World

Tensions Rising In Belfast

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

January 9, 2002 / 4:47 PM EST / CBS

Sectarian tensions simmered in north Belfast Thursday after a fight between two women, one Catholic and one Protestant, sparked the worst street violence the Northern Irish capital has seen in months.

The dispute between the two women as Catholic parents went to collect their children Wednesday highlighted the searing sectarian hatred which divides Roman Catholics and Protestants in parts of the province. Police said there had been daily friction on the street.

Politicians and community leaders did what they could to calm passions after overnight rioting near the flashpoint Holy Cross Primary School -- a Catholic school in a Protestant enclave.

"There's huge anger, huge fear, people are saying where do we go from here?" said the Rev. Aidan Troy, chairman of governors at the Catholic girls' school, after meeting Britain's security minister for the province, Jane Kennedy.

Troy said he hoped the school -- closed Thursday over safety fears -- would reopen Friday. But as the school's governors were meeting, rival gangs gathered on the streets under the watchful eye of riot police.

"The safety of the children is the prime consideration and until such time as we can get the children safely back to school, I ... have to be very conscious of that," said Troy.

"In my heart I have no intention or desire to close that school, but equally not one child can be put at risk."

Protestant children from the Boys Model School in north Belfast were taken home in the back of armored police Land Rovers after a large crowd of Catholics gathered nearby, and a Protestant school closed early because of security fears.

As darkness fell there was isolated stone-throwing and police said a number of vehicles had been hijacked.

The Holy Cross Primary School became the focus late last year of a bitter dispute between the rival communities living cheek-by-jowl in a run-down corner of north Belfast.

The Protestant protest at the school shocked the world with television images of tearful young girls guarded by riot police and troops as they ran a gauntlet of hate walking to school.

Thursday morning, the nearby Our Lady of Mercy Girls' Secondary School, another Catholic school in a Protestant area, was attacked by six men with crowbars who smashed the windows of more than a dozen cars parked outside.

One mother, Marie Bradley, said: "Is it worth a child's life bringing her to school to be educated?"

"It's naked sectarianism," Catholic mother-of-two Kate Lagan told Reuters at the school gate. "I'm angry and sickened. Have they not done enough at Holy Cross?"

Police said the rioting, which began Wednesday afternoon and continued into the early hours of Thursday, was "sustained and highly orchestrated," with shadowy guerrilla groups on both sides stoking the disorder.

Three crates of ready-made gasoline bombs were found by police. More than 130 of the weapons were thrown by rioters, along with acid bombs, flares, fireworks, bricks an bottles.

A police armored vehicle was destroyed by a gasoline bomb, and six cars were hijacked and burned. Forty-eight officers were injured and four Catholics were wounded when a gunman opened fire with a shotgun. None was badly hurt.

"The actual outbreak yesterday we think was spontaneous, but in this area, in both communities, once you scratch the surface the paramilitaries are there, and the paramilitaries on both sides were involved," north Belfast's police chief, Assistant Chief Constable Alan McQuillan, told BBC radio.

"Particularly ... in the nationalist (Catholic) area we saw clear evidence of people orchestrating the rioting."

Each side blamed the other for stoking the violence.

At the House of Commons in London on Wednesday, Britain's Northern Ireland Secretary John Reid called the rioters "thugs and hooligans," and said: "To anyone engaging in rioting in Belfast tonight, I would say the people of Northern Ireland reject your violence. It belongs to the past."

Northern Ireland ended 2001 with some hopes of progress in solving the intractable conflict between Protestants and Catholics which has cost 3,600 lives over more than 30 years.

The Catholic-backed Irish Republican Army guerrilla group, which fought for decades to end British rule of the province, made its first move toward disarmament in October.

The following month some stability was brought to the fledgling home-rule coalition set up under the 1998 Good Friday agreement with the return of pro-British Protestant David Trimble to head the power-sharing coalition in Belfast.