Atlantica - 01.06.2006, Page 21

PHOTO BY PÁLL STEFÁNSSON
20 AT L A N T I CA
There were no whales to be seen, but they were still being hunted.
Japan came to this year’s annual meeting of the International Whaling
Commission on the sun-speckled Caribbean island of St. Kitts with one goal in
mind – take over the IWC and start to make it a group more concerned with
hunting whales than protecting them.
Japan has spent the last decade recruiting small countries like Tuvalu, Kiribati
and Togo (you get a whale burger if you can find two of those on a map) to join
the IWC and vote for whaling, even though none of those countries necessarily
want to harpoon whales.
Their recruitment drive paid off. On June 18, by a margin of one vote, the IWC
voted for the St. Kitts and Nevis Declaration, which said that the 20-year-old ban
on commercial whaling was out of date and should be overturned.
Just a symbolic vote really, since Japan and its allies needed, and didn’t get, a
75 percent majority to truly tear down the ban.
Nonetheless, there was blood in the water. The Brazilians screamed out that
the Icelanders’ vote shouldn’t have counted because Iceland left the IWC at one
time. Environmental groups pointed fingers at Denmark for voting for the pro-
posal even though it was full of bad science. (The Nevis Declaration said hungry
whales are to blame for declining fish stocks – an idea environmentalists con-
sider ludicrous.) And others said Japan had bought off its allies with hundreds of
millions of dollars in fisheries aid, a charge repeatedly levied against them, and
repeatedly denied.
In the end, not much changed.
Japan didn’t get its vote to overturn the ban, Iceland said it would still hunt
whales under its scientific whaling program, and Norway said it would still hunt
them commercially, since it has never honored the ban.
Which means, between the three countries, 2,400 whales will be killed in the
next twelve months.
Not much of a ban after all. AKR a
The international ban on whaling won’t save 2,400 whales this year
Politics at St. Kitts
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