Northern Ireland faces several days of dangerous sectarian passions over parades by the Orange Order, whose annual celebrations of long-ago Protestant triumphs can stir violent Catholic opposition.
Police commanders and moderate leaders on both sides appealed for calm before yesterday's restricted Orange Order parade through Portadown, a power base for the anti-Catholic brotherhood.
That march will be one of hundreds across Northern Ireland climaxing tomorrow on "the Twelfth," an official holiday in this British territory. It commemorates the victory of William of Orange over James II, the Catholic he dethroned as king of Britain and Ireland, at the Battle of the Boyne south of Belfast on July 12, 1690.
Catholics for centuries have despised the mass demonstrations, which celebrate the north's Protestant history and heritage -- and demonstrate, often in an air of menace, Protestants' numerical superiority over their Catholic neighbors. Today the conservatively suited Orangemen, many sporting bowler hats, often are accompanied by thuggish fife-and-drum groups known as "kick the pope" bands, and alcohol-fueled crowds.
Since 1995, led by supporters of the outlawed Irish Republican Army, Catholic protest groups have blocked roads traditionally used by Orangemen in several cities and towns. They have challenged the predominantly Protestant police force to decide whose rights prevail -- the marchers' or their own -- with the losing side primed to riot.
Standoffs over whether Orangemen could parade through Portadown's main Catholic district, the Garvaghy Road, triggered intense rioting across Northern Ireland in 1996, 1997 and 1998, causing widespread intimidation and property damage, hundreds of injuries and several deaths.
Police backed by British troops in 1997 forced the parade down the Garvaghy Road amid Catholic fury. But since 1998 -- when Orangemen, blocked that time by British security-force barricades, abandoned their protest after Protestant arsonists burned to death three young Catholic brothers -- the Orangemen have not been permitted through.
The police commander for yesterday's operation blocking Orangemen from the Garvaghy Road, Chief Superintendent Drew Harris, said his officers would deploy in force only if Orangemen tried to outflank security barriers. In past years these have included a steel wall, coils of barbed wire and water-filled trenches.
Since 1998 the Orangemen's approximately 2,000 members in Portadown, as well as thousands of their supporters, have been stopped at the parade's focal point, an Anglican church atop a hill called Drumcree. Orangemen last assaulted police and troops at the rural spot in 2002.
"This year we plan to scale down the physical security measures at Drumcree even more than last year and I believe that this will be noticeable to most people," said Harris, who forecast a peaceful outcome, like in 2003 and last year.
But the summertime tensions frequently inspire Catholic attacks elsewhere on police officers, including early on Saturday in Londonderry, the second-largest city. Police said one officer suffered arm injuries when a drunken Catholic mob attacked a police unit about 2am with stones, bricks, bottles and metal bars. Three people were charged with rioting.
And British army experts defused a small bomb on Saturday night that had been left outside a police station in Coalisland, a hard-line Catholic town. Police and politicians blamed dissidents opposed to the IRA's 1997 ceasefire.
Northern Ireland is girding for potential street clashes tomorrow, when the Orange Order will stage its biggest annual demonstration in Belfast -- and two smaller parades pass near hostile IRA power bases. Trouble is possible in Londonderry and several other towns and villages.
Orangemen attract curiosity and no overt hostility in the neighboring Republic of Ireland, a predominantly Catholic country that won independence from Britain shortly after Northern Ireland's 1921 creation as a Protestant-majority state.
On Saturday, several thousand Orangemen from more than 50 lodges -- including one visiting from England -- paraded peacefully in Rossnowlagh, County Donegal, a mostly Catholic seaside resort in the Irish Republic where locals watch their parade each year.
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