BELFAST: Hundreds of police reinforcements from Britain were deployed on Belfast’s rubble-strewn streets yesterday after Protestant riots over a blocked Orange Order march left 32 officers, a senior lawmaker and at least eight rioters wounded.
Northern Ireland’s police commander, Chief Constable Matt Baggott, blamed leaders of the Orange Order brotherhood for inciting six hours of running street battles in two parts of Belfast that subsided early Saturday. He derided their leadership as reckless and said they had no plan for controlling crowds they had summoned.
The anti-Catholic fraternity’s annual July 12 marches always raise tensions with the Irish Catholic minority. Over each of the previous four years, Irish republican militants in Ardoyne have attacked police after an Orange parade passed by that Catholic district in north Belfast, the most bitterly divided part of the capital.
This year British authorities ordered Orangemen to avoid the stretch of road nearest Ardoyne, an order that police enforced by blocking their parade route with seven armored vehicles. Orange leaders took that as a challenge and rallied thousands of supporters to the spot, where some attacked the vehicles and the lines of heavily armored officers behind them.
Baggott said the Orange leaders’ decisions were reckless and designed to duck responsibility for the mayhem.
“Having called thousands of people to protest, they had no plan and no control,” said Baggott, an Englishman who has commanded the Police Service of Northern Ireland since 2009.
Orange leaders insisted the blockade was the problem, not the alcohol-fueled fury of their own members. But they backed off their original threat to mount indefinite street protests across Northern Ireland and ordered a suspension of protests early Saturday. The Order’s leaders declined requests for interviews yesterday.
32 policemen injured in Belfast violence
