N. Ireland Copes With Ethnic Bias...

Catholics in north Belfast saw him with a white woman and scarred his temple with a broken beer mug. Protestants taunted him for his dark skin and broke his nose with a pool cue.

Catholic-Protestant strife may be on hold, but another hatred still stains this British province--the violence aimed at people like Paul Gupta, the son of an Indian father and Irish Catholic mother.

“Belfast, Belfast, it’s a wonderful town, it doesn’t matter if your skin is brown,” Gupta sang, recalling a popular local ditty--then laughed derisively. “Belfast people really believe that.”

Cease-fires and the beginning of peace talks have improved life for the divided Catholics and Protestants of Northern Ireland. But for Chinese, Indians and other minorities, it has made little difference.

“You’ve had children being beat up on streets, verbal abuse, arson attacks,” said Suneil Sharma, vice president of the Indian Community Center. “And there is no law to protect us.”

That will change soon. Sir Patrick Mayhew, the senior British official in Northern Ireland, announced in May that Britain’s 1976 race relations act would be extended to the province.

The act, which allows prosecution for discrimination and encourages tougher sentencing for racially motivated attacks, originally ignored Northern Ireland for fear it would further complicate matters in a province racked by sectarian violence.

The government reconsidered after the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination reprimanded Britain in 1993 because of the way ethnic minorities are treated in Northern Ireland.

The U.N. committee was approached by a loose coalition of local ethnic groups--Chinese, Indians, nomadic “travelers” and smaller groups--who complained in sworn affidavits of jobs and housing denied, vandalism, beatings.

In some cases, whole communities had been burned out of their homes. And the police did not provide much comfort.

Anna Manwah Watson, a Hong Kong-born social worker who interprets for Chinese who deal with the police, said one officer called her a racial epithet.

Gupta said that racist attacks have been severe enough to put him in the hospital. Twice, he said, he returned home to find summonses for disturbing the peace.

The Royal Ulster Constabulary acknowledges it has had race problems, but argues they were in the past. Officers have been receiving ethnic sensitivity training since January, the RUC says.

Such moves are welcomed, but the problem runs deeper than street hostility, minority spokesmen say.

“With people who spit at you, call you names, bully kids, at least you know where you stand,” said Deborah Gadd Martin, the director of the Chinese Welfare Assn. “But it’s really about power.”

Ethnic communities complain they have to fight for services that their counterparts in England, Scotland and Wales take for granted, such as health and welfare information in their native tongues.

The community worst hit by discrimination is the “travelers,” an ancient people once known for their country road-making skills, but now largely unemployed because of the urbanization of the province since the 1960s.

They complain that the health and education systems in the province never accommodated their nomadic culture and distinct Anglo-Celtic dialect, Cant. The result: an 85% illiteracy rate and life expectancies 20 years lower than the average.

Mayhew says the discrimination act will be updated to include the travelers, and a school for travelers’ children was recently set up.

Ray Mullan of the Community Relations Council, which promotes Protestant-Catholic dialogue, contends racial discrimination is “a small problem in relation to the sectarian issues.” Minorities number no more than 20,000 out of Northern Ireland’s 1.5 million people, he notes.

Mullan said he persuaded local social workers to drop planned training in ethnic sensitivity and replace it with training to combat bigotry in general.

Martin O’Brien of the Committee on the Administration of Justice, a human rights group, said that view is misguided.

“People in polite society will no longer make anti-Protestant or anti-Catholic remarks, but they will make overtly racist remarks,” he said.

England shows a society can be sensitized through legislation, O’Brien said. “There is a culture of sensitivity there.”

Others doubt that English traditions of secular tolerance could take hold in Northern Ireland.

“England is a post-Christian society,” said David Warm, an official at Belfast’s only synagogue. “Politically and religiously, this is a fundamentally Christian society.”

Gupta, whose idols are the black and Jewish leaders of the U.S. civil rights movement, says it is up to minorities to promote change. He has joined the Social Democratic and Labor Party, which gets most of the Catholic vote in Northern Ireland, and hopes to run for local office.

He has already tested the anti-discrimination law by filing incitement charges against Richard Lynn, an Ulster University professor who has tried to prove the inferiority of women and blacks.

“I want to do something positive,” Gupta said. “I will stand and fight with my skills.”