Whaling conference ends in dispute

Japan's representative Masayuki Komatsu is surrounded after Friday morning's session of the IWC

SHIMONOSEKI, Japan -- As the International Whaling Commissions' week-long annual conference wound-down Friday, dispute still raged over the rejection of quotas for aboriginal whaling.

In what will be remembered as perhaps the most divisive of IWC gatherings, a request by the United States and Russia to renew quotas allowing their native peoples to hunt whales was rejected for the second time in two days, falling short by one vote.

The vote was swayed by Japan, which saw its perennial proposal to lift the 16-year commercial ban on whaling defeated Thursday.

Japan had tried to tie the aboriginal whaling to its own request for quotas for its coastal whaling communities, arguing that its longstanding request for 50 minke whales for hard-hit coastal communities was equal in merit to aboriginal takes and did not deserve to be rejected.

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American officials said aboriginal whaling differed from Japan's coastal whaling because there was no commercial benefit.

But with the second vote defeated, Japan sent a strongly-worded message to the US delegation.

"This year the United States delegation has a message to take back home -- end the hypocrisy," said Masayuki Komatsu, a senior member of Japan's delegation. "The U.S. requests for quotas are a complete double standard."

Rolland Schmitten, head of the U.S. delegation, complained that the vote showed how political gamesmanship has hurt the commission's work.

"In the 56 years of history of the IWC, that was the most unjust, unkind, unfair vote that was ever taken," Schmitten told reporters after the narrow 31-11 vote, one short of the three-quarters majority needed.

The move against the US-Russian proposal, which would have set catch limits for the next five years, was the first time such a request had been turned down since the commission began ruling on aboriginal whaling in the early 1970s.

George Ahmaogak, an American Inuit Eskimo and the mayor of North Slope Borough, Alaska, told Associated Press he feared what would happen if the 7,500 Inuit living in the U.S. state were forced next year to halt the hunts that have supplied them food for millennia.

"Whale provides a lot of nutritional needs for our people, and once we lose that we're in bad shape," Ahmaogak said.

The divisive debate over aboriginal whaling left the pro-whaling bloc of mainly Caribbean nations led by Japan and Norway at logger heads with the anti-whalers including Australia, the U.S. and Britain.

Japanese officials admitted their attempt to overturn the long-standing commerical whaling ban was futile, and only pressed the issue to protest other countries' anti-whaling stance.

Conservationists were also stung at the annual conference when proposals to create new whale sanctuaries in the southern Pacific and southern Atlantic oceans foundered.

Next year's meeting will be held in Berlin.