Community in shock over 'lack of humanity'
RONAN McGREEVY in Birmingham
DISTURBANCES: DUDLEY ROAD in Winson Green, Birmingham, resembles many streets in Britain where ethnic minorities have settled.
It
stretches for miles from just outside the city centre through
traditional working-class areas, the type of place where generations of
immigrants from the Indian sub-continent and the Caribbean have settled
in search of cheap housing.
Here you can buy goat’s meat, yams and yam flour, braids, phonecards, and wire money to your relatives through Western Union.
A
Jamaican food store sits alongside an Asian newsagents, an Afro-hair
style salon next door to a Punjab Kebab house. Each one of these shops
tells the story of an immigrant family working all hours to get ahead.
There
is a mosque distinguishable only by a handwritten sign about Koran
lessons and next door but one is the Afro Caribbean Millennium Centre.
When rioters descended on Dudley Road on Tuesday night, they made no distinction about where they looted.
After
they trashed the local garage, breaking its windows, a group of local
men had had enough and stood sentinel outside the premises where they
could keep watch on both ends of the street.
At about 1.30am on
Wednesday a BMW car driven at reckless speed down this narrowest of
streets, mounted the pavement. It killed Haroon Jahan (21) and brothers
Shazad Ali (30) and Abdul Musavir (31) who ran a local car-wash.
It
marked the moment when the madness that enveloped parts of Britain
since last Saturday took an even more dangerous turn, and led to the
intervention of Haroon Jahan’s father Tariq who appealed to the common
humanity of all communities to stop the violence.
It was an
intervention described by Chris Sims, the chief constable of West
Midlands police, as “so heartfelt, so spontaneous and generous” that it
gave anybody bent on revenge pause for thought.
Yesterday the two
lamp posts outside the garage were festooned with flowers in honour of
the three men who died. “I’m sorry for the lack of humanity,” read one
message.
On Wednesday night locals organised a peaceful prayer
vigil in the garage. Organiser Harpreet Singh said the demonstration
showed a different side to the Asian community so often portrayed in the
media.
“Sikhs and Muslims have a notorious reputation for being
about extremism or terrorism. You saw all the Muslims here, a gathering
of 500, and there was not one stone thrown, not one,” said Singh who is a
Sikh.
To date, four men have been arrested in connection with the
murder of the three men. One, a 32-year-old man, was released on bail
yesterday pending further inquiries. The other three are still being
questioned.
The police have been careful not to release the ethnic
identity of the driver of the car for fear of causing racial tensions,
but locals say he was black. In the same breath they say it will not
harm community relations where blacks and Asians live in harmony.
Local
police have arrested more than 300 suspects across the city and the
courts have been sitting through the night to deal with the looters.
There has been much soul searching across Birmingham as there has been across the country over the causes of the disturbances.
Birmingham
has reinvented itself after a painful deindustrialisation. The
monstrous carbuncle that was the Bullring shopping centre has been
replaced by a glass and chrome palace with its iconic Selfridges
building.
It may be a symbol of renewal, but the area has chronic
problems. The local paper talked of politicians ignoring 30 per cent
youth unemployment, exacerbated by the recession and a “toxic cocktail
of hatred and resentment”.
There may be reasons for what happened,
but they don’t resonate with hard-working immigrant communities who
despise the type of excuse-making that somehow seeks to exonerate those
involved in disturbances.
Gerald Latouche, who arrived from the
Caribbean island of Dominica 13 years ago, said black youngsters growing
up in the UK had chances their relatives could only dream about.
“I
joke that when I was growing up in the Caribbean I had to milk my goat
for breakfast, but I know families for whom that was a reality. They
went on to work at the UN, they work at the World Health Organisation,
they go to university.
“I’m sorry, some of these people [rioters] need to wake up and do for themselves.”
Comments