Dialogue: Are Oldham's Asian youths just learning by example?

British columnist DEBORAH ORR asks if Asian youths are just learning to act like their white counterparts.

Can that little detail nestling in the story of how an early-teens clash between a white and an Asian-British child outside a chip-shop turned into a riot involving hundreds of people be true? Did the mother of the white boy phone some young men and ask them to come round? She was seen talking on her mobile after the incident, then five minutes later two taxis rolled up containing the core of a group of about 25 men.

They began a campaign of harassment against Asian families, which included jumping up and down on a vehicle containing a 2-year-old, throwing bricks through the window of a pregnant woman's home, and daubing graffiti reading "white power OK" on the shutters of an Asian-owned shop. Within hours, reprisals were coming from 500 Asians in turn, whose own destructive anger was not quelled by police for many hours.

If the rumour and speculation around it is true, then one woman's phone call has proved heftily expensive, by all kinds of measures. What does seem to be undeniably true, though, is that all of the trouble seen recently in Oldham tends to start with the actions of young people, and be seized upon by adults with an interest in escalating it into a major racial incident.

Take the example of Walter Chamberlain, the 76-year-old war veteran who was attacked in Oldham three days after some teenagers had told a radio reporter that there were "no-go areas" for whites. A 15-year-old Asian has been charged with racially motivated grievous bodily harm.

But Chamberlain himself does not claim that the boys who assaulted him said "get out of our area," and his own grown-up children insisted on television that they neither wanted the attack to be treated as a racial incident, nor believed it to be one.

How wise they were to take such a stand, and what a further horror it is that their wishes were ignored. The local paper used the apocryphal quotation as its banner headline, alongside a photograph of Chamberlain's bruised and battered face. Its offices were firebombed, supposedly as revenge against its discriminatory reporting. The newspaper vehemently denies these allegations.

However, what cannot be denied is that for the whole British media the "angle" that Asian racial criminals outnumber their white counterparts is a compelling one.

Much of this is based on recent police statistics. They point to 60 per cent of 572 race crimes having been perpetrated against whites in Oldham. According to police statistics the incidence of Asian-on-white racism has been rising since the mid-90s, and the balance has only just tipped over.

Many Asians argue that the statistics lie, because whites are more likely to report racist slurs. Whatever the truth of the matter, the sad fact is that the perception that the sub-continental worm has turned is new and interesting, and therefore in the forefront of the thoughts of media pundits seeking fresh impetus for their stories about race in Britain.

No more tardily, the British National Party seized upon the unwilling Chamberlain as its poster boy, featuring the face of the elderly man with his broken nose and cheekbone as part of their ongoing campaign to foment unrest in the area, and perhaps even gain a parliamentary platform for their policy of "repatriation."

Two candidates are standing in the pair of constituencies Oldham boasts in the general election. One of them is Nick Griffin, leader of the BNP.

So a lot of mileage is squeezed out of every act of teenage delinquency in this area, as interested parties seize upon childish resentments to further their own purportedly more adult ones.

The geographical patchiness of the various ethnic groups in Oldham is highly specific. The idea of "no-go areas" for whites may be a new one as far as gangs and violence are concerned.

But for a long time the trend has been that different groups send their children to local primary schools which are not very diverse, so that it is not until secondary school, that any sort of multi-ethnic education really kicks in.

Many people find this difficulty easily surmountable, as the area's thriving, multi-ethnic sixth form college attests. But among those whites and Asians for whom the shove-up of academic success is not forthcoming, there must be a degree of resentment and anger, played out in the traditional playground way.

That is, by pinpointing differences you can persuade yourself that these are symbols of your own superiority and use them to intimidate your victim.

Unfortunately, racism appears to be one of the habits Asian youths have assimilated in their experience of life. Much is made of the fact that young Oldham Asians, third or fourth generation in Britain, are in a no-man's land, far removed from the cultural traditions of their grandparents, but very far too from the cultural traditions of this country. This explanation is used to explain rather than condone their behaviour, and certainly it does that quite convincingly.

After all, there is a degree of assimilation here. In the area they live in, the most angry, inarticulate and desperate of Asian youths are learning to behave in the same way as their counterpart white youths - as that racist crime escalator, which has suddenly become significant, attests. And maybe they are now learning, all too fast, that it is this kind of behaviour that gets them real attention.

The reality though is a horrible cycle of tit-for-tat exploitation, in which all sorts of theories can be proven by using the example of some very isolated and messed up young people taking out their own anger in the fashion they have seen all sorts of similarly misdirected anger being meted out against their parents.

The police say that perhaps as few as 10 Asian teenagers have perpetrated up to 80 racist attacks of the type committed against Chamberlain. Whatever they themselves believe their motives to be, they are merely delinquents, not different to any others. They do vile and violent things because they enjoy it.

But unfortunately there are a lot of people around them who seem willing to confirm that calling bad behaviour race war makes it a political act and not just pointless, ignorant, bullying, hate.

- INDEPENDENT