Peace lines

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Peace Line on Springmartin Road in West Belfast (Location).

As peace lines or peace walls (English: Peace lines or Peace walls ) barriers are referred to that in Northern Ireland cities, especially in the capital Belfast , the residential areas pro-Irish republicans and pro-British Unionists separate. The peace lines emerged from 1969 after the outbreak of the Northern Ireland conflict in part of the areas that are known as interface areas and are characterized by repeated clashes between republicans (nationalists) and unionists.

history

Northern Irish cities were already characterized by strong segregation before 1969 . In Belfast in the 1960s, 64% of households were on streets where at least 90% of residents were either unionists or nationalists. During serious unrest in August 1969 , a mob coming from the area of ​​the Unionist-inhabited Belfast Shankill Road burned down entire streets in the area of ​​the nationalist-inhabited Falls Road . The British Army was used to end the unrest .

Belfast Peace Line between Shankill Road and Falls Road districts 2010 (location).
Gate in a peace line in Larnak Way, West Belfast (Location).

On September 9, 1969, the Northern Irish Prime Minister James Chichester-Clark announced that a peace line, consisting of a barbed wire fence controlled by police and army , was to be built between the areas of Shankill Road and Falls Road . The construction of the Peace Line was designed to encourage residents of both parts of West Belfast to accept the removal of barricades that had been built during the August riots. Ian Freeland , General Officer Commanding of the British Army in Northern Ireland, called the peace line a "temporary issue" and declared: "We will not have a Berlin Wall or anything like that in this city ".

Segregation in Northern Irish cities continued to increase during the Northern Ireland conflict. In Belfast, an estimated 60,000 people were forced to leave their homes between 1969 and 1973 following bombings, shootings , civil unrest or intimidation. Catholics in particular fled the areas of Belfast previously inhabited jointly with Protestants to areas with a Catholic majority. The peace line intended as a provisional arrangement remained in place; the initial barbed wire barriers were replaced by permanent structures. In addition, further peace lines were established, particularly in the north and west of Belfast, but also in other cities such as Derry and Portadown . In this corrugated iron fences , steel walls and walls built, and later the premises adjusted grid or multicolored walls. Gates were built on streets that are closed permanently, only at night or during riots. Some of the peace lines are several kilometers long and up to eight meters high. In 2010 the total length of the peace lines for Belfast was given as 21 kilometers.

Even after the ceasefire declaration by the IRA and other paramilitary groups in 1994 and the peace settlement agreed in the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, the number of peace lines continued to grow: in Belfast there were 15 peace lines in 1994; their number rose to 35 in 2001 and 42 in 2009. For 2007 it is stated that there is no broad popular support for the removal of the peace lines. In May 2013, the Northern Irish government announced that it wanted to remove the peace lines over the next ten years. Neil Jarman, conflict researcher at Queen's University Belfast , called this schedule "very optimistic" and pointed out that in many cases local residents oppose the removal of the peace lines.

Since the peace settlement, the peace lines have developed into places of interest which, like wall paintings, can be visited by buses and taxis as part of city tours. The term "conflict tourism" was created for this type of tourism.

consequences

An investigation of the place and time of death of victims of the Northern Ireland conflict in relation to the location and construction time of peace lines in Belfast showed that the number of deaths in the vicinity of newly built peace lines has decreased significantly. A particularly large number of people did not die directly on the peace lines, but within a few hundred meters of the buildings. A similar spatial distribution was found at interfaces without peace lines. One possible explanation is seen in the fact that the interfaces were more the scene of smaller conflicts with a high potential for escalation; Bomb attacks and shootings, on the other hand, were concentrated in the core zones of highly segregated residential areas.

Urban planners are ambivalent about the peace lines: On the one hand, the peace lines define precisely demarcated residential areas and thus lead to more subjective security for the residents, whose everyday life was marked by decades of violent conflict . On the other hand, the peace lines create an intimidating and not very human-friendly living environment. In 1988, the Northern Ireland Housing Executive (NIHE), with central responsibility for housing policy in Northern Ireland, described the term "peace lines" as a contradiction in terms: in many cases, peace lines are not characterized by peace and neighborly harmony, but rather by conflicts, tensions, property damage and persistent instability.

The peace lines and segregation in the city have significant implications for urban planning in Belfast. Between 1951 and 1991 the city lost 37% of the population. The proportion of Catholic nationalists in Belfast increased from around 28% in 1961 to 47% in 2001. The reasons for this are the higher birth rate of nationalists and the emigration of unionists to the mostly unionist surrounding area of ​​Belfast. The population density decreased particularly strongly at interfaces, especially on the unionist side. The increased delimitation of residential areas by the peace lines created an imbalance in Belfast's housing market. While there is a lack of housing in nationalist residential areas, numerous houses are empty in unionist areas, and in some cases entire streets have been demolished. The construction of new settlements for nationalists in unionist areas is not politically feasible.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Scott A. Bollens: On narrow ground. Urban policy and ethnic conflict in Jerusalem and Belfast. State University of New York Press, Albany, NY 2000, ISBN 0-7914-4413-9 , p. 194
  2. ^ Entry September 9, 1969 and Conclusions of a meeting of the Joint Security Committee held on tuesday September 9 , 1969, at Stormont Castle (PDF; 505 kB) at CAIN - Conflict Archive on the Internet (English, accessed on December 4, 2011 )
  3. ↑ “This will be a very temporary affair. We will not have a Berlin Wall or anything like that in this city ". Quoted from Thomas Harding: The security wall on our doorstep . In: telegraph.co.uk , February 25, 2004, accessed October 21, 2017.
  4. ↑ Bollens, narrow ground , S. 208th
  5. ↑ a b c Entry 'Peace Line' / 'Peace Wall' at CAIN - Conflict Archive on the Internet. (accessed December 4, 2011).
  6. ^ Stanley D. Brunn, Sarah Byrne, Louise McNamara, Annette Egan: Belfast Landscapes: From Religious Schism to Conflict Tourism. In: Focus on Geography 53 (2010) doi: 10.1111 / j.1949-8535.2010.00011.x , pp. 81–91, here p. 82.
  7. ↑ Bollens, narrow ground , S. 210th
  8. ^ Forty years of peace lines. BBC News , July 1, 2009 (accessed December 4, 2011).
  9. ↑ Security cameras added to west Belfast peaceline. BBC News, February 13, 2014 (accessed August 5, 2014).
  10. ^ Brunn, Belfast Landscapes , pp. 83f.
  11. ^ A b Niall Cunningham, Ian Gregory: Hard to miss, easy to blame? Peacelines, interfaces and political deaths in Belfast during the Troubles. In: Political Geography (2014) 40, pp. 64-78, doi : 10.1016 / j.polgeo.2014.02.004
  12. ↑ These assessments in Bollens, Narrow Ground , pp. 209f.
  13. ↑ NIHE report from 1988, quoted in Bollens, Narrow ground , p. 216.
  14. ↑ Bollens, narrow ground , p 192
  15. ^ Area Profile of Belfast Urban Area - Based on 2001 Census. Northern Ireland Neighborhood Information Service (NINIS), archived from the original on October 5, 2012 ; accessed on July 6, 2016 .
  16. ↑ Bollens, narrow ground , S. 207th
  17. ↑ Bollens, Narrow ground , pp. 212f.