Press Releases & Updates 1998

Tonight two For Mother Earth campaigners breached the high security at the Clyde Naval Base in Faslane, Scotland. This is their second spectacular action this week, in a non-violent effort to disarm the outlawed British Trident nuclear submarine system. The campaigners are enforcing the 1996 UN World Court decision which outlawed both the use and threat to use nuclear weapons, and wish to force the British Government to start multilateral negotiations to ban all nuclear weapons. Westminster has stubbornly ignored all UN resolutions to this effect. The activists, part of Trident Ploughshares 2000, took recourse to non-violent direct disarmament actions, after exhausting all other means. Four other activists, three UK women and a Australian man, were sent to Scottish prisons last Friday.

Over 100 arrests have taken place since the beginning of the Trident Ploughshares campaign on August 11th. Alex Salmond, leader of the Scottish National Party, Rob Green, a former UK Naval Commander, and Australian Senator Bob Brown, are amongst the many who have shown support for this campaign, to rid Scotland of the illegal nuclear weapons system.

Krista van Velzen (23 - Netherlands) and Katri Silvonen (20 - Finland), both full-time campaigners at the office of ’For Mother Earth’ International in Belgium, swam for one and a half hours across the ice-cold Gare Loch, penetrating the heart of Britain’s first strike nuclear weapon system at 3:15 a.m. They wore wet-suits, and were carrying tools to disarm the nuclear submarine, hammers, bolt-cutters and sirup. It is not yet clear if they were succesful in disarming part of the Trident system.

Tonight’s attempt follows a first attempt made in the early hours of August 17th, where they were arrested within only a few yards of a Trident nuclear submarine. Tonight, according to an independent monitoring source, they came even closer, one activist climbing onto the ship-lift above the Trident submarine.

The activists were arrested by the MOD at Faslane, and will possibly be greeted once again with high respect by the astonished security forces. Although first met with fear and distrust, the activists say that the MOD and local Strathclyde Police are displaying growing sympathy for the commitment and challenging non-violent methods employed by the emerging international Trident Ploughshares 2000 movement.

’If they send me to join the three other women in a Scottish jail, I can only state that they arrest the wrong people. We as citizens have the legal obligation to stop the preparation of crimes against humanity under the UN approved Nuremberg Charter’, states the 20 year Finnish campaigner Katri Silvonen.

Twenty three year old Dutch citizen Krista van Velzen says

’We have no doubt that this Ploughshares movement is going to force Westminster to fulfil its commitment under Article VI of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty by the year 2000. The people of the UK, nor the global community, want these costly weapons of mass destruction. It is time to invest this waste of money and resources into meeting real social needs’.

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