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.
