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Press Releases & Updates 1999
14th October 1999
Danish Peace Activist Testifies in Scottish Court
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In Greenock Sheriff court today, where she is on trial with two other women for disarming a UK nuclear weapons facility, a Danish woman told the jury how an increasing sense of alarm and urgency about the menace posed by nuclear weapons had spurred her on to engage in campaigning and direct action.
Triggered by a new series of nuclear bomb tests in 1995 Ulla Roder (42), a social worker and mother of two from Odense, published a newsletter and collected 4500 signatures for a petition seeking an end to the nuclear arms race. This led to a meeting with the Danish Foreign Minister, Nils Henry Petersen, about the nuclear tests going on in the US. She had also met with the Indian ambassador to Denmark to share concern about Indian’s nuclear testing.
In April 1999 she had written to the Prime Minister, Mr. Rasmussen, to protest about NATO’s expansionist policy and nuclear strategy. When he failed to reply he was sent a "citizen’s summons", informing him of the illegality of NATO’s nuclear weapons under international law. Although the people of Denmark had voted in a referendum against nuclear weapons on Danish soil, such weapons had been brought into Denmark on US ships with the full knowledge of the Danish government.
Roder said:
"I promised myself that that I did not want to be the only one left behind one day, realising that I had done nothing when I knew what could happen."
When questioned by the prosecutor Roder admitted that she, along with the two other women, had boarded the laboratory "Maytime", had damaged a number of items and thrown further items into the sea. She had intended to make sure that they could not again be used as part of the Trident system. Although their action had probably only caused a delay in testing the new Trident submarine, the women were only a part of the Trident Ploughshares campaign and many others were committed to direct action.
Roder did not believe the assurances she had received from the UK ambassador to Denmark that the UK government wanted a "safer world in which there was no place for nuclear weapons." The same government was even now colluding with the US in developing new nuclear weapons. She concluded her testimony by saying that she had no evil intention when she boarded "Maytime" on the 8th of June.
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