US peace activist visiting New Zealand to promote peace and meet with local spybase attackers
For immediate release

American peace activist, author, lecturer and 2008 Nobel Prize nominee John Dear will be in New Zealand for a week from 28 October to speak at public lectures throughout the country. He will also meet with members of the group who caused an estimated $1m damage in an attack on a US spybase in 2008. The Prime Minister described the attack as a “senseless act of criminal vandalism”.

Dear’s peace activism is focused on protesting war and violence. He describes war as the “ultimate moral sin”. Also a practising Catholic clergyman (a Jesuit Priest), he has been arrested more than 75 times for his “non-violent” activism. His longest period of incarceration was 17 months - eight months in a tiny prison cell, and nine months of house arrest - for hammering on an F15 nuclear fighter-bomber, while protesting as part of the Ploughshares movement. As a result, his United States voting rights were withdrawn, he is prohibited from traveling to certain countries, and is subjected to increased scrutiny at airports.

The Ploughshares movement has links to three men who were publicly criticised by Prime Minister Helen Clark after a 2008 attack on a 30-metre dome at a spybase in Waihopai, near Blenheim, which caused an estimated $1m damage. Miss Clark called it a “senseless act of criminal vandalism”.

Dear, however, describes their actions as “ dismantling the weapons of death”. He supports the actions of the Waihopai protesters, and is looking forward to meeting with them. Dear has organized hundreds of similar demonstrations

at military bases across the United States. He has also worked with Mother Theresa, among others, in attempts to stop the death penalty. He was nominated for the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize by Archbishop Desmond Tutu. That year he was sentenced to 40 hours of community service and $510 in fines for another anti-war protest. He refused to pay the fine or undertake community service, but considered it a " great blessing to be in trouble with the U.S. government".

Dear's work for peace has also taken him to South America, where he lived and worked in a refugee camp in 1985; to the Middle East, the Philippines and Northern Ireland, where he lived and worked at a human rights centre for a year. In Iraq, he led a delegation of Nobel Peace prizewinners to witness the effects of the deadly sanctions on Iraqi children.

John Dear will be available for media interviews while in New Zealand. His two main public evening lectures will be in Wellington at St Johns Church on 29 October and Otago University on 2 November. He will also be conducting a Mass outside the US Embassy in Wellington on 29 October from 5pm.

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