Bloody Friday may refer to:
The May 1998 Riots of Indonesia (Indonesian: Kerusuhan Mei 1998), also known simply as The 1998 Tragedy (Indonesian: Peristiwa 1998), were incidents of mass violence of a racial nature that occurred throughout Indonesia, mainly in Medan in the province of North Sumatra (4–8 May), the capital city of Jakarta (12–15 May), and Surakarta (also called Solo) in the province of Central Java (13–15 May). The riots were triggered by economic problems including food shortages and mass unemployment, and eventually led to the resignation of President Suharto and the fall of the New Order government. The main targets of the violence were ethnic Chinese, however, most of the people who died in the riots were the Javanese Indonesian looters who targeted the Chinese shops, not the Chinese themselves, since the looters were burnt to death in a massive fire.
It was estimated that more than a thousand people died in the riots. At least 168 cases of rape were reported, and material damage was valued at more than Rp 3.1 trillion. As of 2010, legal proceedings regarding the riots have yet to be completed.
Bloody Friday is the name given to the bombings by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) in Belfast on 21 July 1972, during the Troubles. At least twenty bombs exploded in the space of eighty minutes, most within a half hour period. Most of them were car bombs and most targeted infrastructure, especially the transport network. Nine people were killed, including two British soldiers and five civilians, while 130 were injured. The IRA said it sent telephoned warnings at least thirty minutes before each explosion, and claimed the security forces wilfully ignored some of the warnings for its own ends. The security forces denied this and said they were overstretched by the sheer amount of bombs and bomb warnings, some of which were hoaxes.
The bombings were partly a response to the breakdown of talks between the IRA and the British government. Since the beginning of its campaign in 1970, the IRA had carried out a bombing campaign against economic, military and political targets in Northern Ireland. It carried out a total of 1,300 bombings in 1972. However, Bloody Friday was a major setback for the IRA and there was a backlash against the organization. Immediately after the bombings, the security forces carried out numerous raids on the homes of republicans. Ten days later, the British Army launched Operation Motorman, in which it re-took the no-go areas controlled by republicans. Loyalist paramilitaries also reacted to the bombings by carrying out 'revenge' attacks on Catholic civilians.