After two straight nights of Protestant rioting, Britain decided Tuesday to send hundreds more troops into Northern Ireland to intercept mobs that were hijacking cars, attacking police and erecting flaming barricades.
The widespread unrest is aimed at overturning a ban on a Protestant march through a Catholic neighborhood.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair agreed to meet leaders of the 80,000-strong Protestant Orange Order to discuss whether its members can parade through the main Catholic enclave of Portadown, the group’s spiritual heartland southwest of Belfast.
In Portadown, several hundred would-be marchers camped in tents Tuesday outside the rural Drumcree Anglican church, where extensive barbed-wire barricades prevented their Sunday parade from going near Catholic homes along Garvaghy Road.
They vow to hold their ground until authorities let them complete their parade along the entire route they have used since 1807.
In Washington, the U.S. government backed the British position.
“We understand the deep emotions evoked by the commemorative marchers in Northern Ireland and the difficult choices that the appointed parades commissions must make,” said State Department spokesman James Rubin.
“Public safety and the rights of both communities must be taken into consideration. We urge responsible leaders in both communities to abide by the parades commissions’ decisions and to work to defuse the current impasse.”
The fight over whose rights should prevail–those of the Orangemen or those of Garvaghy Road’s militant Catholics–has sparked sectarian mayhem across Northern Ireland for three summers running, with the Orangemen winning most of the time.
“No march should enter any area where they are not wanted. This is not an issue of conflicting rights. It is an issue of equality, of civil rights,” said Gerry Adams, leader of the Irish Republican Army-allied Sinn Fein party, which in 1995 began organizing opposition to Orange parades that pass near Catholic areas.
Calling the Orange Order a “sectarian, anti-Catholic organization,” Adams said its leaders must meet with the Garvaghy Road protest leader, former IRA prisoner Breandan MacCionnaith.
Instead, Orange leaders plan to meet Thursday with Blair to demand their right “to walk the queen’s highway,” something Blair says cannot happen on Garvaghy Road unless the Orangemen negotiate with their enemies.
The Royal Ulster Constabulary calculated that from Sunday afternoon to Tuesday morning across the province, 42 police officers were wounded, 101 vehicles were set on fire and used as road barricades, 213 other cars were damaged, 110 homes and other buildings vandalized and 63 rioters arrested.
Police said joint police and army patrols were barraged by gasoline bombs on 330 occasions.
The army announced Tuesday that it will reinforce its 18,000- member garrison in Northern Ireland with about 800 soldiers from England.
