Strangers Side by Side

It’s hard to dissect a riot. a sudden eruption of anger and violence doesn’t lend itself to tidy packaging. But last week, the people of Bradford were struggling to make sense of frightening scenes when hundreds of youths of Pakistani descent injured over 200 police officers and torched white-owned businesses in a predominantly Pakistani neighborhood. Those who run the city seemed shell-shocked. Was this a “simple” race riot expressing (however illegally) frustration at segregation and police harassment and unemployment? Or a bunch of thugs pumped up on testosterone and booze? Or drug dealers getting back at police? Or a master plan by white racists, after earlier riots in Oldham and Burnley, to whip up trouble in a series of northern English cities? All these explanations had their advocates. On the airwaves and on the streets, feelings were mixed — fury at the rioters, some anger at the police for weak tactics — but mostly fear that the city, already poor and sharply segregated, is on a downward spiral.

Those who pick the bones of disaster were out in force. White gangs smashed a Pakistani-owned restaurant and service station. TV crews roamed the city seeking footage of more trouble. At Lister Park BMW, looted and charred, portable toilets arrived for the demolition crew. Harry Taylor, the general manager, wouldn’t say whether they would rebuild, but didn’t sound optimistic. “We had some fantastic years here,” he said, in the tone of a man about to retire.

Sajaad Waris isn’t going anywhere. He owns the gleaming, marble-walled Punjab Halal Meat store across the street, where mutton neck goes for $2.28 per kg. He’s incensed at the rioters’ thuggery and their attack on their own neighborhood, where he has built up his business for 30 years. He’s thinking of organizing other Asian businesses to support the looted white-owned firms. He’s doubtful that the rioters had any coherent politics; they showed up downtown to confront a rally by the racist National Front, which was banned, so they turned their Molotov cocktails on the police. Slowly they were pushed back toward his neighborhood, where, he says, “some of them took advantage of a situation that was out of control.”

But even this pillar of the community is suspicious of the white power structure. He says he called the police at 11:15 p.m. when he first saw the BMW dealership under attack. Though a major police station is only a few hundred meters away, the cops and fire brigade didn’t show up until after 3 a.m. “Either they are badly organized, or they are letting the community suffer,” he says. Ridiculous, says a police spokeswoman: they sent a helicopter to the scene four minutes after receiving the first call (which she says was after 1 a.m.), but were so busy saving lives at the Manningham Labour Club, where rioters had blocked the fire doors with blazing cars, that they couldn’t handle the BMW dealer too.

“Whatever the reality, perceptions are significant,” says Khadam Hossain, 49, a financial planner who came to Britain when he was eight. “While we support the police to a certain extent, they haven’t managed to get their image right among the youth.” He has no white clients, nor, he says, do his friends in other professions. He is sitting in Connect Telecom, a busy mobile-phone store run by his sons, where some whites, but mostly a procession of young men of Pakistani descent with slick haircuts and fancy sports clothes, buy phone cards, ogle the newest models and shoot the breeze in broad Yorkshire accents. He accuses one of rioting; the youth politely demurs but quickly leaves. “We used to be beaten by gangs of whites and just took it,” Hossain says. “These boys are British-born, and they want their rights.” A tattooed white teenager from the poor Ravenscliff estate reacts unprintably to that notion. “The Muslims already get everything, we get nothing,” he spits.

The truth is that the system has failed both sides of the racial divide. Bradford’s schools are among the worst in the country, so bad that the government has turned management over to a private company. The district is one-fifth non-white, but housing patterns often produce schools that are 98% white or 98% Asian. Herman Ouseley, former chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, coincidentally issued a report last week on why race relations were bad in Bradford. Among other failings, it criticized politicians for making quiet deals with neighborhood ethnic leaders rather than tackling underlying problems. He sees hope in the young, who say they thirst to know other ethnic groups. Bradford’s élite, gathered to hear Ouseley at the local football club (next to a mosque), wondered if his proposed solutions, like diversity audits of government agencies and a multicultural study center, could solve problems so entrenched. But stunned out of their complacency, they are glad for any map at all.