Northern Ireland’s divisive annual holiday called “The Twelfth,” when tens of thousands of Protestants parade across the British territory, got off to a violent start yesterday with riots in several parts of Belfast.
Police said at least seven officers were injured during street clashes that gathered pace after Protestants lit scores of towering bonfires at midnight, the traditional start to one-sided Twelfth celebrations that for decades have inspired bloodshed and destruction.
Tens of thousands of members of the Orange Order, a Protestant brotherhood dedicated to celebrating 17th-century military victories over Catholics, planned to march later in the day.
As the acrid smell of bonfires wafted across Belfast, crowds of Catholic militants seeking a fight with police turned violent in several frontline areas where fixed barricades called “peace lines” separate British Protestant and Irish Catholic turf.
In one of the worst clashes, police confronted a 200-strong crowd of men and teenagers in the Broadway section of Catholic west Belfast. Police lines formed a barrier preventing Catholics from reaching Protestant bonfire celebrants on the far side of the M1 motorway that bisects the city.
The rioters tossed Molotov cocktails, masonry, bricks and stones at police, who donned visored helmets, shields and head-to-toe flame retardant suits. At one point, rioters hijacked a bus at gunpoint on the nearby Falls Road and apparently tried to drive the vehicle at police lines, but it crashed into nearby fencing instead and was set ablaze.
At Broadway and two other Belfast flashpoints, police contained the rioters with sporadic volleys of British-style plastic bullets — blunt-nosed cylinders designed to deal hard blows to their targets — and heavy doses of blasts from mobile water cannon.
Police could offer no estimates of civilian casualties, which is typical amid the confusion of nighttime Northern Ireland riots. Unless seriously injured, Belfast rioters try to avoid hospital treatment because police investigate those who have wounds apparently suffered during riots.
On both sides, many members of the youthful crowds were visibly drinking heavily. Often the just-emptied bottles joined the salvo of objects being thrown at police positioned to keep the two sides apart.
Yesterday’s violence follows weeks of similar flare-ups in working-class districts of Belfast and nearby suburbs that have left scores of police injured, none critically. Last week, Protestants rioted in one suburb after police removed British and sectarian flags from streetlights near the area’s lone Catholic church.
Northern Ireland remains a deeply divided society despite the broad success of its two-decade peace process. The leaders of peacemaking’s central achievement — a Catholic-Protestant government based on an eastern hilltop overlooking the city — appealed in vain for rioters to desist this year.
Later yesterday, Orangemen planned to march at 17 locations accompanied by so-called “kick the pope” fife-and-drum bands. Police were bracing for potential violence, as Orangemen marching back to their lodges pass Catholic districts. British authorities have tried to minimize such confrontations by restricting the routes of Orange parades over the past 15 years.
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