TOKYO: Japan vowed yesterday to continue its whale hunt in the Southern Ocean after clashes with the militant conservationist Sea Shepherd group, which claimed Tokyo had been forced to end the programme.
“We are keeping our whaling programme,” an official at Japan’s Fisheries Agency said, denying a report that Japan was forced to suspend its whale hunt after collisions with boats crewed by anti-whaling campaigners.
The official also repeated Tokyo’s claim that the conservationists had rammed Japanese whaling ship the Nisshin Maru on Wednesday, their worst confrontation in the Southern Ocean in three years.
On Wednesday, the conservationist group — which earlier this month lost a battle at the US Supreme Court over an order to steer clear of Japan’s whaling fleet — accused the Japanese side of deliberately colliding with its vessels.
Sea Shepherd captain Paul Watson told the Australian Associated Press news agency that the whalers were refuelling at sea in an area where such activities are prohibited by an Antarctic treaty.
“I feel that this is the end of it,” he was quoted as saying, pointing to the 18 days remaining in the short whaling season and deriding the Japanese fleet’s moves as “like a case of road rage”.
A spokesman for Japan’s Institute of Cetacean Research said yesterday that the ship could not be refuelled “due to Sea Shepherd’s dangerous activities”.
Sea Shepherd is chasing the Japanese fleet hunting whales off Antarctica, as it has done for years in a bid to harass the whalers and prevent the mammals being slaughtered.
AFP
