The impact of the protests goes far beyond the immigrants who were the target of racist attacks
Belfast is slowly returning to normality after a week of violence.
Anyone who is in town today and hasn’t seen the news in the last few days might think that nothing happened. But you just need to pay attention to see the destruction left by the protests and the burning smell of burning houses and cars that, like the fear of immigrants slowly returning to their workplaces and their lives, is still felt here.
He started it all with a video of a knife attack that happened earlier in the week, carried out by a Sudanese migrant who was living in Northern Ireland on refugee status. The video, which shows the man mutilating and seriously injuring another man who was left in critical condition, spread like wildfire across the internet.
Hours after the video was published, addresses were also published where immigrants allegedly lived and worked, and peaceful demonstrations quickly turned into attacks against any immigrant and anyone who was not white.
Many families had to leave their homes for fear of being attacked and were transferred to hotels.
“We’re afraid to go out to the grocery store,” a boy who moved to Northern Ireland just two months ago tells me and has chosen to stay. He is translating the conversation from English to Arabic on his cell phone, and asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation. “The house of an acquaintance of mine was attacked,” says the screen. “It’s very scary.”
Moments earlier, an immigrant wearing a jilbab walking her young daughter admitted that she is terrified.
But the impact of the protests goes far beyond the immigrants who were targets of racist attacks.
Many stores remain closed, or close earlier than usual. The trainer at a gym on the street where the protests took place told me that more than 100 people canceled their memberships in just two days because of the protests.
“It’s not just us who are being affected”, explains to me the owner of a restaurant in the north of the city that had been closed in recent days. He moved to Northern Ireland 21 years ago and says he has never seen anything like it. “It’s affecting the entire community.”
In this part of the city, where much of the violence took place, you see British flags everywhere – people here are Protestant and identify as British.
In Belfast, discrimination is part of everyday life. Many remember the violence of the Troubles – the clashes between Catholics and Protestants, between those who wanted the reunification of Ireland and those who wanted Northern Ireland to remain within the United Kingdom. It is a part of Irish history that left deep scars that are still felt in the community.
And the protests are reopening them.
Many nationalist Catholic residents blame unionist Protestants for violence and hostility toward immigrants. “Everything is happening in the Protestant part of the city”, a Catholic person tells me. “It’s where the rent is cheaper, and that’s why there are more immigrants living there. What they did to us, they are now doing to immigrants.”
Another Catholic man, referring to the young people involved in the protests, says that “they are more afraid of the paramilitaries than of the law”. But there were protests in Catholic parts of the city and, according to the police, there was no indication that they were organized by unionist paramilitaries.
And many people in the Protestant part of the city think that it is necessary to control illegal immigration into the country and those trying to enter the UK “through the back door”, but they say that this is the wrong way to protest against the lack of
border control and point the finger at younger people, incited by online accounts and racist posts that appear in their feeds.
“These are just new people who just want trouble,” explains a man who still remembers well the blood spilled on Irish streets during the Troubles. “They are hot-blooded, they don’t know what they are doing.”
But there are also those who think that this is once again uniting Protestants and Catholics. “It’s a shame there is collateral damage, but for the first time we are all united against this threat,” says one resident. He was referring to immigrants.
