Fresh violence erupted across Northern Ireland early Tuesday with fires and riots in retaliation for Britain's decision to allow Protestant marchers through a Catholic neighborhood.
A policeman was shot and wounded on Garvaghy Road, the Roman Catholic enclave in the predominantly Protestant town of Portadown where clashes were triggered Sunday.In north Belfast, a Protestant man was wounded in a burst of gunfire from the Catholic Ardoyne neighborhood as he stood on the street with a group of other Protestants.
Since the disturbances broke out early Sunday, there have been 776 attacks on police and soldiers, 1,444 gasoline bombings and 363 hijackings, police said Tuesday. About 60 police officers and 49 civilians have been injured, and the security forces fired 2,400 plastic bullets in the clashes.
Rioters in Strabane, 65 miles west of Belfast, threw about 250 gasoline bombs overnight at police officers who responded with plastic bullets, police said.
In southwest Belfast, a Protestant militant died Monday when a pipe bomb he was carrying exploded in his hands.
Early Tuesday, arsonists set fire to Protestant meeting halls in Portadown, Ballycastle and Moy, police said. The halls, belonging to Orange Order, the dominant Protestant fraternal group, were empty at the time.
The second night of rioting battered hopes for a new Irish Republican Army cease-fire and progress in negotiations for a wider peace settlement in British-ruled Northern Ireland.
Britain had hoped to avoid the Protestant unrest that erupted last year when it tried to block the Orangemen's annual march. On Sunday, police and soldiers forced the march through a Catholic neighborhood, setting off violent Catholic protests.
Britain's new Northern Ireland secretary, Mo Mowlam, admitted Monday that she had fumbled her first crisis.
Tuesday, Mowlam was caught in a furor over a leaked document that appeared to indicate the government decided as early as June 20 that permitting the march was "the least worst option."
"It really reveals incredible thinking or indeed makes one wonder: Was there any thinking at all?" said John Hume, leader of the moderate Social Democratic and Labor Party, which gets most of the Catholic vote in Northern Ireland.
Mowlam denied any prior decision had been made. "We didn't reach a consensus because I didn't have a view outside the desire to reach accommodation," she said Tuesday.
Mowlam approved Sunday's pre-dawn military operation on Portadown's Garvaghy Road, which kept the area's 3,000 residents locked in behind more than 100 armored cars and 1,500 riot police and troops. On Monday, she used the words "least worst option" to describe her decision to allow the Orangemen to march quickly and quietly.
Mowlam, appointed just two months ago, said Protestants would have staged widespread mayhem if the Orangemen had been blocked - and some might have killed Catholic civilians - as happened last year when police blocked the same march for four nights.
In that case, police capitulated to the Protestants, sparking even fiercer Catholic rioting.