March Highlights Protestant Hardliners

BELFAST, Northern Ireland, July 12--To the beat of pounding drums, Protestant hard-liners marched in their tens of thousands Wednesday and vowed to protest until they regained the right to parade past hostile Catholic areas.

More than 80,000 members of the Orange Order, Northern Ireland's once-dominant Protestant fraternal group, paraded through Belfast and 17 other towns to commemorate the triumph of the Protestant King William of Orange versus a Catholic foe on July 12, 1690.

The annual Twelfth demonstrations always bring rivalries between British Protestants and Irish Catholics to the boil. But with several parades blocked this year from going through or near Catholic areas by British security forces, Protestant anger turned against fellow Protestants over who to blame for the past 10 days of widespread rioting.

"We meet here today under extremely difficult circumstances. Our city and our country are being ravaged by terrorism and lawlessness," Jim Rodgers, a Belfast councilman, told fellow Orangemen in a city park.

Several militants in the audience heckled Rodgers as soon as he appealed for the riots to end immediately because they were self-destructive.

"Those that are suffering are people in our own areas. We are destroying our properties, we are hitting our churches, we're taking people's cars and burning them," Rodgers said.

He had to shout above the insults flying from a few who accused his Ulster Unionist Party of caving in to Irish Republican Army supporters to make peace.

IRA supporters are prominent in all the anti-Orange protest groups, and the Ulster Unionists and IRA-linked Sinn Fein party are uncomfortable partners in Northern Ireland's power-sharing government.

Many Orangemen oppose negotiations with the protesters on the same grounds that they reject sharing power with Sinn Fein: the belief that their enemy will never be satisfied no matter how many compromises are made, so no compromises should be made.

Orangemen insisted their demonstrations should be treated as inoffensive, colorful pageants. The lodges march with hand-painted banners portraying important events in Protestant history and mythology: King William on his white horse; the Harland and Wolff shipyard and its most famous product, the Titanic; Protestants dying on World War I battlefields.

But across the Lagan River from the Orange demonstration, the Catholics of the Lower Ormeau neighborhood were savoring a respite from this pageantry, thanks to a British army blockade that prevented a small Orange parade from passing their area that morning.

They said the sound of the Orangemen's rowdy bands of fife and drum sent shivers down their spine.

"Thankfully we can't see them. But just listening to these god-awful bands in the distance reminds people here of the pure hate involved. We just don't want any part of it," said John Gormley, who has helped organize anti-parade protests since 1995.

Several Orange speakers noted bitterly Wednesday that the British government and Royal Ulster Constabulary--the province's predominantly Protestant police--had decided this year to confront Orangemen rather than Catholic protesters. In 1996 and 1997, the protesters were violently forced off disputed streets to make way for Orangemen. Intense Catholic riots followed.

"The Orange Order will not be surrendering its culture, its history, and its tradition to the demands of Sinn Fein-IRA or any of its residents groups," said Denis Watson, the senior Orangeman in County Armagh, where the order was born in 1795 following a sectarian gun battle.

The order's anti-Catholicism was underscored at several rallies, which adopted motions calling for Anglican, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches to end all ecumenical cooperation with Catholics.

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