                            PA News
                       "POLICE STONED IN
                     ULSTER PARADE RIOT"
                             By Deric Henderson

13 December 1997 
   Rioting nationalists hijacked and set fire to buses and vans as 
violence erupted in Londonderry today. 
   Police protecting 3,000 Protestant Apprentice Boys marching through 
the city centre were also attacked with petrol bombs, stones and 
bottles. 
   At one stage there were four vehicles burning just yards from 
Guildhall Square. Hundreds of RUC officers sealed off parts of the city, 
but the violence involving a crowd of up to 1,000 threatened to escalate 
and spread as darkness fell. 
   The trouble, the worst in Derry since the restoration of the IRA 
ceasefire last July, is a setback for the Prime Minister's Northern 
Ireland peace hopes, and even though some of the violence was clearly 
orchestrated, police tactics of allowing the parade through and holding 
back nationalist protesters was blamed for heightening tensions. 
 The city's MP, SDLP leader John Hume, who tried to negotiate compromise 
arrangements between the opposing sides, looked on from a third floor 
window of a department store as mobs went on the rampage through streets 
causing shoppers to flee in terror. 
   The worst of the trouble was in Shipquay Street and in Customs House 
Street, 100 yards from the Guildhall where President Clinton two years 
ago spoke of his hopes for an end to all violence. 
   But many of Derry's Christmas street lights stayed off as the vans 
and buses burned sending flames and huge palls of smoke into the air. 
   Apart from one brief skirmish involving stewards and a band from 
south Belfast, the Apprentice Boys' parade through the flashpoint 
Diamond area passed off without any major incident. 
   But police suddenly came under attack from republicans who had been 
held back in Butcher Street and Shipquay Street. They objected to the 
parade because of troubles at a previous Apprentice Boys' march in Derry 
last August. 
   Police chiefs, fearing trouble imposed restrictions on both sides, 
but the violence flared anyway. 
   SDLP city councillor Mark Durkan said everybody, including the 
police, had to accept responsibility for the trouble which effectively 
cleared the streets of Christmas shoppers on what should have been one 
of the busiest days of the year. 
   Mr Durkan, a former SDLP chairman, watched the rioting in Shipquay 
Street and said he was disgusted. 
   He said: "The police have to take their share of the blame for this 
situation. The decisions they made and the manner in which they were 
enforced served to exacerbate a very difficult situation. 
   "These events represent a shared failure on all of us and we are 
going to have to work again to try and prevent this sort of thing in the 
future. 
   "The Apprentice Boys need to look to their position as do the Bogside 
Residents' Group and representatives like myself who have to accept our 
share of this failure as well." 