New Zealander faces US jail time for Greenpeace protest

5:30 pm

A veteran New Zealand Greenpeace campaigner is facing up to six months in jail for protesting against Star Wars missile tests in California.

Waiheke Islander Henk Haazen, former engineer on Greenpeace's ill-fated Rainbow Warrior, was in a group of 15 Greenpeace activists and two journalists who disrupted a Star Wars missile test at Vandenberg Air Force Base on July 14 last year.

The United States Attorney's Office this week agreed to drop two felony conspiracy charges - one of which had a maximum jail sentence of six years - against the 17 defendants.

In turn, they all pleaded guilty to a single misdemeanour charge of conspiring to enter a military base, which carries a potential jail term of up to six months.

Most of them will be sentenced on January 18, but Mr Haazen has been told by his lawyer that the prosecutor wants jail time for four defendants, including him.

"Maybe they're picking on me because I'm the one with the most grey hair in the group, I don't know," the 47-year-old told NZPA from Los Angeles today.

"The prosecution seems to be waving a big stick at us as a deterrent.

"But Greenpeace has a long history of protesting against the arms race, and the one in California was a classic, peaceful Greenpeace protest - I feel exactly the same now as I did when I protested against the programme."

However, he didn't expect to have felony charges laid against him for the protest, and was "definitely" worried about going to jail.

"I surely wasn't expecting that ... I don't want to go to jail for six months -nobody wants to go to jail for six months."

Mr Haazen, who voluntarily flew to the US in November last year to face the charges, was arrested in Alaska in 2000 during an environmental protest.

He thinks his Alaskan arrest may have had a bearing on the prosecutor lining him up for jail.

"She was using the arguments of previous convictions and criminal history," he said.

"But I haven't got a criminal history and there's only that Alaskan arrest for disobeying a police officer - I was fined $US50 ($NZ117.73) for that."

Mr Haazen expects to be back at his Waiheke Island home early next week, and will return to the US for the April 15 sentencing.

Greenpeace international disarmament campaigner Mike Townsley today described the prosecutor's actions as an attempt to remove the campaigners' civil right to protest, "and intimidate both the defendants and Greenpeace as a whole by bringing totally unwarranted felony charges".

But the group would continue to oppose the programme, he said, in spite of a civil injunction stopping Greenpeace USA from protests that break the law at military bases supporting the Star Wars programme in the US and the Pacific.

In last July's protest, the Greenpeace campaigners and journalists used inflatable rafts and boats to enter a restricted zone in the Pacific Ocean off California's central coast to stop the Air Force from launching an intercontinental ballistic missile.

The test, in which an unarmed missile was fired over the ocean and then destroyed by another rocket, was delayed by 40 minutes.

Group members were from New Zealand, Australia, Britain, Canada, Germany, India, Sweden and the United States.

- NZPA