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Religious Riots Hit Belfast
Catholic and Protestant rioters bombarded police with rocks, bricks and gasoline bombs Thursday in street warfare that mirrored worsening prospects for Northern Ireland's 1998 peace accord.
For the second straight night, heavily armored police backed by British soldiers kept the rival mobs from attacking each other on the edge of Ardoyne, a hard-line Catholic enclave surrounded by militant Protestant neighborhoods.
The previous night, rioters threw more than 100 gasoline bombs and several homemade grenades at police lines, injuring 39 officers, five seriously, police said.
No civilians were reported hospitalized, even though Protestant militants threw at least two crude pipebombs into the back yards of Catholic-occupied homes.
One blast Thursday afternoon knocked a 5-year-old boy into a fence, locals said. Police who responded to the blast leapt to safety when a second device thrown by Protestants failed to detonate; almost as soon as they'd gotten back up, they suffered a barrage of bricks and bottles from Catholics.
Just like their politicians, who are struggling to keep a joint Catholic-Protestant government running as the 1998 pact intended, the two sides in the Ardoyne dispute blame each other.
The Catholics say Protestants on Tuesday began throwing rocks at schoolgirls leaving Holy Cross Primary School, which sits beside the few remaining Protestant-occupied streets in Ardoyne.
The Protestants ¡ª who on Thursday blocked the main road outside the school and forced parents to escort their children via a back entrance ¡ª insist the violence began Tuesday when IRA supporters from Ardoyne attacked Protestants erecting flags on Protestant streets beside the school.
Those flags honor the Ulster Volunteer Force, an outlawed paramilitary group that, like the IRA, is supposed to be observing a cease-fire in support of the 1998 pact.
The hatred between the two camps came to the surface outside the school, where officers in helmets, masks and shields formed a human barrier.
Police said bullets were fired at their positions late Wednesday from both UVF and IRA turf, suggesting that members of both groups were involved in the violence.
Both sides concede the wider issue ¡ª common to most intercommunal Northern Ireland disputes ¡ª is the question of control. North Belfast was once predominantly Protestant, but is turning increasingly Catholic.
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