Report from northern Ireland
Belfast is Little Rock revisited
By Richard Becker
Belfast, northern Ireland
The picture on the office wall is from Little Rock,
Arkansas. It's 1957. A young African American woman is
surrounded by young whites, their faces contorted with hatred
as they scream racist insults at her.
The office is not in the U.S. It's in North Belfast,
northern Ireland. This is the office of the Right to Education
Group, whose members are all white. But they compare their
struggle to that in Little Rock. And with good reason.
For 11 weeks, their small children have been subjected to
attack and harassment by a howling and often violent mob. Aged
three to 11, the kids attend Holy Cross Primary School for
Girls on the Ardoyne Road. Bigots scream the most vile
obscenities at the girls and their parents, who must accompany
the students to and from school every day.
The bigots are Loyalists, the mainly Protestant shrinking
majority in northern Ireland. Also known as Unionists, their
loyalty is to Britain.
The girls' parents are Nationalists, mainly Catholic, who
have fought for decades against anti-Catholic discrimination
and for unification with the Republic of Ireland.
"Ardoyne Road is an interface between the Nationalist and
Loyalist communities," said Margaret McLenaghan, a member of
the Sinn Fein party who represents this neighborhood in the
Belfast City Council.
You can see it in the flags. On one side of the street every
street light flies a tattered British Union Jack, as well as
banners of fascist Loyalist groups like the Ulster Defense
Association (UDA) and Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF). On the
other side are the tri-color flags of the Irish Republic.
"Violent attacks are common here," said McLenaghan. "If a
Catholic is walking alone on this side of Ardoyne Road, it is
common for 10 or 15 Loyalists to run across the street, throw
some punches or kicks, and sometimes try to drag the person
back with them."
Brendan Mailey, an organizer with the parents' committee,
told us that even the infamously anti-Nationalist Royal Ulster
Constabulary (RUC) has stated that 92 percent of all
ethnic/religious attacks in the area are carried out by
Loyalists against Nationalists.
The attacks on the Holy Cross students began on Sept. 3,
2001, when school reconvened.
The protests were an initiative of the UDA and other fascist
organizations, which mobilized hundreds of vicious bigots on
the day school started to line the quarter-mile or so of
Ardoyne Road that passes through a Loyalist area.
For a week before Sept. 11, the Holy Cross struggle was in
the world news. The violence of the fascist bigots was an
embarrassment to the British occupiers and their "respectable"
Loyalist allies. The RUC and elements of the British occupation
army had to be called out to create a path through which the
girls and their parents could pass. A bomb was even
detonated.
Like so many other struggles around the world, Holy Cross
school disappeared from the U.S. media after Sept. 11.
"On Sept. 12," McLenaghan told Workers World, "we had a
minute of silence on the way to school in memory of those who
had died in the September 11 attacks. The silence was
disrupted, however, by the bigots screaming, 'Your friends in
America won't be sending you any more money, you Fenian
bastards.' " There is fund-raising for their cause among Irish
Americans.
Out of the world media spotlight, the British government and
the local Unionist authorities allowed the bigots to continue
terrorizing the children.
"What's going on here is child abuse," said Mailey. "These
demonstrations against children shouldn't be allowed at all.
But what the government is trying to do is make them
acceptable."
Protests are 'legitimized'
by police
On the previous day, Nov. 6, Mailey pointed out, the police
had met with Jim Potts of the UDA and others and agreed that if
the protests were slightly modified, the RUC officers would
stop wearing riot gear. "They (RUC) didn't discuss this with us
at all,"said Mailey. "We are opposed to anything that
legitimizes these bigoted protests, when instead they should be
ended altogether."
Walking up to the school and back with the parents and
children was an instant education, even though the bigots were
acting in a restrained manner on Nov. 7. South African
Archbishop Desmond Tutu had visited the school that morning and
some of the international media were with him.
Both sides of Ardoyne Road were lined with more than 50 gray
RUC vehicles, "jeeps" as they're called locally. They look
somewhat like small armored personnel carriers. There were also
several Saracens--wheeled tanks. This gauntlet is staffed with
more than 100 RUC police and dozens of British troops, wearing
camouflage and wielding various automatic weapons.
Most telling, all of the RUC and British soldiers faced
inward, toward the children and parents, their machine gun
barrels parallel to the ground.
The spirit of resistance of the Nationalist community was
evident in the quiet but steely determination of the parents'
committee and other community activists. And it was evident in
the girls, as well.
As we walked back down the hill after school, some of the
older girls started defiantly singing a call-and-response
school song.
Everywhere we go, people want to know
Who we are, where do we come from
And so we tell them, we're from Holy Cross
And if you can't hear us, we'll shout a little louder.
They shouted a lot louder.
Reprinted from the Nov. 29, 2001, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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