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Some 1,000 people from Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic, staged a protest against the US-led war on Iraq on Monday near Hillsborough Castle, where visiting US President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair were believed to be holding a summit.
The demonstrators gathered from a procession of cars and chartered buses some three kilometers long and expressed their anti-war feelings in the parking lot of a shopping center near Hillsbvorough, the official residence of Britain's secretary of state for Northern Ireland, about 10 kilometers south of Belfast.
"We're here to express our opposition to the war in Iraq," Bairbre de Brun, the Sinn Fein education minister in the now-suspended Northern Ireland Assembly, said to reporters.
US President Bush arrived in Belfast late Monday for a two-day summit with British Prime Minister Tony Blair to discuss the war in Iraq and the peace process in the Middle East and Northern Ireland, as US troops tightened their hold on Baghdad on Sunday and British troops drove into the center of Basra to seize a large chunk of Iraq's second largest city.
By visiting Belfast at this crucial stage of war in Iraq, Bush is thought to do a favor for Blair, who has sent about 45,000 servicemen for fighting with US troops in the Gulf, the analysts said.
(Xinhua News Agency April 8, 2003)
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