BELFAST (Reuters) - Protestant demonstrators clashed with police in Belfast on Saturday, hurling blast bombs, petrol bombs and bricks after a contentious parade by Orangemen near a nationalist area of the city.
Heavily armed riot police fired baton rounds and used water cannon on the angry crowd of around 500 on west Belfast's Springfield Road, and officers also confronted stone-throwing mobs in the north and east of the city.
"We are coming under sustained attack in west Belfast, where there is a serious situation going on, and there are sporadic outbreaks of stone throwing elsewhere in the city," a police spokeswoman said.
She said four officers and two civilians had been injured, one of the civilians with serious gunshot wounds. There were also unconfirmed reports that two officers had been injured by a blast bomb.
She said what was believed to be machinegun fire had been heard on the Springfield Road. A car had been hijacked and set on fire in north Belfast and other vehicles, including a bus, hijacked in the city centre.
The Protestant Orangemen and their supporters had been angered by a decision earlier this week by Northern Ireland's independent Parades Commission to re-route their planned march away from a nationalist enclave on the Springfield Road because of opposition from residents.
Trouble broke out as they approached the contested section of the march, which had been postponed from earlier in the year.
Every summer thousands of Orangemen, wearing colourful regalia and playing music, engage in "a marching season" to celebrate the 17th century defeat in battle of Catholic King James II by the Protestant William of Orange.
Most Catholics in the province regard the marches as an offensive display of triumphalism.
Earlier this week the Orange Order said the decision to re-route Saturday's march was the latest in a series of attempts to "erode Protestant culture" and deny Orangemen their rights, and called on followers to support the parade.
Tension has mounted recently in Protestant communities on the view that the British government has moved too fast to reduce its security presence in the province without any concrete action by the IRA to disarm.
In July the IRA said it was ending its 30-year armed campaign against British rule in Northern Ireland and pledged to dump its weapons, but so far it has shown no sign of doing so.
http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-09-10T185214Z_01_WRI061738_RTRUKOC_0_UK-IRISH-RIOTING.xmlI know there's been basically a riot every night recently in Belfast, but this one seems to be getting serious and there are fears it'll spread throughout Northern Ireland. Later reports on RTE report regular sounds of machine gun fire, and civilians have been injured by gunshots and blast bombs. Also, civilian buses have been stoned until everyone left, then set on fire. There are loads of roadblocks around North, East and West Belfast and the smoke is bellowing out over Belfast.
I really hope this doesn't become another yearly thing, similar to Drumcree. Thoughts?
