Belfast Catholics riot over Protestant parade

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(Agencies)
Updated: 2009-07-14 11:49

The often elderly, conservatively dressed Orangemen are accompanied by so-called "kick the pope" bands whose hard-faced, tattooed members play an odd mix of Gospel and sectarian tunes on shrill flutes and deafening drums.

Monday's parades were preceded by a string of overnight attacks northwest of Belfast that damaged two Orange halls and two Protestant homes, one of them gutted by fire. Catholic youths cheered the blaze and jeered the home's elderly occupants, who vowed to leave behind their Catholic neighbors after 32 years.

Belfast Catholics riot over Protestant parade
An Orangemen marches during the annual 12th of July Celebrations in Belfast July 13, 2009. On the 12th of July every year Protestants and Loyalists commemorate King William of Orange's victory over King James at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, but the commemorations were but back by a day this year as the 12th fell on a Sunday. [Agencies]

And Catholic youths struck two departing Orangemen in the head with rocks in the village of Rasharkin. Three police officers were injured in subsequent scuffles with Catholics, who threw several Molotov cocktails. One rioter was arrested.

During another Orange parade in the city of Armagh, 40 miles (65 kilometers) southwest of Belfast, police evacuated a major street called Friary Road after spotting a small bomb. It detonated, injuring nobody and causing little damage, before British army experts could defuse it using a remote-controlled robot.

No group claimed responsibility but police and politicians blamed IRA dissidents who reject the underground group's 2005 disarmament. Analysts agree that the dissidents' sporadic bombings and shootings stand no chance of forcing Northern Ireland out of the United Kingdom, the traditional IRA goal.

Scores of Catholic youths later attacked police on Friary Road with Molotov cocktails and other thrown objects. They also hijacked and burned two cars on the road. Police arrested four rioters.

"The Twelfth" officially commemorates the July 12, 1690, triumph of Protestant King William of Orange versus his Catholic rival for the English throne, James II, at the Battle of the Boyne south of Belfast. This year the parades took place on the 13th because Orangemen - who march beneath banners depicting the British crown on an open Bible - refuse to hold the holiday on a Sunday.

Orangemen once marched wherever they wanted in Northern Ireland, a state created on the back of Orange power as the predominantly Catholic rest of Ireland won independence from Britain in the early 1920s.

Catholic hostility to Protestant parades helped ignite a conflict over Northern Ireland's future that claimed more than 3,600 lives from the late 1960s to mid-1990s, when paramilitary cease-fires finally took hold.

At that time, the IRA-linked Sinn Fein party led protests blocking Orangemen's traditional marching routes in several cities, towns and villages. The tactic brought Northern Ireland to the brink of civil war - and ultimately ended in broad defeat for the Orangemen, who refused to negotiate on their marching rights until it was too late.

Britain punished the Orangemen's stubbornness by imposing bans on parades that encountered the heaviest opposition from Catholics. The Orangemen spent years mounting violent standoffs with British security forces in hopes of regaining lost ground, but eventually gave up.

The Crumlin Road beside Ardoyne is the only remaining parading point in Belfast that inspires recurring violence. There, the Orangemen have no obvious alternative way to march from their lodges to central Belfast and back again.

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