Remember that scene in the 1980s hit movie Crocodile Dundee when Paul Hogan’s character and his girlfriend become the victims of muggers in New York City. One of the gang members threatens Hogan and his new squeeze with a blade while he demands money from the couple. In response Hogan shakes his head and tells the young man in front of him: “That’s not a knife”. The Australian then pulls out a massive machete to make his point informing the muggers: “Now this is a knife”, and the-would be robbers flee in terror.
The “that’s not a knife” moment comes to mind whenever you compare and contrast rioting in the UK this summer. No one would denigrate the serious nature of the disorder that rocked a number of English cities in August. Think of the three young men mowed down by a hit and run driver while guarding a petrol station in Birmingham’s Dudley Road.
Amid this tragedy came one of the most moving and courageous moments of the year when the father of two of the victims spoke out in favour of inter-communal peace, pleading that there be no more deaths in his city after his sons. Nor should anyone underestimate the mortal danger some of those innocent bystanders caught up in the riots found themselves in, such as the young Polish shop assistant leaping from the flames of a blazing south London building.
However, the rioting, looting, vandalism and assaults from Croydon to Manchester should be placed in some context. A few weeks earlier across the Irish sea, riots erupted firstly in east Belfast and later in the north of the city.
The first of these conflagrations in June involved the loyalist terror group the Ulster Volunteer Force which organised hundreds of rioters, at one stage even temporarily “invading” a small Catholic enclave, the Short Strand. Residents in the nationalist district later told the Guardian that their streets were attacked on two different fronts with sub-military style precision and that many feared for their lives.
Over the next few days the Police Service of Northern Ireland formed a security cordon between the loyalists and the Short Strand with riot police officers coming under constant bombardment with petrol bombs, fireworks, pipe bombs and at one stage gunshots which left a press photographer wounded.
Just over a fortnight later, once the trouble in east Belfast subsided, the action switched to one of the most unstable sectarian interfaces in the north of the city. In what has become an annual event, republican youths from the Ardoyne district rioted for hours on 12 July in protest against a decision to allow a small band of loyalists and Orangemen to pass by their area before joining the main Orange parade in central Belfast.
The rioting at Ardoyne also involved dozens of molotov cocktails being thrown alongside every conceivable piece of debris the violent protestors could dig up around them. Given the accuracy of the masonry and missiles being directed at the police lines you could have been forgiven for thinking that some of the Ardoyne rioters would be ideal candidates for the javelin, discus and shot put teams of the British Olympic team for London 2012 … if of course they were ever prepared to join any entity with the word “British” in it.
One scene stood out during the hours spent hemmed up against the walls of Holy Cross church on Crumlin Road, petrol bombs exploding at our feet, heads constantly bobbing and weaving to avoid the bricks and stones.
One rioter, camouflaged in the ubiquitous uniform of hoodie and football scarf, zigzagged through a hail of plastic bullets to attack a giant white painted water cannon. The youth had a bread knife in his hand and once up beside the vehicle, oblivious to the jets of water directed at him, started to hack away at the tyres.
A phalanx of other rioters gave him “cover” by thrusting forward towards the police lines and hurling rocks at the heavily armed officers. The hooded vandal eventually managed to pierce through the rubber and disabled the water cannon which had to be taken away and replaced later by another. Despite several attempts to arrest him the youth with the knife was able to melt back into the mob at the mouth of Brompton Park.
It is fair to say that the brazen rioter in the hoodie is part of a sub-culture in Northern Ireland that is partly addicted to what is called “recreational rioting” – a social phenomena that is as nihilistic and undirected as the violence and the vandalism that tore through England this summer.
However, not all of those engaged in street disorder such as that which took place at Ardoyne are motivated entirely by nihilism or boredom. They are also fired by sectarian hatred for the other side, historic hatred of the police and, dare we say it, recalcitrant republican ideology.
The crucial difference between the hoodie stabbing at the water cannon’s tyres and the hoodie leaping out of a smashed up Dixons store in Manchester with a DVD player under his arm is that there is more of a political motive to the former.
Like it or not, the tyre-slasher on the Crumlin Road had nothing to gain from his bid to vandalise a heavily armoured police vehicle while dodging plastic bullets and jets of water. Depressing as it sounds, he is a much more formidable problem the state has to deal with in the long term and one whose numbers will grow as the recession deepens and the simplistic mantras of the republican dissidents become more attractive.
In this resume of the violent scenes at the Ardoyne shops last July the key words are “water cannon” and “plastic bullets”. The House of Commons home affairs select committee this week added its voice to those opposed to the deployment of these anti-riot weapons in Britain.
MPs pledged to block any moves by the government to introduce them on to English streets in the event of a repeat of the August riots. That only underlines once again the view held on this side of the sea that there is one law for English, Welsh and Scottish subjects and another for those in Northern Ireland regardless of which part of the sectarian divide they grew up on.
No parliamentary committees or commissions are likely to recommend withdrawing water cannon and plastic baton rounds from the streets of Belfast or Derry despite the later weapon being responsible for the deaths of 17 people since 1969, of whom eight were children.
