BELFAST: A week of racism-fuelled unrest in Northern Ireland, sparked by rioting in English cities and towns, is proving increasingly difficult to end amid fears that sectarian divisions in the UK region are fuelling the violence.
“They burned everything, there was nothing left inside, just ash,” said Bashir, whose supermarket in Belfast was torched during attacks on foreign-owned shops and businesses.
A mosque in a town near Belfast was also targeted on Friday evening.
“We are scared about what might happen next, there is a lot of hostility against the Muslim community,” said the 28-year-old from Dubai, who did not want to give his full name for security reasons.
In Northern Ireland, there has been night-time rioting, especially in pro-UK loyalist neighbourhoods, which began after an anti-immigration protest in Belfast on 3 August.
The violence mirrors unrest across England, fuelled by misinformation spread on social media about the alleged perpetrator of a knife attack in Southport on 29 July that killed three children.
The Police Department of Northern Ireland (PSNI) said on Saturday that 31 people were arrested during the disturbances.
“At a fundamental level, the Belfast attacks are similar in their dynamic to anti-immigration protests in white working-class areas of England, the Republic of Ireland and elsewhere in Europe,” said Peter McLoughlin, a politics lecturer at Queens University Belfast.
“It is driven by racism and fear of the other, but in Northern Ireland it also interfaces with sectarian political dynamics,” he told AFP.
Three decades of violent sectarian conflict known as the Troubles largely ended in 1998, but bitterness and friction persist between pro-UK Protestant loyalists and pro-Irish unity Catholic nationalists.
Outside Bashir's smoke-scarred shop in the loyalist Sandy Row area of the city centre, British Union Jack flags fly on lampposts and murals painted on walls proclaim a fierce allegiance to the United Kingdom.
“There is a prevailing sense within loyalism, which has been prevalent during the Northern Ireland peace process, that their community is in retreat, that their community and British identity is under attack,” McLoughlin explained.
Many loyalists feel they “have to oppose the arrival of outsiders in those areas, who are seen as stealing supposedly Protestant jobs and homes and invading a once dominant community,” he added.
Following last Saturday’s anti-immigration protest, rioters took to the streets looking for foreign businesses to attack.
“What happened last week was crazy,” Yilmaz Batu, a 64-year-old Turkish chef who has lived in Northern Ireland for two years, told AFP.
“There have never been any problems before,” he said, sitting in Sahara Shisha Cafe, one of several Middle Eastern and Turkish-owned establishments near Sandy Row that were hit.
The Muslim Council of Northern Ireland said in a statement that “the vast majority of the violence has been fomented and fuelled by deliberate misinformation and disinformation on social media”.
“False and dangerous narratives” about Muslims “constituting a small minority in Northern Ireland” had led to the attacks, he added.
Northern Ireland has low immigration rates compared to the rest of the UK and the Republic of Ireland.
The 2021 census showed that around six percent of the population was born outside the UK or Ireland, with around 97 percent describing their ethnicity as white.
The riots were “extremely shocking for the whole community”, said Fiona Doran, chair of the group United Against Racism which co-organised a solidarity rally in Belfast on Saturday.
The demonstration, which attracted several thousand people, gave people “the chance to take to the streets, to show that Belfast is a welcoming city, a city that says no to racism and fascism,” he told AFP.
At an anti-immigration demonstration in Belfast the day before, around a hundred protesters carried British flags and signs reading “Respect our country or leave!”
Some have named Tommy Robinson, a well-known anti-Muslim agitator accused of helping fuel the unrest in England through persistent social media posts about the events.
Nearby, behind rows of armored police vehicles, more than 1,000 counter-protesters chanted “Racists out!”
Bashir told AFP on Saturday he was unsure whether he would reopen his supermarket.
“My question is: can we do it? If we do it, it will be thanks to all the people who came to show us their support,” he said after the solidarity demonstration.
