Protestants riot in Northern Ireland for 3rd day
(AP)
Updated: 2005-09-13 09:59

Several thousand police equipped with shields, body armor, flame-retardant suits, guns loaded with plastic bullets, armored personnel carriers, mobile water cannon and tear gas were on standby in fortified barracks across this city of 600,000. About 1,200 British soldiers also were deployed to support the police.

British governor Peter Hain and police commander Hugh Orde said the outlawed Ulster Volunteer Force and Ulster Defense Association, which are supposed to be observing cease-fires in support of Northern Ireland's 1998 peace accord, carried out the weekend attacks on police.

Hain said he would issue a policy statement within the next few days, raising widespread expectations he will withdraw Britain's recognition of the groups' 1994 cease-fire. Their truce has been repeatedly violated over the past decade — but rarely so brazenly as last weekend.

A man walks past a burning vehicle in a Loyalist area in North Belfast September 12, 2005. Belfast ground to a halt on Monday evening after Protestant demonstrators blocked roads and nervous commuters, fearing a resumption of the weekend's rioting, scrambled to leave the city early. [Reuters]

"The evidence I have seen is absolutely clear-cut. If it wasn't clear-cut before, it's absolutely categorical now," said Hain, who viewed surveillance footage of the weekend's riots at the police headquarters in east Belfast.

Police have accused the Ulster Volunteer Force, which wields brutal authority in many Protestant parts of Belfast and runs a range of criminal rackets including counterfeiting and smuggling cigarettes, of killing four Protestant men this summer in a turf war with a breakaway drug dealing gang.

Hain could order a return to prison for dozens of UVF and UDA convicts who received prison paroles as part of the 1998 peace deal. Catholic leaders demanded sterner action against both groups.

But police and political analysts warned that the deep-seated Protestant alienation fueling the riots required a diplomatic rather than security solution. Protestant politicians said rioting was inevitable given the belief of many Protestants that Britain has focused a decade of peacemaking on the demands of Catholics and the outlawed Irish Republican Army.

"Quite clearly, what you have here is a politics of fatalism, a community that sees itself as not being listened to," said University of Ulster social scientist Peter Shirlow.

Confrontations over Protestant parades, particularly near Catholic areas, have triggered riots in the past. The most widespread violence happened from 1996 to 1998, when Catholic militants blockaded Protestants' parade routes.

Since then, a government-appointed Parades Commission imposed restrictions on disputed Protestant parades. Until now, Orangemen usually accepted with sullen resignation.

But when the commission ordered Saturday's marchers to parade through a factory site instead of the main road, Orange leaders called for illegal sit-down protests all over Belfast. Orangemen refused to accept any responsibility for the rioting.

Mitchell Reiss, President Bush's envoy to Northern Ireland, accused Protestant leaders of making bogus excuses for rioters.

"I think all of us are pretty disappointed with the abdication of responsibility by many (Protestant) unionist leaders," Reiss said in Belfast. "No political party, and certainly no responsible political leadership, deserves to serve in a government unless it cooperates and supports fully and unconditionally the police, and calls on its supporters to do so."

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