Three policemen were shot and slightly wounded in Catholic neighborhoods in north Belfast early Friday after days of Protestant riots leading up to provincewide marches commemorating 17th century battles.
They were the first police officers shot in Northern Ireland since 1994, when the Irish Republican Army began a 17-month cease-fire in its campaign against British rule. There was no indication who fired the shots.In Londonderry, police said 900 gasoline bombs were thrown during the night by Catholic rioters, and 11 police and 40 civilians were injured.
The Royal Ulster Constabulary said two officers were shot in the Ardoyne neighborhood of Belfast about 1:45 a.m. during clashes with youths hijacking vehicles and throwing gasoline bombs. One was hit in the ankle, the other in the hand.
A third officer was shot in the arm 15 minutes later in nearby New Lodge Road, another Catholic stronghold. Two of the three were released from the hospital after treatment.
The violence in Catholic areas followed the surprise decision by police Thursday to let pro-British Protestants march through a Catholic enclave of Portadown, 25 miles southwest of Belfast, following a five-day standoff.
Protestant mobs had rioted throughout Northern Ireland since police first blocked the march Sunday, citing local Catholic opposition.
In south Belfast, British troops and the police sealed off a Catholic neighborhood to quash opposition to another Protestant march marking Northern Ireland's most divisive holiday: the "Twelfth."
An estimated 80,000 members of the Orange Order, Northern Ireland's dominant Protestant fraternal group, planned to march Friday throughout the province to commemorate 17th-century victories over Irish Catholics.
The march along the Lower Ormeau Road of south Belfast passed peacefully Friday morning but with signs of antagonism on both sides. Fife-and-drum bands - including two from Scotland - cranked up the volume as they reached Catholic turf, where a banner on one building read: "Shame on you."
Marchers carried a banner with the motto, "Trust in God and keep your powder dry."
Residents of Lower Ormeau succeeded in blocking several Protestant marches this year by staging sit-down protests. Soldiers and riot police blocked every entrance point and the neighborhood's dozen streets of red-brick houses with armored cars late Thursday and refused to let any visitors in.
"We're all blocked in and there's no way they'll let us out. We're corralled in our streets," said Des McGrady, a local resident who dreaded the approach of the Orangemen.
"With their flags and their drums and their songs, even to hear them is intimidating. Why can't they take a different route? Why do we have to shift over all the time?" McGrady said.
The Orangemen's marches - taken by many Catholics as a demonstration of their second-class status in the Protestant-majority province - are held every July 12. But this year they took place against an exceptionally sour backdrop.
Northern Ireland this week endured four nights of the worst Protestant rioting and civil disobedience seen in a decade after police blocked an annual Orange Order march at an Anglican church north of Portadown. The Orangemen stubbornly held their ground against more than 1,000 riot police backed by troops and marshaled support across the province.
Police caved in Thursday, escorting 1,300 Orangemen down Portadown's Catholic Garvaghy Road - and sparking a fifth night of sporadic unrest, this time by Catholics.
"I think it is intolerable to see the forces of the state capitulate in front of mob violence and the threat of violence," Cardinal Cahal Daly, the leader of Ireland's 4 million Catholics, said Friday.
But Sir Patrick Mayhew, the senior British official in Northern Ireland, said police had a duty to balance the risks.
"How many lives would Cardinal Daly think that it was right to risk losing in order to sustain the decision that had been taken in different circumstances five days earlier?" Mayhew said on BBC radio.
Besides the clashes in north Belfast, Catholics burned an Orange Lodge hall in Broughshane, 14 miles northwest of Belfast and blocked roads in Armagh, the ecclesiastical capital of Ireland 40 miles southwest of Belfast, with at least 15 burning buses and other vehicles.
In Poleglass, an impoverished Catholic district on Belfast's western outskirts, a man was badly burned when his van was struck by a gasoline bomb.