are openly fighting to keep control of criminal empires -- a future challenged by the police and the wider peace process.
Just last week, the UVF directed a smaller-scale Belfast riot against police after officers raided UVF members' homes and seized a machine gun and makeshift UVF uniforms. Police have been cracking down on the UVF, in particular, because the underground group has killed four Protestant men this summer in a feud with a breakaway drug-dealing gang, the Loyalist Volunteer Force.
Orde said members of both the UVF and UDA, which wield authority in different Protestant districts of Belfast, were both orchestrating attacks.
Orange marches, always a divisive summertime tradition, triggered widespread violence in the mid-1990s but comparatively little in recent years. Belfast's last major riot came July 12, when about 500 Catholics attacked police following a small Orange parade in north Belfast. On that occasion, about 100 officers and 10 civilians were wounded.
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