Small spark set off Oldham's racial powder keg

By IAN HERBERT and CAHAL MILMO

OLDHAM - This city's customary racial tensions had been crackling away uncomfortably all week.

Early last week, outside the Breeze Hill school from which a 15-year-old girl was recently removed after suffering racial abuse at the hands of a 13-year-old, a small group of white former pupils took to the school gates, taunting Asians and blacks and threatening staff.

They returned every day until Friday when police were called in, though it was a group of Pakistani pupils - in the wrong place at the wrong time - who retaliated and found themselves under arrest.

Then Saturday dawned - ominously. It has become known as "no-go day" or "National Front Day" among Oldham Asians and blacks, who say police have advised them that on this day the former mill town's shopping precinct is to be avoided at all costs. Greater Manchester police deny this.

On a Saturday five weeks ago, the National Front's march there was banned by police and the local council, but that has not stopped British National Party activists - who are planning general election campaigns for Oldham's two parliamentary seats - gathering in pubs and hotels.

On "no-go" Saturday four weeks ago, 16 people were arrested after racial clashes and last weekend was no different. Far right activists had been tailing Anti-Nazi League supporters around town all day.

With tensions stretched desperately tight and the police helicopter circling overhead, it appears to have taken a mere squabble between a white and Asian teenager, in the early evening heat outside a chip shop, to incite the worst riots in the history of an already racially troubled town.

The boys were aged between 13 and 14 according to the owner of the Datta grocery shop, Mohammed Sharif, who saw them at around 8.30 pm (Sunday morning New Zealand time).

After the row, the white boy's mother was seen speaking on a mobile phone and five minutes later two taxis full of men helped form a group of 25 whites who stormed through Asian occupied streets. Sharif and his son rolled down the steel shutters of the shop - still daubed yesterday with red graffitti which read OK White Power - and locked themselves in while outside the whites ran riot.

Bricks were thrown through the house window of a pregnant Asian woman. White men jumped on the stationary car containing Sharif's sister and her 2-year-old son, smashing the bonnet and windscreen.

Police - present in substantial numbers in the centre of the deprived Asian district of Gloddick five streets away - initially kept gangs of Asian and white youths apart, but by 8.30 pm local time the full Asian backlash was beginning to unleash itself. By 9 pm, Asians were hurling missiles at the windows of the Live and Let Live pub - believed by some to have harboured National Front activists during the day.

The 8mm reinforced glass of the ground floor windows - installed after attacks elsewhere in the town - withstood the battering but the upstairs windows were smashed. A firebomb was hurled through a window, setting fire to curtains and the floor as most of the 40 drinkers ran for cover in the barrel room and the publican's living quarters.

"There were ladies in their 60s, hysterical because they didn't know what was going on," said one regular, Kenneth Berry, aged 59. "About 100 to 150 Asian youths came out from behind the trees."

Three regulars had already been taken to hospital before a second attack at 11 pm. Paul Barrow, aged 48, the pub landlord said: "The [Asians] attacked the customers with whatever they could get their hands on, bottles, stools and glasses."

The National Front was nowhere to be seen so it was police who came under fire, officers fighting pitch battles with 500 Asian youths as they pushed back the lines of stone throwers to escort ambulances and fire engines in to tend the injured.

As smashed-up cars, bricks and the supermarket trolleys - used to ram police - were cleared away from the Gloddick Rd by transporters and street-cleaning vehicles, 70-year-old Jack Roscoe conducted what he later called "a chat with the Paks," a conversation with his Pakistani neighbours which underlines the depth of racial prejudice here.

"The street was black with Pakis," confided Roscoe, a former postman, when the Pakistanis had gone, pointing to the spot where he claimed to have counted 31 taxi drivers, gathered in solidarity at 8.30 pm local time. "They were coming from all angles. They were throwing stones and I was thinking of my Mazda and cringing. There's so much arrogance among them. They blame other people and don't look at the fundamental issues."

Asian youth workers laid the blame for the riots squarely on a two-week campaign of "racist propaganda and agitation" by far right activists.

The British National Party and the National Front's presence dates to an attack in the town on its latest cause celebre - 76-year-old D-Day veteran Walter Chamberlain, aged 76, who was beaten up in April, days after a national radio report that some areas of Oldham had become "no-go" to whites.

"For the past fortnight, Asian kids feel they have been asked to stand back while skinheads walk around the town handing out literature," said Nanu Miah of Oldham's Bangladeshi Youth Association. "Can you imagine the sort of corrosive effect that has? So, when they hear that an Asian street has been attacked and women injured by National Front supporters, then the whole place went up. It was in many ways a riot waiting to happen."

But other community leaders privately despair of the young second and third-generation Asians who now provide 25 per cent of the town's youth population and are more willing to defend themselves against racism than the largely Bangladeshi, Bengali and Pakistani immigrants who first arrived 30 years ago to work in the mills. Their determination to fight back provides some explanation for the fact that white victims of crime have been outnumbering blacks and Asians in Oldham for the past eight years: 71 per cent of violent racial attack victims were white in 1993, 72 per cent in 1997 and 69 per cent in 1998.

The statistics are the source of much conjecture - Pakistanis and Bangladeshis are still far less likely to report their own racial experiences but anti-white crime among the notorious local Gloddick boys and Coppice boys, small but potent groups of Asian trouble-makers, is high.

Riaz Ahmed, a local JP and councillor, said: "I see the same white youths before the court, but once they turn 21 or 22 they don't seem to come again. The Asian youths are still before me at 24 and 25. They don't seem to be maturing. For some, it is a case of wanting to be European and copying white youths."

Opposite the Live and Let Live pub Abdul Bassit Shah, who sits on a local community forum, provided some demonstration of how hard rebuilding stability may now be as he remonstrated with Asians - in their native tongue - to desist from more violence.

Some of the young men who watched him were unconvinced. "Idiots like that are being diplomatic because they have a job to do but they don't make any difference," said one young Asian, Parvis Nazir. "The young lads know what's going on. The answer is not to let the NF pump people up."

- INDEPENDENT