Asians battle whites in yet another British city

Author: Rashmee Z. Ahmed
Publication: The Times of India
Date: June 26, 2001
 
In a grim pattern of blood and gore across northern England, Burnley has joined other cities such as Oldham, Leeds and Bradford as a place where Asians and whites are apparently in conflict. A weekend of interracial violence in Burnley, an industrial town with a predominantly Pakistani and Bangladeshi ethnic minority, comes within weeks of the neo-fascist British National Party (BNP) posting exceptionally good results in local and parliamentary elections in the region.

The weekend of violence in Burnley, which has no history of racial conflict, saw police battling to keep white and Asian youths away from each other, even as one white-owned pub was reduced to a burnt shell and several Asian shops attacked. The violence erupted over an apparently trivial matter. Asians felt the police response to a racist attack on an Asian taxi driver was unduly delayed. This reportedly led angry Asian youths to pelt the police with stones. Soon after, a large gang of white youths entered an Asian area, seemingly intent on violence.

Police admit they were taken aback at the scale and intensity of the violence. There are no reports of severe casualties, although police have made some arrests and met Asian community leaders in an attempt to talk over the town’s troubles. But no one is very sure what ails Burnley, except possibly poverty and ignorance. The town has just 7,000 Asians, which is roughly seven per cent of the total population.

Local MP Peter Pike told The Times of India his constituency’s ethnic population was overwhelmingly made up of Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslims, with very few Indians and scarcely any Hindus.

He said the violence was not totally unexpected and much of it was economic in a town that was once the heart of Britain’s cotton trade. “There have been problems, mainly dereliction and poverty, with 3,500 houses standing empty, people finding it hard to sell their property, people finding it hard to get work.” The town’s deputy mayor, Rafiq Malik, insisted Burnley should not be tagged as “another Oldham” in a reference to the racially-troubled city just 20 miles away, where two nights of rioting in May allowed the neo-fascist BNP to post its best general election result ever.

But observers say Burnley may not be another Oldham, but is suffering the “Oldham effect” with whites and Asians increasingly involved in “copycat attacks”. According Asian community leaders, Burnley is linked to Oldham simply because the earlier rioting may have been a catalyst to the weekend’s violence.
 

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