British cruise base protesters evicted

Press, 8 February 1985, Page 6

British cruise base protesters evicted

NZPA-Reuter London About 2000 police and soldiers evicted yesterday about 150 protesters from the site of Britain’s second cruise missile base, and nuclear disarmament campaigners called it an “enormous overreaction.” The police and 1500 army engineers used bulldozers to clear an area at the Royal

Air Force base at Molesworth, 100 km north of London. As the Army erected an llkm-long barbed wire fence, the police put up road-blocks, and officers with dogs stopped people approaching over surrounding fields. No-one was arrested. The group, protesting against the planned siting of 64 American cruise missiles

from 1988, said that their campaign would continue. The Defence Secretary, Michael Heseltine, said that the eviction had been carefully planned “with a minimum of disruption and the minimum of danger to the people, particularly the children on the site.” Mr Heseltine said in a statement to Parliament that he had ordered the

action because of an organised campaign of disruption by peace protesters. “We could have faced civil disobedience not just for days or weeks but for months on that site,” he said. He described the protesters as trespassers and said that they were members of a small, unrepresentative minority.

A Labour Left-winger, Tony Benn, said that the fence that soldiers had built around the base was Britain’s version of the Berlin Wall. Monsignor Bruce Kent, general secretary of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Britain’s largest group opposing nuclear arms, said that the eviction was “an enormous

overreaction.” C.N.D. protests would continue at the site. Huge demonstrations at Easter were planned, he said. A C.N.D. spokesman added that the organisation "reaffirms its intention to protest peacefully in the face of all the might the Government can bring to bear upon us.”