Rioting continues in Poland

Police incident touches off seventh day of anger

WARSAW, Poland (RWN) - Angry service workers threw rocks and bricks at police, set fire to cars and looted businesses in the seventh straight day of rioting.

For the first day since the rioting began, no one was killed. There were more than 30 people injured, officials said.

The rioting in Warsaw followed riots in Vistula and Gdansk. All the riots were sparked by tensions between police and low-paid service industry workers, who are primarily Muslim.

"We are appealing to the Muslim community to please help us calm the situation," Polish Chancellor Casmir Walech said in a nationally televised press conference. "We ask that you please stay in your homes for the next two days and let restore order, take a deep breath and get things back to normal."

The riots in Warsaw were touched off when a Polish antiterrorist team raided an apartment on Belgradtzka Street, a heavily Somalian Islamic area. Someone - reports differ on who - fired a shot and the team began firing.

Two people - including a pregnant mother - were wounded. The mother remains in critical condition; the other person was treated and released.

News of the shooting spread through the community and Somalian immigrants poured into the streets. Police were deployed to maintain order.

"Things just degenerated from there," said Cmdr. Christian Kapowski, the regional commander of police for the Warsaw area.

Tensions between Muslim immigrants and assimilated Muslims in Poland have simmered - and occasionally flared - for the last 30 years. But a new influx of Muslims from east Africa a decade ago set the stage for these confrontations.

Just as generations of immigrants had done before them, these new Poles set up their own ethnic enclaves in neighborhoods. They went to work for low wages in the service industry while putting their children their children to school.

But the brand of Islam they practiced - a mix of Islamic Fundamentalism and Evangelic Islam - drove a wedge between the migrants and the assimilated Poles in society.

Christian Europeans and assimilated Muslims passed a law restricting the numbers of Islamic immigrants admitted to the country without guaranteed jobs. In 2031, Walech and the Pride of Poland Party took over the government by an overwhelming margin. Basing his campaign largely on Polish fears of immigrants, Walech's government was the first single-party, non-coalition Polish government since 2008.



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