Attacks on Roma hint at Europe’s last taboo Sunday, June 21, 2009 By Tom McGurk The racist attacks on the Roma community in the Village area of Belfast will come as no surprise to those who know the place.
For years, it has been synonymous with the most extreme loyalist elements and, throughout the Troubles, was dominated by loyalist paramilitarism. During the worst days of the sectarian killings in Belfast, the Village was the headquarters for some of loyalism’s bloodiest gangs.
Situated as it is just below the Falls Road by theM1 motorway and close to Belfast city centre, it was ideally located for loyalist murder gang sorties into adjacent Catholic areas to kidnap victims.
Over the years, many of the bodies of the people they killed would be found by the light of morning on the large areas of waste ground surrounding the Village itself.
Increasingly decrepit and rundown, the Village is nowadays symbolic of what has happened to large sections of the North’s unionist working-class communities, with huge levels of unemployment, poor levels of educational achievement and serious levels of alcohol and drug abuse.
In recent years, those who could get out of the Village got out, with the result that property developers bought up local housing cheap to rent out. This in turn led to an influx of immigrants to the area.
Here then is traditional old workingclass unionist territory with, if anything, deepening insecurities in the North’s new political dispensation. I suspect the attacks come as a surprise to the long-persecuted Roma, who lost the largest percentage of any of the races murdered in the Nazi death-camps.
However, they are only the latest victims of sectarian attacks in the North, which has the highest level of hate crime in these islands. Over the years, there have been persistent attacks on the Chinese community in south Belfast, while in other places Poles and Portuguese have suffered.
The origins of the latest attacks lie in a riot around the Northern Ireland vs Poland soccer match at nearby Windsor Park in March. Given that the Polish community is mostly Catholic, it took very little to set off the violence that occurred.
Since March, there seems to have been a systematic, if spasmodic, campaign to rid the Village area of foreign nationals culminating in this week’s Roma attacks.
With a recent investigation by the Observer newspaper pointing out that some 90 per cent of the North’s hate crimes have occurred in loyalist areas, there are significant signals that what’s left of paramilitary loyalism, officially or unofficially, is largely responsible.
The Observer wrote that ‘‘these assaults range from petrol bombings of the houses of migrant workers to the forced evictions of black women from loyalist estates. In one incident racists smeared excrement over a Catholic church in the Upper Newtownards Road in east Belfast, which had become a place of worship for Filipino nurses working at nearby Ulster Hospital.”
At one level, we may just be witnessing the dying spasms of bigotry in the North’s last redoubt of so called white Anglo-Saxon Protestantism and its infamous intolerance of anything but itself.
But maybe what happened in Belfast last week is yet another signal of the growing concern and social discontent about the EU’s multi-racial and multi-ethnic migration policies?
Across Europe, in the recent elections, there were significant signals that race and migration are once again assuming political importance, not least in Britain.
There, thousands of traditional working-class Labour voters abandoned their party to elect two British National Party (BNP) members. Thousands of others also flocked to the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP).
Few commentators have mentioned it, but the combined UKIP and BNP vote at 22.7 per cent was greater than either the Labour or Liberal Democratic vote, taken singly, and was only 5 per cent behind the Tory vote at 27.7 per cent.
Britain’s increasingly Eurosceptic vote now equals half the electorate, with concerns about immigration at the centre of it. (Nowonder there are Downing Street and European concerns about giving Ireland Lisbon Treaty protocols down the road that might need to return to Westminster.)
In fact, all across Europe (where only two in five bothered to vote at all) there were significant shifts towards right-wing anti-immigration parties in Denmark, Holland, Belgium, Austria and Italy. Stridently nationalist parties recorded big votes in Hungary and the Baltic states.
Austria’s rightist Freedom Party more than doubled its strength to 13.1 per cent of the vote, campaigning on an anti-Islam platform. In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders’s anti-Islamic party secured 17 per cent of the country’s votes, taking four seats, and the Hungarian far-right Jobbik party won three.
Jobbik describes itself as Eurosceptic and anti-immigration and wants police to crack down on petty crimes committed by gypsies - ironically the same Roma who are under attack in Belfast. Critics say the party is racist and anti-Semitic.
As Europe’s economic recession deepens, creating more and more unemployment and growing social welfare queues, the immigration debate may be poised to gather in political significance.
The elephant in the room is that the large anti-Lisbon vote last year in Irish workingclass areas may well have been influenced by immigration, but such are the limitations imposed by our tsars of political correctness that the possibility may not even be publicly aired. Indeed, ask any question at all about the wider implications of immigration and the Pavlovian response is an accusation of racism.
Political thuggery will, of course, always seek out the point of least resistance, and the unfortunate Roma in Belfast last week were fit for the purpose. But are we just to ignore the potential for right-wing political exploitation of this issue by not listening to people’s concerns?
For example, getting Ireland over the Lisbon Treaty line is taking vintage Brussels three-card-trickery, or, as one EU diplomat elegantly put it to the Guardian: ‘‘We want maximum impact in Ireland and minimum damage for everyone else’’. Here we see the European democratic malaise in all its furtive genius, spinning a wall of words around the unchangeable fact that only exactly the same Lisbon Treaty can be re-voted on.
As in its determined multi-cultural ambitions, the franchise of the citizens is not required. Sometimes one wonders if the question hanging over the European road map is whether it’s headed into the 21st century at all, or back to the 1930s.
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