Japan, other prowhalers gain momentum

FRIGATE BAY, St. Kitts (AP) The annual battle over commercial whaling ended Tuesday with Japan and other prowhaling nations edging closer toward their goal of resuming commercial hunts, amid accusations of vote-buying and bullying from both sides of the debate.

A police officer tries Tuesday to stop Greenpeace activists from sticking cardboard signs representing whale tails into the sand at the beach resort in Frigate Bay, St. Kitts, where the annual International Whaling Commission conference was being held.

As delegates to the International Whaling Commission left the Caribbean island of St. Kitts, many agreed Japan and its allies had scored a victory — at least a symbolic one — at the annual conference.

The prowhaling nations managed to pass by a single vote a resolution to support ending a 20-year-old ban on commercial whaling, and they appeared poised to expand their influence on the commission and win more votes at next year's meeting in Anchorage, Alaska.

"This was a historic vote," Joji Morishita, a spokesman for the Japanese delegation, said of the resolution. "This means the IWC can go back to managing whales and not just protecting them."

Japan and Iceland hunt whales under the auspices of scientific research, and Norway ignores the 1986 ban altogether.

As the meeting ended, Japan planned a meeting of prowhaling nations early next year to help consolidate its gains and move toward gaining the 75 percent majority necessary to overturn the ban.

The simple majority, which Japan and its allies gained for the first time since the ban, lets prowhaling nations chip away at restrictions and shift the IWC's focus away from conservation.

"They showed that they are equally strong as a voting bloc as the antiwhaling side," said Eugene Lapointe, an expert on sustainable resource management who attended the conference.

The gathering also showed that the world remains bitterly divided over whaling. Small nations that supported Japan grumbled about what they perceived as bullying by conservationists and governments that support whale preservation efforts.

Opponents meanwhile accused Japan of buying support by paying the dues of friendly nations and providing more than $ 100 million in aid over the past five years to the six Caribbean nations that backed the resolution.

"It took 15 years for Japan to achieve a simple majority, and they invested heavily in it," said New Zealand Conservation Minister Chris Carter.

As delegates debated administrative issues Tuesday, police arrested 10 protesters from Greenpeace who had tried to place cardboard whale tails in the sand outside the conference as a memorial to the 863 whales killed by Japan in the past year.

Earlier, the government of St. Kitts — which supports the resumption of commercial whaling — banned the Greenpeace ship Arctic Sunrise from entering its territory.

Conservationists had argued that the six nations that authored the prohunting resolution — Dominica, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Grenada, Antigua and Barbuda and St. Lucia — should embrace whale watching instead of hunting to help their tourism-dependent economies.

Antiwhaling members of the commission noted that this year's session wasn't a complete win for Japan, which failed to gain passage of a measure to resume whaling off its coast.

The Japanese also lost a vote to allow secret ballots, which they had hoped would allow nations to support their cause without fear of repercussions.

"They can call it a win on paper," Australian Environmental Minister Ian Campbell said.

"But on all substantive issues, they lost."

Conservation groups said they hope to galvanize public opposition to whaling ahead of next year's conference. One group, called Save the Whales Again, is planning to launch public service announcements in the U.S. starring actors Pierce Brosnan and Hayden Panettiere.