NORTHERN IRELAND : Chinese Minority Fails to Get Peace From Cease-Fire

A pause in the sectarian violence between Protestants and Roman Catholics in Northern Ireland has brought a small, vulnerable Chinese community here under fierce pressure from both sides.

Police are investigating more than two dozen attacks so far this year by hooded intruders who break into the homes of Chinese families late at night to terrorize and steal.

Leaders of the Chinese community report that harassment arose even as a cease-fire between warring Catholic and Protestant terrorists took effect in the fall of 1994--a truce that the Irish Republican Army ended in February in mainland Britain but has not yet broken here.

“Before the cease-fire, tensions between the two groups were very high. Afterward--as if they had nothing else to do--it has been much worse for minorities,” said Patrick Yu at the Northern Ireland Council for Ethnic Minorities. “It is not only the ethnics who are feeling the pressures, but also others who are different, like lesbians and gays. Most of the incidents are occurring in [majority Protestant] loyalist areas.”

With about 8,000 members, the Chinese community is the largest non-Irish group in a province living now in restive peace after 25 years of terrorist warfare.

The Chinese, who began arriving about 1962, make up about half of the small minority ethnic community in the six-county British province. Most have come from Hong Kong via mainland Britain, with some from mainland China, Singapore and Malaysia. Nine Chinese in 10 say they have encountered some form of racial prejudice, according to a recent survey.

As a group, the Chinese, whose chamber of commerce has about 150 members, cast a shadow larger than their numbers. It would be hard today to find even a small town in Northern Ireland without its High Street takeout Chinese restaurant. Virtually every Chinese family is directly involved in the restaurant business, said Yu, an officer of the Chinese Welfare Assn. in Belfast, the provincial capital.

These “take-aways” sell food cheaply and stay open late. Their owners often do not speak English fluently. Thus, almost inevitably, the restaurants are well-known stopping places--and targets--for young, racist hooligans and late-night drunks.

Beginning early this year, however, organized criminals began targeting restaurant owners when they returned home, said Detective Chief Inspector Charlie McCracken, head of a police task force created to catch the crooks. Since January, there have been 26 late-night intrusions against Chinese businessmen at their homes, 11 with violence or the threat of violence.

She said that in a typical attack, hooded and gloved intruders burst into a house late at night, tie up the women and children and wait for the man to return home. “They’ll attack the man as soon as he arrives with sticks, cudgels, chair legs, and they’ll threaten to harm the children if they don’t tell where the money is,” she said.

“We don’t think this is politics or racism, just easy cash,” she added.

The Chinese of Northern Ireland tend to be identified locally by the neighborhoods, Catholic or Protestant, in which their shops are located. But they cling to neutrality. Trying to run peaceful businesses in a sectarian minefield has left them wary of politics and religion.

“I remember taking census information in Cantonese, but with one family after another, when I’d ask routinely about religion, people denied any. ‘No Protestant,’ they’d say, ‘No Catholic,’ ” said Fee Ching Leong, who heads Belfast’s Multi-Cultural Resource Center.

When Britain adopted sweeping anti-racism laws in 1976, they were not extended to Northern Ireland, which is governed from London, because there did not appear to be a need for them. A British government draft order on extending the laws is to be ready later this year.

By all accounts, though, it will be a long time before the Chinese and other minorities consider themselves more than second-class citizens, Yu said.