Sawt Falasteen - Immigration concerns endure in UK town hit by riot

"It was terrifying," Clive Wingate, who lives near the now-infamous Holiday Inn Express, told AFP.

"When they were lighting the bins to push into the building, where there were people inside, what were their intentions?" the 66-year-old pensioner asked.

The images from Rotherham were among the most striking of the recent riots across England and Northern Ireland.

Hundreds of men, some draped in the English flag, gathered outside the hotel, chanting "kick them out" while outnumbered police came under fire from bricks and burning objects.

The nationwide riots -- the worst in the country since 2011 -- began after a knife attack that killed three girls during a dance class on July 29 in Southport, another northern town.

False rumours that the suspect was a Muslim asylum seeker spread on social media, and although police corrected the record, anti-immigration riots erupted for more than a week, leading to more than 1,000 arrests.

Signs of fire damage and plywood covering doors and windows remained as indicators of the violence.

- 'Very angry' -

The leafy area several kilometres (miles) from the town centre is usually peaceful, residents said, adding that the asylum seekers housed there while their applications are processed were not a major problem.

The rioters "deserve jail, they are morons", said Charlotte Bedford, who was out walking her dog.

"If you want to protest, protest peacefully", added the 34-year-old.

Several rioters received heavy sentences. They included three years in prison for a 19-year-old who threw bricks at police officers and two years and eight months for a 60-year-old man who pulled an officer to the ground.

Phil Fletcher, a 65-year-old who worked in property maintenance, criticised the violence, but was not surprised by the riots.

"There are millions of people fed up with immigration. It's not our country anymore," said the pensioner, who voted for the anti-immigration Reform UK party in the general election in early July, won by Labour.

Not far from him, a woman added: "18,000 arrived since the beginning of the year", referring to the number of migrants arriving on small boats in southeast England after crossing the Channel.

"That's too many. Immigration has to be the priority for this government," she added.

According to its supporters, Brexit was supposed to allow the UK to take back control of its borders.

But legal and irregular immigration, including via the small boats, have since reached record levels.

Natalie Jackson, a 28-year-old teaching assistant, told AFP that the UK is "a small island."

"We are overpopulated. We can't even get a doctor's appointment anymore," she said.

Caroline Roberts, a 66-year-old seamstress, added: "Nobody is listening to people that are complaining."

"If you say anything, you are called a racist.

"It's making people very angry. The help they (migrants) get, our own children can't get it. We are short of money here," she added.

- 'Frustrations' -

Rotherham, which has a population of 265,000, grew during the Industrial Revolution but suffered decades of economic decline as the local steelworks and mines closed.

The town also experienced a notorious child sexual exploitation scandal between 1997 and 2013 which is still reverberating today.

Gangs of men with Pakistani heritage abused around 1,400 girls, mostly white and from disadvantaged backgrounds, whom they raped and sexually exploited, according to watchdog reports into the scandal.

The official report severely criticised authorities for a failure to address the abuse, attributing it to issues around race, class and religion and a fear that the perpetrators' ethnicity would trigger allegations of racism.

This has only increased the distrust of immigration and institutions in the town.

"There was always going to be more anger here," explained Riaz Ayaaz, referring to the legacy of the abuse scandal.

The 29-year-old Muslim, born in Rotherham, said that his mosque had asked worshippers to "look out for each other", to not "react" to possible provocations and to "trust the police".

For him, a "lot of people" used the deaths of the three girls in Southport "as an excuse to vent out their frustrations".

He called for a focus on "wider scale issues", particularly the economy, "which impacts everything else."

Z.Ramadan--SF-PST