Who bought off the IWC?

MANY PEOPLE, ESPECIALLY IN THE WEST, seem ready to condemn Japan for buying pro-whaling votes from smaller Third World countries in the International Whaling Commission through foreign aid programs.

That might be the case, but reader Aceface passes along a site with information that suggests Japan modeled its behavior after Greenpeace, which paid for membership fees to the IWC and supplied the new members’ “delegates” to the commission.

The whale savers targeted poor nations plus some small, newly independent ones like Antigua and St. Lucia. They drafted the required membership documents for submission to the U.S. State Department. They assigned themselves or their friends as the scientists and commissioners to represent these nations at the whaling commission. For instance, Palacio, a Columbian citizen based in Miami, arranged to be the commissioner from St. Lucia. The commissioner from Antigua was Palacio’s friend and lawer, Richard Baron, also from Miami. McTaggart’s friend Paul Gouin, a Moroccan-born French expatriate living in Nassau, Bahamas, served as commissioner from Panama…Between 1978 and 1982, Palacio says, the operation added at least half a dozen new member countries to the commission’s membership to achieve the three-fourths majority necessary for a moratorium on commercial whaling, which passed in 1982.

Some governments were involved too:

A top US government official, Dr. Michael Tillman, has admitted that anti-whaling fundraising groups recruited countries into the International Whaling Commission (IWC) to pass measures against commercial whaling, including a commercial whaling moratorium.

According to John Rudolph, reporting for National Public Radio’s Living on Earth program, anti-whaling activists wanted to ban whaling in late 1970’s and developed “a campaign by the U.S. government and conservation groups to bring new members into the IWC. Among the nations recruited in the early 1980’s were several from the Caribbean: St. Vincent, St. Lucia, Antigua and others. Their votes helped the moratorium squeak through in 1982.

“Dr. Tillman and others claim that, in the years just before the vote on the worldwide moratorium, conservation groups paid some small island nations to join the Commission,” he said.

“There was what we called ‘common knowledge’ that a number of countries joined and that their dues and the travel support was reportedly due to conservation groups providing it,” Dr. Tillman stated on the program. Dr. Tillmann was the acting head of the U.S. delegation at many of the IWC annual meetings.

The countries referred to included the Seychelles, India, Belize, Costa Rica, Uruguay, Egypt, Kenya, Jamaica, Senegal, and four newly independent eastern Caribbean states.

The Solomon Islands were recruited by the United States in 1985 to help obtain a catch quota of bowhead whales for Alaskan Eskimos.

The British got some countries into a half-Nelson as well:

In 1994, U.K. Agriculture Minister John Gummer threatened the Caribbean countries with loss of UK support for their European banana market if they voted against the Antarctic Whale Sanctuary. As the Caribbean countries depend upon the banana market for up to 60 percent of their total annual incomes, they abstained from the issue.

In contrast, how have the Japanese efforts gone?

Japan gives development assistance to as many as 150 countries around the world, and it so happens that these Caribbean nations are among the recipients of this assistance…(I)f all 150 countries that receive Japanese aid were to join IWC and vote in support of Japan, the IWC would have been a different place altogether. However, in reality only a few of the recipients have joined IWC and some of them almost always oppose Japan in voting, for example, Argentine and India.

Some years ago, then Greenpeace member David Garrick came to Japan to promote the anti-whaling cause. Garrick was the co-founder of Greenpeace Chronicles and stayed with the society through 1979. (He left to form the Sea Shepherd Society with Paul Watson, who had a falling out with Greenpeace because he favored violent tactics, as our previous posts have described.)

During his visit, Garrick said:

“There’s a lot of dirty politicking here that we’d like to clarify. We’d like to get people working on it while there’s still whales left.”

Dirty politicking indeed.

Update: Paul Watson of Sea Shepherd admits that anti-whaling forces were the first to use these tactics. In regard to his tactics of ramming whalers at sea, he states: “I think it is important that we continue to confront, harass and intervene against the whalers on the water. The media is not interested in discussions or dialogue – the media is interested in drama. We must continue to dramatize whaling by confronting them.”