------------------------- Via Workers World News Service Reprinted from the Nov. 29, 2001 issue of Workers World newspaper -------------------------
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. - END - (Copyright Workers World Service: Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this document, but changing it is not allowed. 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