From: <www.commondreams.org>
Published on Monday, January 2, 2006 by the lndependent/UK
20 Years On and Whales are Under Threat Again
by Michael McCarthy

Dust down the slogan, it's needed once again: Save The Whale. Twenty years
on from the introduction of the international whaling moratorium that was
supposed to protect them, the great whales face renewed and mortal dangers
in 2006.

The Greenpeace ship MY Esperanza is pursued by a Japanese whaling ship on
the Southern Ocean December 31, 2005. Greenpeace activists will put their
lives on the line to disrupt this year's Japanese whaling hunt, the group
said recently.

A double threat is looming for the world's largest mammals, many of them
endangered species, in the coming year.

In the biggest whale slaughter for a generation, more than 2,000 animals are
likely to be directly hunted by the three countries continuing whaling in
defiance of world opinion, Japan, Norway and Iceland. And in a crucial
political move, this year the pro-whaling nations look likely to achieve
their first majority of votes in whaling's regulatory body, the
International Whaling Commission (IWC).

The first development will be brutal, bloody and shocking to many people who
might be under the impression that whaling is a thing of the past. But the
second may be even more significant for whale welfare in the long term, for
it would pave the way for an eventual resumption of commercial whaling,
which the 1986 moratorium put on indefinite hold.

Japan is leading the way on both counts. Its whaling fleet is firing
harpoons right now in the Antarctic Ocean, hunting 935 minke whales, more
than double the number it took last year, all of them under the guise of
"scientific" whaling - killing the animals allegedly for research purposes.
This label is a fiction which fools no one, as whale meat, popular with
Japanese consumers, is sold on the open market.

It is also hunting 10 endangered fin whales - the second-largest animal on
earth, after the blue whale - and over the next two years will seek to
harpoon 40 more fin whales, and 50 humpbacks, the big whales whose
spectacular "breaching" - leaping from the water - delights observers on
whale-watching cruises.

Norway, which is pursuing commercial whaling openly by simply declining to
adhere to the moratorium, is following close behind, with another leap in
its planned kills in the coming year. Four days before Christmas, the
Norwegian government announced it would increase its 2006 whale hunting
quota by a further 250 animals to 1,052, following a unanimous
recommendation by the Storting (Norwegian parliament).
Iceland, which recommenced whaling three years ago, also under the
"scientific" label, killed 39 minkes last year and is expected to hunt a
similar number in 2006.

That all adds up to by far the bloodiest bout of whale slaughter since the
days of full-scale commercial whaling and has greatly angered environmental
campaigners.

"People should wake up to the scale of what is happening this year," said
the whaling campaigner for Greenpeace UK, Willie McKenzie. "Politicians who
are supposed to be anti-whaling especially need to wake up to it, and press
their governments to put as much effort into saving the world's whale
populations as the whaling countries are doing to exploit them."
Greenpeace has decided to take the fight directly to the Japanese, and has
sent two of its large campaigning vessels, Arctic Sunrise and Esperanza, to
the Southern Ocean to try to hinder whaling operations directly. In the past
10 days there have been a series of extraordinary confrontations between
Greenpeace and the Japanese fleet, which is based around the factory ship
Nisshin Maru.

In actions strongly reminiscent of those which first made the group famous
in the 1970s, Greenpeace activists in small inflatable boats have been
trying to block the harpooners' line of fire and, on a number if occasions,
have succeeded - making the idea of Save The Whale a reality.
What especially angers environmentalists is the fact the Japanese hunt is
taking place in the Southern Ocean Whaling Sanctuary, an area encompassing
21 million sq miles of sea around Antarctica which the IWC declared
off-limits for whaling in 1994. Japan ignores it.

Some campaigners are now calling for the anti-whaling countries - the
so-called "like-minded" group, led by Australia, New Zealand, the US and
Britain - to take legal action against Japan over the "scientific" whaling
issue.

"Scientific whaling needs to be stopped, and legal action needs to be taken
against Japan in the International Court," said Joth Singh, director of
wildlife and habitats for the International Fund for Animal Welfare.
"We believe there is, in fact, an opportunity to do that, and we have
contracted a lawyer in Australia who has done an evalutation of the
possibilities of legal action. We think the like-minded countries should
look at them.

"They need to take this issue to the International Court, because
international pressure is required. Trade sanctions should certainly be a
possibility." Mr Singh added: "I have been attending IWC meetings for years,
and a number of resolutions which have been passed aimed at stopping
scientific whaling have had no effect whatsoever. Diplomatic demarches,
notes to Japan, have had no effect either.

"If there is any seriousness in terms of saving whales, this seems to be the
way."

But time is pressing if the anti-whaling countries want to act, because in
June, at the IWC meeting to be held in St Kitts and Nevis in the Caribbean,
the whaling nations seem likely to secure a voting majority for the first
time.

It would be the result of an intense diplomatic campaign by Japan to get
small developing countries to join the IWC and vote in its favour, by
offering them substantial aid. Over the past six years, at least 14 nations
have been recruited to the IWC as Japan's supporters, most of which have no
whaling tradition. Some of the newcomers, such as Mongolia and Mali, do not
even have a coastline.

Mark Simmonds, international director of science for the Whale and Dolphin
Conservation Society, believes the Japanese already had their majority at
last year's IWC meeting in South Korea but administrative hitches meant they
were not able to exercise it. This year, he thinks, they will.
"This would be the most enormous setback for whale and dolphin
conservation," he said. "People don't realise how significant it is and how
close it is. The world needs to be alerted to it."

The whaling moratorium, voted through at the IWC meeting in Brighton in 1982
and brought in four years later, has been a rare environmental success
story. It was intended originally, not as an outright and permanent ban on
whaling, but as a pause to give whale stocks time to recover while their
numbers were assessed comprehensively, and new ways of managing huting were
introduced, based on the close study of whale population dynamics.
Most anti-whaling countries, including Britain, are now firmly of the view
that commercial whaling should never resume. Britain's original position was
to be "guided by the science" but that view has hardened over the years, and
the UK now believes "that properly regulated whale watching is the only
truly sustainable use of whales and other cetaceans [dolphins and
porpoises]".

HUNTED: THE MAIN TARGETS

* COMMON MINKE WHALE
Balaenoptera acutorostrata. The smallest of the great whales, usually about
35ft long and weighing about nine tons. This is the whale that is most
commonly seen around the coasts of Britain and it is the main object of the
summer whale hunt by Norwegian and Icelandic boats.

* ANTARCTIC MINKE WHALE
Balaenoptera bonaerensis. Slightly larger version of the North Atlantic
minke. Because it was the smallest, it was targeted last during the
centuries of commercial whaling, so it is still relatively abundant. The
main target of the Japanese whale hunt, for "scientific" reasons.

* FIN WHALE
Balaenoptera physalus. The second-largest of all the whales, exceeded only
by the blue whale. Can be 75ft long and weigh 75 tons. Despite its
classification as an endangered species - the result of commercial whaling,
especially in the southern hemisphere - it is now being hunted again by the
Japanese.

* HUMPBACK WHALE
Megaptera novaeangliae. Medium-sized whale, typically 45ft long and weighing
30 tons, widely distributed from the Arctic to the Antarctic. This species
is probably the best known, and most photographed, because of its habit of
making spectacular leaps out of the water. Heavily exploited in the past, it
is now recovering in many places thanks to the whaling moratorium, but it is
again being targeted by the Japanese.

© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited