day 3
bread not bombs / english / trial
/ first trial / day 3
Fri, 7 May 1999
A Swedish peace campaigner told a British court today why he tried to damage a Trident nuclear submarine.
Stellan Vinthagen, 34, a PhD student at theUniversity of Gothenburg, is ointly charged with conpsiracy to commit criminal damage, with Ann-Britt Sternfeldt and Annika Spalde.
They were arrested last September inside the VSEL shipyard in Barrow, North -West England, before they could damage the last of Britain 's four Trident submarines to be built.
Vinthagen, from (?which town did he grow up in?), told the jury at Preston CrownCourt that he faced years of prison, and risked losing his secure university job, being separated from his family and being in a foreign country. "But some 20 years of work against nuclear weapons has forced me to be here today," he told the jury.
His parents had been pioneers of the ecological movement inSweden, and his grandfather, a professional soldier, ended up in a military prison because he was letting Jewish refugees come to Sweden. "He was following his own conscience, and that has formed me," said Vinthagen.
"I wanted to be a professional footballer, but my upbringing changed that." International peace and solidarity work taught him about poverty in the Third World, where 30,000 childen die every day of starvation. He became the secretary of the Swedish Peace Council, and met survivors of the Hiroshima nuclear bomb.
"I started to realise I had to act more boldly against these dangers, especialy after meeting Hiroshima survivors."
In 1986 he helped to disarm a nuclear missile launcher for Pershing II missiles at Mutlangen US base i Germany, using bolt-cutters and hammers. In 1987 the superpowers agreed to dismantle Pershing and other simliar missiles in the IMF Treaty.
"That was a huge success, to see our role was a tiny part of it, one year after our action," said Vinthagen.
He stressed that 99% of his work in these yeras was "so-called normal legal work. Only sometimes, when I felt it was really necessary, to act and do practical disarmament, I have done that."
He explaiend the British government's "official lies" about Trident and the risks that the submarine posed, carrying missiles that could kill more peole than the dead of World War 2. Nuclear weapons were used to uphold an "on-going undeclared war, where the increadibly rich are holding down the incredibly poor -- that is inhuman, immoral, and very dangerous."
The trial judge, Judge Peter Openshaw, interrupted Vinthagen and accused him of delivering a political speech that had nothing to do with the case.
Vinthagen was supported by his first witness, a German judge who told how his parents' shame over the Nazi era had led him to be arrested as an anti-nuclear protester.
Judge Bernd Hahnfeld flew from Hamburg and has 30 years' experience in the German family and criminal courts, told the court how he was arrested in 1987 when he and 19 other judges sat down in the road in front of the Mutlangen US military base, where Pershing II nuclear missiles were stationed.
Their protest was part of growing public opposition to the missiles, and shortly afterwards, Pershing and Cruise missiles were disarmed under the IMF treaty between the Soviet Union and the United States.
He said: "In Germany judges do not learn in university that international law is part of national law, but it is, it is a higher law.
The judge supported Vinthagen's claim that nuclear weapons are illegal under international law, quoting the 1949 Nuremberg principles and the 1996 advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice in the Hague that the threat or use of nuclear weapons is a violation of international law, with the possible exception of national self-defence when national survival is at stake.
Judge Hahnfeld told the jury: "I was born in the Third Reich, in 1939. After the war, I and other young people asked our parents what they did to protest against war, and there was no answer. I thought that if our children asked us, we can say what we did."
The trial continues.
Contact: Andrew Hobbs
Tel: 01772 721466 or 0403 615894
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Andrew Hobbs (NUJ)
8 Hampton Street
Preston
Lancashire
PR2 2JL
UK
