Ofog and Avrusta - A people's movement to do away with weapons.

Ofog and Avrusta - Swedish words that mean Mischief and Disarm resp. - are two anti-war groups from Sweden, the home of Alfred Nobel who a fortune as an inventor, principally for his invention of dynamite. He died in 1896, leaving most of his fortune to endow the Nobel prizes.

Nobel believed the destructive power of his inventions could promote peace. He wrote to his lifelong friend, peace activist Bertha von Suttner, who would win the Nobel Peace Prize almost a decade after his death, “Perhaps my factories will put an end to war even sooner than your Congresses; on the day when two army corps will be able to annihilate each other in a second, all civilised nations will recoil with horror and disband their troops.”

But instead of recoiling in horror, countries today destroy each other many times over, while continuing to buy more and more destructive weapons and ironically this has made Sweden one of the world leaders in exporting weapons. Nobel in 1894 aquired the company Bofors which is now a subsidiary of the present day BAE Systems.

Paradoxically while year after year many people around the world, vie for the coveted Nobel Peace Prize, the lesser known Swedes who oppose Bofors in their own unique way go unnoticed.

Cattis Laska is a member of the anti-war groups Ofog and Avrusta, speaks about their non-violent protests against the the Swedish weapons industry: “We went into two weapon factories the same night. Two went into Saab Bofors Dynamics (while General Motors bought Saab’s auto division, Saab in Sweden makes weapons) ... and they disarmed about 20 [grenade launchers] ... to prevent them from being used in wars. They did it by using a hammer. There’s very much details in those launchers, so they have to be perfect. So it’s enough just to scrape inside to disable them. And then, me and another person went into the BAE Systems Bofors factory, where we disabled some parts for howitzers going to India. We also used hammers.”

Cattis Laska and many of her compatriots, follow the plowshares activists in the United States, who practice the biblical prescription from Isaiah 2:4, turning “swords into plowshares,”albeit in their own peculiar way. While Laska has been sentenced to a prison term of three months for her mischievous deeds, Annika Spalde another activist with Ofog and Avrusta, waiting for her trial says,

“We sell weapons to countries at war and to countries who seriously violate human rights, and still these sales just grow bigger and bigger, so we feel that we, as ordinary citizens, have a responsibility to act then and to physically try to stop these weapons from being shipped off."