Police in Northern Ireland held the Protestant Orange Order accountable yesterday after at least 12 police officers were injured in the worst rioting in the British-ruled province for years. The rioting, by thousand protesters across the city and in outlying areas, raged from mid-afternoon on Saturday into the early hours yesterday, with Belfast waking up to rubble-strewn streets and burnt-out cars. “It was complete bedlam,” a police spokesman said. “We haven’t experienced anything like that for a long time.”

Riot police used water cannon and fired baton rounds as crowds attacked them in the west and east of the city. Elsewhere rampaging mobs hijacked and set fire to cars, blocked roads and threw stones at the police into the early hours. Two civilians were injured, one of them with gunshot wounds.

Northern Ireland’s chief constable, Hugh Orde, laid the bulk of the blame for the disturbances with the Orange Order, who earlier this week called on supporters to turn out in strength. The order, which supports British rule in Northern Ireland, was angered by an earlier directive rerouting one of their seasonal marches away from a Catholic neighbourhood in the province, which remains substantially divided along religious lines. “The Orange Order must bear substantial responsibility for this. They publicly called people onto the streets,” Orde said. The Orange Order, however, pointed at the police who it accused of “a brutal and heavy-handed” approach. Orde said his officers, backed up by British soldiers, had “acted like heroes”.

Every summer thousands of Orangemen, wearing colourful regalia and playing music, engage in “a marching season” to celebrate the 17th century defeat in battle of Catholic King James II by the Protestant William of Orange. Most Catholics in the province regard the marches as an offensive display of triumphalism. Earlier this week the Orange Order said the decision to re-route Saturday’s march was the latest in a series of attempts to “erode Protestant culture” and deny Orangemen their rights.

Tension mounted recently in Protestant communities – which support Northern Ireland’s links with Britain – on the view that the British government has moved too fast to reduce its security presence in the province without any concrete action by the Irish Republican Army to disarm. This weekend’s turbulence will dismay the British and Irish governments who are hoping to kickstart talks aimed at restoring the province’s Protestant-Catholic power-sharing assembly, set up under 1998’s peace agreement.

Anne CADWALLADER