Violence flares as British police evict traveller camp

Oct 19, 2011, 14:13 GMT

London - British police launched a controversial operation Wednesday to evict several hundred people from an illegal travellers site on a farm in south-east England, following a 10-year legal battle.

Police in riot gear moved into the site of Dale Farm, near the town of Basildon in the country of Essex, at dawn Wednesday, where they were met by resistance from protestors hurling bricks and bottles. An empty caravan was set alight by protestors, police said.

Police said they twice used taser guns to control the protest, in which one person was injured. Several arrests were made.

A police spokesman said there had been a potential for 'serious violence' as intelligence showed that large quantities of missiles and liquid objects had been stored at the site.

Basildon council was given the green light to clear an illegal part of the camp by the courts after a long legal battle last week.

After breaking down a fence at the back of the farmland area, police entered the site to proceed to its heavily-barricaded front gate where protestors were holed up on top of a 12-metre-high scaffolding structure.

Police used a huge crane, or cherry picker, to remove a handful of protestors from the structure in what seemed a precarious operation.

They were mostly young people who moved in on the perimeters of the camp to support the travellers in their fight to stay and prevent eviction.

Dale Farm, the largest travellers site in Britain, first became home to Irish travellers in the 1960s. But a long drawn-out legal dispute began when the traveller families set up pitches illegally on green land.

The Irish travellers, who are not gypsies, have a nomadic lifestyle and settled on 51 illegal plots at Dale Farm in the 1970s.

Irish travellers mainly came to England after the potato famine in the 1850s, and again after World War II. But many of the camps' inhabitants were born in Britain.

Kathleen McCarthy, a Dale Farm resident, said: 'The memory of Dale Farm will weigh heavily on Britain for generations - we are being dragged out of the only homes we have in this world.'

The leader of Basildon Council, Tony Ball, said that, despite the sporadic violence, the council hoped to clear the land in a 'safe, dignified and humane way.'

He said he felt 'some sympathy' for the women and children who had been 'misled' by their community and made to believe they would eventually be granted planning permission on the land.

The council, which has engaged in years of negotiations with the travellers, said its offers of accommodation for the 'most vulnerable' among the travellers' community had been rejected.