Beorn
06-20-2009, 02:04 PM
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2009/06/20/article-0-05614EF6000005DC-506_468x313.jpg
On a piece of waste ground poisoned by toxic chemicals, a group of teenagers were indulging in an age-old ritual this week.
They were making a giant bonfire from old crates and timber stolen from derelict buildings.
When a huge pyre had been erected, the youths retired to admire their work from the ‘den’, a hut they’d built for their gang from scrap and furnished with sofas found dumped on the street.
There were even broken venetian blinds at the front of the hut, which twisted and moaned in the wind.
Next month, on July 11, the night before the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne — when Protestant King William of Orange defeated the Catholic King James in 1690 — the bonfire will be set ablaze.
Along with hundreds of other bonfires lit across Belfast that night, the flames are meant to remind the Catholic majority of that historic Protestant victory, and serve warning that Loyalists will still fight fire with fire if any attempt is made to separate them from British rule.
Yet, as they prepared their fire to coincide with Ulster’s ‘marching season’, it transpired that this generation of young men had also been involved in a sinister, disturbing new ritual: mounting racial attacks on the ‘foreigners’ in their midst.
With swastikas daubed on the walls of their den, these youths — aged from 14 to 20 — admitted they had been present during the attacks on Romanian immigrants this week that made headlines around the world.
‘So what if we were?’ said one, curling his lip. ‘They had it coming.’
To cries of anguish from politicians and citizens alike, the tumultuous events of the past week have again thrust Belfast to the forefront of world attention, after more than 100 Romanian gipsies, known as Roma, were forced to flee in terror when gangs armed with bottles and rocks drove them from their homes.
In echoes of the sectarian violence at the height of The Troubles, when those from the ‘wrong’ religion were burned out of their homes, these attacks happened in an affluent, liberal part of the city, home to Queen’s University and countless trendy bars and bistros.
Violence flared when more than 30 youths gathered outside the homes of about 20 Roma on Sunday night, taunting and jeering and smashing their windows.
They came again the following night, hurling rocks and bottles at the windows and making Nazi salutes.
The Romanian families, including a five-day-old baby girl, cowered inside as the mob shouted and swore that the foreign gipsy ‘scum’ should pack up and go — or face the consequences.
After police were called, the mob was dispersed and about 20 Romanian families emerged from their damaged homes. Clutching old suitcases and blankets, and looking terrified as the cameras recorded their every move, they were given shelter in a local church hall.
But their numbers grew. By Wednesday morning, 115 Roma had congregated, telling the authorities that they did not feel safe in their own homes. As one man lugged an accordion past the waiting photographers, and women sobbed, pictures of these pitiful scenes went round the world.
After being moved into a leisure centre, where mattresses were spread out on indoor tennis courts and local people donated soup and sandwiches, the few Romanians who could speak English claimed that some of the attackers had been armed with guns, although the police later said they had no evidence to support this.
‘They made signs like they wanted to cut my brother’s baby’s throat,’ said Couaccusil Filuis, who’d come from a
village near Bucharest, the Romanian capital. ‘They said they wanted to kill us. We are very scared. We have young children. We could go back to Romania, but we have no money. We have to stay here.’
Strugurel Teglas, another Roma, who had been selling newspapers and washing cars in Belfast, said: ‘No money for food in Romania.
'Romania no job. Belfast job. But ten persons come. They drink. They broke in the house. They no good.’
Understandably, the scenes of foreigners being evacuated with their belongings were received with horror.
This, after all, is a city still nervously emerging from decades of violence and bloodshed. The last thing anyone wants to see is new fissures in Ulster’s tragic history of ethnic hatred.
Indeed, so appalled was Naomi Long, the Lord Mayor of Belfast, that she was in tears when she was asked about the violence.
‘A minority of people in this city have brought shame on us and I urge the good people of Belfast, the overwhelming majority, to co-operate with the police and bring the perpetrators of these racist attacks to justice.’
As Gordon Brown called on the authorities to take all possible action to end the violence, and former IRA terrorists now sharing power condemned those involved in the violence, Mrs Long pledged to do everything possible to persuade the Romanians to stay in Northern Ireland.
‘If they go back to Romania, the thugs will think they have won,’ she added. ‘That is the last thing we want. We must find them permanent new homes.’
Not everyone shares her sentiments. There was fury in The Village, a rugged working-class area a mile from the attacks, some of whose residents joined the mob wanting to drive the Roma out.
With murals of the Queen painted on walls and Union Jacks fluttering from virtually every window, the people of The Village are incensed at the ‘special treatment’ they say immigrants receive, while they themselves live in grim terrace homes with outside toilets.
‘These people are sly,’ said Annie Johnson, a local woman. ‘It’s all just a racket — they put on their sad faces and get moved to the top of the queue for housing.
‘Politicians are full of cr*p. They leap into action at the first mention of racism — but what about the poor people who have lived here all their lives?’
Opinion has been inflamed not only by the crimes the police and locals agree some of the Roma commit — but also by the fact that no one has even been able to debate the issue of their presence in the city without being accused of racism .
Ian Magill, 45, runs the only shop in The Village, which was once a stronghold for Loyalist terrorists. He is a calm, intelligent man, whose greatest wish is that his three sons do not get into trouble with the law.
Dominic, his youngest son, was adopted from Croatia, so Mr Magill can hardly be described as someone with a hatred of foreigners.
But he is under no illusions about why people from his area were involved in the violence.
‘People feel like they are under siege because of all the immigrants coming in,’ he said. ‘It’s getting to the stage where people just don’t care any more.
‘You get branded a racist if you speak out about the issue of immigration. But I think I’m being a realist, not a racist, when I say that this is something we must address.
‘Most of the Polish immigrants work — but these people [Romas] don’t,’ he added.
‘They are pretty uneducated and they seem to think that the only way they can survive is to bend the rules.
‘But when you are doing this, and carrying out crimes against local people, it becomes a problem. They shouldn’t be here.’
Not all Mr Magill’s fellow citizens are as considered as he is. At a nearby off-licence, a young, welldressed man of about 30 erupts in anger.
He says all these ‘foreigners should be burned out of their f****** homes. All we hear about are their problems. For once, why don’t you write about the problems these people cause to us locals’.
He is referring to a wave of petty crime that has swept Belfast over the past two years — the period in which the Roma have arrived.
The crimes, confirmed by police, range from ‘mobbing’ elderly ladies at cashpoint machines, distracting them while they steal cash, to using razor blades to slice the straps of handbags and disappear with possessions before anyone knows.
Roma have also been linked with prostitution and people trafficking. But it is the petty crimes that are causing such fury.
Countless people I spoke to in The Village reported clothes being stolen from their washing lines — one man claimed to have seen a Roma wearing his distinctive jeans, which had disappeared while hanging out to dry, only for the thief to laugh in his face — and children’s bikes being taken from back yards.
Of course, no one is suggesting that every Roma in Belfast is a criminal. And it’s also true that many in the province are deeply troubled by the presence of any foreigners, however law-abiding they might be.
Northern Ireland during The Troubles was hardly an ideal destination to start a new life — with more than 3,000 murdered during the decades of bloodshed between Catholics and Protestants.
Things changed after the 1998 peace agreement, however, and as Britain’s borders were thrown open by Tony Blair, Ulster became a popular destination for immigrants from Poland and other parts of Eastern Europe.
The British government, of course, insisted that only 20,000 people would come from Europe. In reality, a staggering 600,000 poured into the United Kingdom, putting a huge strain on health services, housing and jobs.
But it was the admission of Romania to the EU in 2007 that caused the gravest problems.
Interpol has since warned that organised criminals among the Romanian immigrants are stealing from indigenous populations on the orders of gangsters back home.
British police said last year that they were struggling to cope with a staggering 800 per cent increase in crimes, such as pickpocketing, committed by Romanians since they started coming to Britain in large numbers.
Forces in Germany and France have also reported more crime, some of it violent. In Italy, murders, rapes and kidnappings have been blamed on the newcomers.
Inevitably, there is a danger that Roma are unjustly blamed for the crimes of others. But acts of retaliation are taking place everywhere.
Marian Mandache, of Romani Criss, a group dedicated to helping the gipsies, says the violence in Belfast follows a disturbing trend of assaults on the Roma across
Europe. ‘Starting in Italy, there have been waves of attacks — as well as in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, everywhere.’
Racial tensions are rising throughout Europe as the pace of immigration intensifies and economies deteriorate. In Italy, the authorities have started fingerprinting Roma immigrants and repatriating them after their alleged crimes led to waves of brutal, retaliatory attacks by locals.
More than 1,000 Roma have arrived in Northern Ireland.
Few speak English and ‘begging gangs’ now operate throughout Belfast.
Local tourism websites are clogged with comments about aggressive beggars, pickpockets and con artists — though clearly they are not all Roma.
‘The fact is, we’ve seen a lot of things change here — foreign people selling the Belfast Telegraph on the streets, something you didn’t see before,’ said Jolena Flett of the Northern Ireland Council for Ethnic Minorities.
‘They are easily identifiable. When people are looking for a fight, as a lot of people are now, just because of frustrations in their own lives, anything will spark it off.’
Of course, no right-thinking person can condone the attacks that have seen the Roma families moved this weekend to a new, secret location. :rolleyes:
Yet it is the lack of debate (or action) on immigration by politicians that has contributed to these festering frustrations, just as it has led to the appalling spectre of two seats for the British National Party in this month’s European elections.
In The Village, people are taking the law into their own hands. There are countless derelict, boarded-up homes after people have been ‘put out’ — slang for driven from the area.
But it’s not just immigrants: many white Northern Irish families have been sent packing as well; anyone, in fact, caught indulging in ‘ antisocial behaviour’ — from having late-night parties to stealing or dealing in drugs.
Back at the Loyalist ‘den’ on wasteland, the youths say they are simply doing what their communities have done for years: policing and punishing the criminals among them. ‘Putting them out of their homes’ can even involve petrol bombs being thrown through the windows.
‘We see them [Roma] sneaking about, looking in our dad’s car windows and eyeing up our bikes,’ said one of the youths, none of whom would give their names. ‘There were fights with some of them a few weeks back.
‘We just can’t be having them doing these sorts of things. We need to stand up and be counted.’
Tragically, it doesn’t occur to them that they are now visiting on these newcomers to Belfast the same mindless prejudice, hatred and violence that was once inflicted on them by the IRA.
Perhaps the last word should go to 39-year-old Belfast delivery driver Anton Bremner. ‘In 1969, people were chased out of their homes because of religion,’ he said. ‘Now it’s because of race.
‘The last thing anyone needs here is more division and conflict. For God’s sake, after all the bloodshed over the years, can’t we all just live peacefully alongside our neighbours, whatever religion or race?’Source (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1194358/SPECIAL-INVESTIGATION-As-hate-filled-mobs-drive-Romanian-gipsies-Ulster-ask-whos-REALLY-blame.html)
On a piece of waste ground poisoned by toxic chemicals, a group of teenagers were indulging in an age-old ritual this week.
They were making a giant bonfire from old crates and timber stolen from derelict buildings.
When a huge pyre had been erected, the youths retired to admire their work from the ‘den’, a hut they’d built for their gang from scrap and furnished with sofas found dumped on the street.
There were even broken venetian blinds at the front of the hut, which twisted and moaned in the wind.
Next month, on July 11, the night before the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne — when Protestant King William of Orange defeated the Catholic King James in 1690 — the bonfire will be set ablaze.
Along with hundreds of other bonfires lit across Belfast that night, the flames are meant to remind the Catholic majority of that historic Protestant victory, and serve warning that Loyalists will still fight fire with fire if any attempt is made to separate them from British rule.
Yet, as they prepared their fire to coincide with Ulster’s ‘marching season’, it transpired that this generation of young men had also been involved in a sinister, disturbing new ritual: mounting racial attacks on the ‘foreigners’ in their midst.
With swastikas daubed on the walls of their den, these youths — aged from 14 to 20 — admitted they had been present during the attacks on Romanian immigrants this week that made headlines around the world.
‘So what if we were?’ said one, curling his lip. ‘They had it coming.’
To cries of anguish from politicians and citizens alike, the tumultuous events of the past week have again thrust Belfast to the forefront of world attention, after more than 100 Romanian gipsies, known as Roma, were forced to flee in terror when gangs armed with bottles and rocks drove them from their homes.
In echoes of the sectarian violence at the height of The Troubles, when those from the ‘wrong’ religion were burned out of their homes, these attacks happened in an affluent, liberal part of the city, home to Queen’s University and countless trendy bars and bistros.
Violence flared when more than 30 youths gathered outside the homes of about 20 Roma on Sunday night, taunting and jeering and smashing their windows.
They came again the following night, hurling rocks and bottles at the windows and making Nazi salutes.
The Romanian families, including a five-day-old baby girl, cowered inside as the mob shouted and swore that the foreign gipsy ‘scum’ should pack up and go — or face the consequences.
After police were called, the mob was dispersed and about 20 Romanian families emerged from their damaged homes. Clutching old suitcases and blankets, and looking terrified as the cameras recorded their every move, they were given shelter in a local church hall.
But their numbers grew. By Wednesday morning, 115 Roma had congregated, telling the authorities that they did not feel safe in their own homes. As one man lugged an accordion past the waiting photographers, and women sobbed, pictures of these pitiful scenes went round the world.
After being moved into a leisure centre, where mattresses were spread out on indoor tennis courts and local people donated soup and sandwiches, the few Romanians who could speak English claimed that some of the attackers had been armed with guns, although the police later said they had no evidence to support this.
‘They made signs like they wanted to cut my brother’s baby’s throat,’ said Couaccusil Filuis, who’d come from a
village near Bucharest, the Romanian capital. ‘They said they wanted to kill us. We are very scared. We have young children. We could go back to Romania, but we have no money. We have to stay here.’
Strugurel Teglas, another Roma, who had been selling newspapers and washing cars in Belfast, said: ‘No money for food in Romania.
'Romania no job. Belfast job. But ten persons come. They drink. They broke in the house. They no good.’
Understandably, the scenes of foreigners being evacuated with their belongings were received with horror.
This, after all, is a city still nervously emerging from decades of violence and bloodshed. The last thing anyone wants to see is new fissures in Ulster’s tragic history of ethnic hatred.
Indeed, so appalled was Naomi Long, the Lord Mayor of Belfast, that she was in tears when she was asked about the violence.
‘A minority of people in this city have brought shame on us and I urge the good people of Belfast, the overwhelming majority, to co-operate with the police and bring the perpetrators of these racist attacks to justice.’
As Gordon Brown called on the authorities to take all possible action to end the violence, and former IRA terrorists now sharing power condemned those involved in the violence, Mrs Long pledged to do everything possible to persuade the Romanians to stay in Northern Ireland.
‘If they go back to Romania, the thugs will think they have won,’ she added. ‘That is the last thing we want. We must find them permanent new homes.’
Not everyone shares her sentiments. There was fury in The Village, a rugged working-class area a mile from the attacks, some of whose residents joined the mob wanting to drive the Roma out.
With murals of the Queen painted on walls and Union Jacks fluttering from virtually every window, the people of The Village are incensed at the ‘special treatment’ they say immigrants receive, while they themselves live in grim terrace homes with outside toilets.
‘These people are sly,’ said Annie Johnson, a local woman. ‘It’s all just a racket — they put on their sad faces and get moved to the top of the queue for housing.
‘Politicians are full of cr*p. They leap into action at the first mention of racism — but what about the poor people who have lived here all their lives?’
Opinion has been inflamed not only by the crimes the police and locals agree some of the Roma commit — but also by the fact that no one has even been able to debate the issue of their presence in the city without being accused of racism .
Ian Magill, 45, runs the only shop in The Village, which was once a stronghold for Loyalist terrorists. He is a calm, intelligent man, whose greatest wish is that his three sons do not get into trouble with the law.
Dominic, his youngest son, was adopted from Croatia, so Mr Magill can hardly be described as someone with a hatred of foreigners.
But he is under no illusions about why people from his area were involved in the violence.
‘People feel like they are under siege because of all the immigrants coming in,’ he said. ‘It’s getting to the stage where people just don’t care any more.
‘You get branded a racist if you speak out about the issue of immigration. But I think I’m being a realist, not a racist, when I say that this is something we must address.
‘Most of the Polish immigrants work — but these people [Romas] don’t,’ he added.
‘They are pretty uneducated and they seem to think that the only way they can survive is to bend the rules.
‘But when you are doing this, and carrying out crimes against local people, it becomes a problem. They shouldn’t be here.’
Not all Mr Magill’s fellow citizens are as considered as he is. At a nearby off-licence, a young, welldressed man of about 30 erupts in anger.
He says all these ‘foreigners should be burned out of their f****** homes. All we hear about are their problems. For once, why don’t you write about the problems these people cause to us locals’.
He is referring to a wave of petty crime that has swept Belfast over the past two years — the period in which the Roma have arrived.
The crimes, confirmed by police, range from ‘mobbing’ elderly ladies at cashpoint machines, distracting them while they steal cash, to using razor blades to slice the straps of handbags and disappear with possessions before anyone knows.
Roma have also been linked with prostitution and people trafficking. But it is the petty crimes that are causing such fury.
Countless people I spoke to in The Village reported clothes being stolen from their washing lines — one man claimed to have seen a Roma wearing his distinctive jeans, which had disappeared while hanging out to dry, only for the thief to laugh in his face — and children’s bikes being taken from back yards.
Of course, no one is suggesting that every Roma in Belfast is a criminal. And it’s also true that many in the province are deeply troubled by the presence of any foreigners, however law-abiding they might be.
Northern Ireland during The Troubles was hardly an ideal destination to start a new life — with more than 3,000 murdered during the decades of bloodshed between Catholics and Protestants.
Things changed after the 1998 peace agreement, however, and as Britain’s borders were thrown open by Tony Blair, Ulster became a popular destination for immigrants from Poland and other parts of Eastern Europe.
The British government, of course, insisted that only 20,000 people would come from Europe. In reality, a staggering 600,000 poured into the United Kingdom, putting a huge strain on health services, housing and jobs.
But it was the admission of Romania to the EU in 2007 that caused the gravest problems.
Interpol has since warned that organised criminals among the Romanian immigrants are stealing from indigenous populations on the orders of gangsters back home.
British police said last year that they were struggling to cope with a staggering 800 per cent increase in crimes, such as pickpocketing, committed by Romanians since they started coming to Britain in large numbers.
Forces in Germany and France have also reported more crime, some of it violent. In Italy, murders, rapes and kidnappings have been blamed on the newcomers.
Inevitably, there is a danger that Roma are unjustly blamed for the crimes of others. But acts of retaliation are taking place everywhere.
Marian Mandache, of Romani Criss, a group dedicated to helping the gipsies, says the violence in Belfast follows a disturbing trend of assaults on the Roma across
Europe. ‘Starting in Italy, there have been waves of attacks — as well as in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, everywhere.’
Racial tensions are rising throughout Europe as the pace of immigration intensifies and economies deteriorate. In Italy, the authorities have started fingerprinting Roma immigrants and repatriating them after their alleged crimes led to waves of brutal, retaliatory attacks by locals.
More than 1,000 Roma have arrived in Northern Ireland.
Few speak English and ‘begging gangs’ now operate throughout Belfast.
Local tourism websites are clogged with comments about aggressive beggars, pickpockets and con artists — though clearly they are not all Roma.
‘The fact is, we’ve seen a lot of things change here — foreign people selling the Belfast Telegraph on the streets, something you didn’t see before,’ said Jolena Flett of the Northern Ireland Council for Ethnic Minorities.
‘They are easily identifiable. When people are looking for a fight, as a lot of people are now, just because of frustrations in their own lives, anything will spark it off.’
Of course, no right-thinking person can condone the attacks that have seen the Roma families moved this weekend to a new, secret location. :rolleyes:
Yet it is the lack of debate (or action) on immigration by politicians that has contributed to these festering frustrations, just as it has led to the appalling spectre of two seats for the British National Party in this month’s European elections.
In The Village, people are taking the law into their own hands. There are countless derelict, boarded-up homes after people have been ‘put out’ — slang for driven from the area.
But it’s not just immigrants: many white Northern Irish families have been sent packing as well; anyone, in fact, caught indulging in ‘ antisocial behaviour’ — from having late-night parties to stealing or dealing in drugs.
Back at the Loyalist ‘den’ on wasteland, the youths say they are simply doing what their communities have done for years: policing and punishing the criminals among them. ‘Putting them out of their homes’ can even involve petrol bombs being thrown through the windows.
‘We see them [Roma] sneaking about, looking in our dad’s car windows and eyeing up our bikes,’ said one of the youths, none of whom would give their names. ‘There were fights with some of them a few weeks back.
‘We just can’t be having them doing these sorts of things. We need to stand up and be counted.’
Tragically, it doesn’t occur to them that they are now visiting on these newcomers to Belfast the same mindless prejudice, hatred and violence that was once inflicted on them by the IRA.
Perhaps the last word should go to 39-year-old Belfast delivery driver Anton Bremner. ‘In 1969, people were chased out of their homes because of religion,’ he said. ‘Now it’s because of race.
‘The last thing anyone needs here is more division and conflict. For God’s sake, after all the bloodshed over the years, can’t we all just live peacefully alongside our neighbours, whatever religion or race?’Source (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1194358/SPECIAL-INVESTIGATION-As-hate-filled-mobs-drive-Romanian-gipsies-Ulster-ask-whos-REALLY-blame.html)