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Riots in Belfast: An old conflict flares up again
Photo: Charles McQuillan / Getty Images
They come in small groups, laugh, disappear briefly in the side streets and return with bricks and bottles.
Hundreds of young people put the Northern Irish capital Belfast in a state of emergency.
On Thursday evening, stones and fireworks fell on armored police cars parked on Springfield Road, a street in an Irish Catholic neighborhood.
Neither dozens of social workers nor a police water cannon can calm or deter the angry teenagers.
The security forces block their way to the hated enemies of the Protestant Shankill Road.
Incidentally, the rioters from the opposing sides look very similar: black jackets, black masks, jeans or sweatpants, a lot of pent-up anger and frustration.
"Every year there is tension about Easter, but I haven't seen it get this bad for many years."
Sharon, local resident
The two working-class quarters are separated from each other by a wall, the so-called "peace wall".
It is several meters high and has three parts - concrete, corrugated iron and grating.
The gate in the wall is closed.
On the Protestant side, there is a line of police cars in front of it.
Molotov cocktails flew over the gate on Wednesday evening, and in the end it was broken into.
A public bus was set on fire on Shankill Road.
"Every year there is tension around Easter, but I haven't seen it get this bad for many years," says Sharon, a local resident who watches the riots with her neighbors in the Catholic quarter.
For more than a week, stones and Molotov cocktails have been thrown at the police and cars have been set on fire in Northern Ireland every day.
The riots began in pro-British unionist districts in Londonderry, Belfast and smaller towns such as Ballymena or Carrickfergus.
Since Wednesday there has also been a rebellion in the Catholic quarter around Springfield Road.
More than 50 police officers have already been injured.
The Northern Irish Parliament held a special session on Thursday.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson sent the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland to Belfast.
Brexit is re-fueling the old tensions between pro-Irish republicans and pro-British unionists.
Since the UK left the EU in January, there has been a de facto customs border between the UK and the EU in the Irish Sea.
The so-called Northern Ireland Protocol, on which London and Brussels had agreed, is intended to prevent a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.
"We don't want to be second-class citizens"
This regulation has long caused displeasure among the unionists.
The unionist party DUP demands that the protocol be repealed.
And if you speak to Protestant youths who gather in riots every day in the early evening, they rattle down slogans: “We don't want a border in the Irish Sea.
They are trying to cut us off from England, Scotland and Wales and so have a united Ireland.
That mustn't happen. "
The teenagers, who hide their faces behind masks and don't want to give their names, are not interested in bureaucratic subtleties or supply bottlenecks.
As a group they feel threatened, excluded and disadvantaged.
"We don't want to be second-class citizens," they keep repeating.
The question of where the customs border between Great Britain and the EU runs becomes a question of identity.
A funeral divides Catholics and Protestants
As evidence that Irish Catholics in Northern Ireland, unlike Protestants, supposedly enjoy special privileges, they cite the story of Bobby Storey's funeral.
Storey was once a leader in the Irish Republican Army IRA and was buried with special honors in Belfast in March.
Despite Corona restrictions, more than a thousand people gathered for his funeral, including the chairwoman of the Sinn Féin party, Mary Lou McDonald, and Northern Ireland's Deputy First Minister, Michelle O'Neill.
None of the participants were punished for this.
The case became a political issue when the Northern Irish Prime Minister Arlene Foster demanded the resignation of the police chief from the unionist party DUP.
The outrage over the funeral was one reason the violence escalated.
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Belfast police officers: violence has escalated for days
Photo: Mark Marlow / EPA
The Unionist view that the customs border between Great Britain and Northern Ireland poses an existential threat is shared not only by youth but also by influential adults in Protestant neighborhoods.
When Robert Williamson wants to make it clear that there is no way he will accept a border in the Irish Sea, he points to graffiti in his neighborhood in East Belfast.
This commemorates Protestant victims of the Northern Ireland conflict.
"The slaughter of the innocent by the bloody hands of Sinn Féin / IRA must never be forgotten" is written in red on a black background.
For him, a customs border is the first step towards Irish reunification and that would put Protestants in practical danger.
"We were completely betrayed"
The now 60-year-old Williamson was an activist on the side of loyalists - radical unionists - even as a teenager.
He is now a coordinator at a local organization that works with former loyalist fighters.
And he is a member of the Loyalist Community Council (LCC), an association that also includes representatives of paramilitary unionist groups.
In early March, the LCC announced that it was temporarily withdrawing its support for the Good Friday Agreement because of the Northern Ireland Protocol.
“After Brexit, Prime Minister Johnson came to Belfast and assured us that our British identity was not in danger.
But he lied.
We were completely betrayed, ”says Williamson.
This feeling has prevailed among many unionists.
He says the violence has to stop before someone dies.
But it's not easy, protests are already being planned for the weekend in his own neighborhood via social media.
