Source: The High North publication, "The International Harpoon," July 3, 2000, published during the 52nd Annual Meeting of the International Whaling Commission held in Australia

Annual meetings of the IWC has be come shorter through the nineties. With no management scheme in place for commercial whaling, participation in the working group handling the missing part - supervision and control - has in recent years been quite embarrassing. Last year, nobody asked for the floor, and the chairman desperately tried stretch the meeting until they could be freed by the lunch bell. This year, everyone was busy trying to deliver the impression being constructive, but still with no substantial results.

Who is responsible for this deadlock?

According to veteran New Zealand delegate Mike Donoghue, it’s the whalers. “The whaling nations are dragging their feet these issues,” he told Australia’s ABC Radio (June 19). Greenpeace agrees. Japan and Norway are “to sabotage the International Whale Meeting”, announced in a recent press re-lease. The whaling nations “have failed to change their hard-line stand” and refuse to accept the Irish “compromise” proposal, according to Greenpeace.

But does anyone seriously believe these two nations have the clout to block decisions in a body with 40 members? To veto change in the IWC schedule requires a quarter of the members’ votes. True, the whalers have the support of a handful of island nations (which the anti-whalers claim have been bought by Japan), but even this was not enough to block adoption of the Southern Ocean Sanctuary, despite its profound implications for the future of whaling. Indeed, Norway abstained on that particular vote, partly in protest but also because another “No” vote would have made no difference.

Since that momentous event, the number of nations supporting the whalers has remained stable, while the anti-whaling numbers have grown with the addition Italy. Thus, common sense tells us that responsibility for the deadlock rests with the anti-whaling majority. The reason they are shy about admitting it is because they are at war with themselves.

It is “beyond question ... that there is a serious split in the ranks of the anti-whalers,” wrote David Helton in the British magazine BBC Wildlife (June 1994), a publication known for its friendly relations with animal protection organisations. That “split in the ranks” is not about objectives, as the magazine’s editor went to considerable pains to explain. “[M]embers of any of the groups mentioned above should feel assured that the leaders of all of them are honestly in favour of an end to whaling and are honestly doing what they think has the best chance of bringing it about,” she wrote. 

The split is all about strategy –purist anti-whalers vs. pragmatic anti-whalers. Explained Helton: “To Side A, any rules for whaling are simply anathema, something that in itself would cause whaling to resume. To Side B, it’s a chance to outfox the whalers once and for all, by making sure that if whaling does ‘resume’, it can’t.” 

Side A, the purists, is led by Australia and New Zealand, backed by Austria, Italy and the UK, both of which joined the IWC expressly to block a return to whaling. Prominent whale rights NGOs lending their support to Side A are the Environmental Investigation Agency and the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society. Side B, the pragmatists, consists of several EU countries, nominally headed by Ireland as lead sponsor of the “compromise” proposal. NGO supporters include the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) and the World Wide Fund for Nature. (For a while, it looked as if Greenpeace had also pitched its tent in this camp, but now it jumps nervously back and forth between camps, uncertain where its best interests lie.) 

Helton allowed “IFAW’s Sidney Holt” to explain the tactics of Side B in further detail: The geo-graphical restrictions due to the Indian and Southern Sanctuaries “would combine with a tough RMP” - with its “safeguards for enforcement and insistence on a humane way of killing whales” - to create qualifications that “would not be met by whalers in 50 years, and probably never.” In other words, Side B’s tactic is to make whaling legal but impossible - surely a smarter approach than that of the purists. Imagine if Side B had its way. Norway and Japan have been calling for completion of the Revised Management Scheme for ten years. If the anti-whalers were now to al-low its adoption, any protest on the part of the whalers at its draconian requirements would find no public sympathy other than in their own countries. Not only would they find it hard to explain to the public why the details of the RMS made whaling impossible. It would also make it very difficult to withdraw from the IWC, a scenario that is inevitable if the purists succeed in their quest to ban all whaling. 

The Dutch chairman of the working group on supervision and control has put forward a series of proposals which imposes several layers of control on the whaling nations. They are to have at least two national inspectors on every boat, to enable 24-hour inspection. In addition to this, the IWC can place an international observer on board. Under such a scheme, a rather bizarre situation could result aboard many of the small Norwegian fishing boats which engage in seasonal whaling. A typical boat with a crew of six could be controlled by no fewer than three inspectors! The proposal also calls for national inspectors (plus the possibility of international observers) to be present on landing stations. A control centre would be established at IWC headquarters and satellite transmitters would enable real-time monitoring of every boat’s position. The cost of all this would, of course, be borne by the whaling nations, and just in case Norway’s whalers think they might cover this cost by exporting to Japan, forget it. The Irish proposal would ban exports.

As IFAW’s Holt spelled out six years ago, these are indeed qualifications that “would not be met by whalers in 50 years, and probably never.”

The plan of the anti-whaling pragmatists might have been a reality today had it not been for Australia’s and New Zealand’s anxiety to be seen as champions of the whales. But all the purists are really saving are the whaling nations - from being “outfoxed once and for all”. 

Between them, the whaling nations and the anti-whaling purists control enough votes in the IWC to reject a Revised Management Scheme that makes whaling legal but impossible.

But to blame the whalers for holding up the RMS is fallacious. If the purists threw in their lot with the pragmatists, the RMS could be implemented tomorrow. For the sake of Mike Donoghue, Greenpeace, and anyone else who refuses to see what is obvious to the rest of us, let us sum marise. It is not the whaling nations who have brought the IWC to a standstill. It is the anti-whaling majority, who for reasons of their individual self-interest cannot agree on the best way to destroy the whaling industry.

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