BELFAST, Northern Ireland: Protestant extremists attacked police and British troops for a second straight night on Sunday, littering streets with rubble and burned-out vehicles in widespread violence sparked by anger over a restricted parade. More than 40 police were wounded in the weekend mayhem.

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 in at least two parts of the capital on Sunday night.

Nobody was reported shot, but shrapnel from homemade grenades wounded a half-dozen officers during clashes Sunday night with a 700-strong mob in east Belfast, raising the number of police wounded over the past 36 hours to above 40.

Police advised drivers to avoid Protestant parts of the city, where thousands blocked roads and lobbed the grenades a range of other objects at police equipped with helmets, body armour and flame-retardant jumpsuits.

Officers doused crowds with massive water cannons and fired several hundred blunt-nosed plastic bullets.

Chief Constable Hugh Orde, commander of Northern Ireland's mostly Protestant police, blamed the Orange Order 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 claimer Northern Ireland's two major outlawed Protestant paramilitary groups, the Ulster Defence 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 supposed to be observing cease-fires and disarming in support of Northern Ireland's 1998 peace accord, just like the Irish Republican Army (IRA) 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 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.

(China Daily 09/13/2005 page7)