Northern Ireland | Racist violence fuelled by historical resentment

(Belfast) “They burned everything”: the grocery store run by Bashir is among the targets of racist and Islamophobic violence that continues in Northern Ireland, despite the return to calm observed in the rest of the United Kingdom following the far-right riots.

“There is nothing left inside, just ashes,” laments the 28-year-old shopkeeper. “We are afraid of what might happen after this, there is a strong hostility towards the Muslim community,” Bashir, originally from Dubai, who prefers not to give his last name, told AFP.

His Belfast store, now under the Iron Curtain, was set on fire in a wave of attacks in recent days on foreign-owned businesses. A mosque was also vandalised near the Northern Irish capital on Friday night.

The violence followed, as in England, the knife attack that cost the lives of three girls aged six to nine on July 29 in Southport, against a backdrop of online rumours – since partly denied – about the profile of the suspect.

But unlike the rest of the country, they have continued in recent days, giving rise to more than thirty arrests according to the latest police report and highlighting the tensions inherited from a bloody past.

Citing “racism and fear of the other,” Peter McLoughlin, a political scientist at Queens University Belfast, places these attacks in “the same dynamic as anti-immigration protests in white working-class areas of England, the Republic of Ireland and the rest of Europe.”

“But in Northern Ireland, they are also part of political dynamics linked to community divisions,” he adds.

Identity “threatened”

The violence took place mainly in unionist districts – mainly Protestant – attached to belonging to the United Kingdom, after an anti-immigration rally on August 3.

A peace agreement in 1998 ended three decades of bloody conflict between unionists and republicans, mainly Catholics, who favoured unification with the Republic of Ireland (3,500 dead). But the resentment has not disappeared.

Outside Bashir’s shop, which is in a unionist neighborhood, Union Jacks – British flags – fly from lampposts and graffiti reminds people of allegiance to the United Kingdom.

“The loyalists felt throughout the peace process, […] that their community and British identity were under threat,” said Peter McLoughlin.

Some therefore believe that they “must prevent the arrival of those who are seen as outsiders, who supposedly take their Protestant jobs and homes, and come to encroach on a population that was once dominant,” adds the academic.

Signs of decline are multiplying, such as the once unthinkable victory of the republican party Sinn Fein in the last local elections or the latest census showing that Catholics now outnumber Protestants in this territory formed as a Protestant enclave on a Catholic island at the time of the partition of Ireland in 1921.

“Shocking”

“What happened last week is completely crazy,” said Yilmaz Batu, a 64-year-old Turkish chef who has lived in Northern Ireland for two years and sat outside a shisha bar that was targeted. “We’ve never had any problems before.”

The Muslim Council of Northern Ireland has denounced violence fuelled by “deliberate misinformation on social media”.

The British province has much lower levels of immigration than the rest of the UK or neighbouring Ireland. According to the 2021 census, only 6% of the population was born outside these two countries and 97% of respondents identified themselves as “white”.

The violence “was extremely shocking for the whole population,” said Fiona Doran, chairwoman of the anti-racist group United Against Racism, which brought 5,000 people onto the streets of Belfast on Saturday.

The day before, around a hundred people had taken part in an anti-migrant rally with British flags and signs saying “Respect our country or leave!”

Bashir, for his part, wonders if he will be able to reopen his grocery store: “If so, it will be thanks to all those who supported us.”