Report of belfast demo from an italian perspective

national | miscellaneous | news report Friday February 21, 2003 22:58 by Dan Buckley - SWP belfast dan_buckley_1917 at hotmail dot com

The “two Irelands” refute war, largest ever anti-war mobilisations ever

Sorry for the translation, it isnt perfect... a mix between a computer translation and a good dictionary.

30,000 march in Dublin. In Belfast the four churches march

Silvio Cerulli
From Belfast

Two different voices, but one message, ‘no to war’. The two demonstratione were the largest that the island, that was nearly crushed by America and britain, and not just geographically, has ever seen in its history. The first gathering was in Dublin, where 30,000 [sic] people marched from the memorial to the anti-English insurrection of 1916 to the centre of the Central Bank in order to ask their government to respect its status of neutrality and to align themselves with the “old Europeans” and to renounce its role as a soldier of Bush and Blair as it has made Shannon Airport into a US airforce base.

One hundreds miles north there are Palestinian, Cuban, basque and other flags shining under the bright sun of Belfast. The city, now under its 8th century of british rule and used to the sights and smells of war. Four marches converge near the city centre and over 12,000 people march through the city centre to the city hall where armoured cars from the disproportionate police deployment wait. Among the representatives were those of the four Irish churches, all the nationalist parties and one Unionist (the small Progressive Unionist Party), the full trade union movement, the three universities and one delgation from each northern Irish school. And then the pascifist movement, the human rights organisations, the former political prisoners from the IRA and men of the protestant death squads [sic] and, above all, the common people, mothers with prams and the old, the regular Saturday shoppers that swell the ranks of the march; people who might not neccesarilly have looked at each other although living in the same city who have forgotten their differences in order to say “no to the arrogance and to the military unilateralism that represents in truth the same threat that the united nations is designed to prevent”, through the thunder on the megaphones of the anti-war movement.
Unavoidably, part of Ireland is still governed form Downing Street, Tony Blair has turned into a target of the demonstrators on the streets of Belfast. Speaking from a stage at the end of the march, the writer and human rights activist amd spokesman for the northern Irish left, eamonn mccann, accused tony blair of “wanting to terrorise its own citizens in and attempt to trigger popular hysteria that convinces people to go into war”.