4 - Sunday, November 16, 1986 - North Shore News Bob Hunter MY OLD comrade Paul Watson is still stirring up more than just waves, | See. His latest action — sending saboteurs from his militant Sea Shepherd Society into Iceland to sink two whaling ships — has fomented an angry public discus- _ sion about ethics and ecology. As everyone knows by now, the ships were sunk at dockside when the seacocks were opened. Water poured in. The boats sank. There was no one aboard. No one got hurt. But the same saboteurs then struck a whaling station, destroying equipment, including a computer. That is radical stuff. It remains to be seen, at the time of this writing, whether Watson will be arrested and extradited to {celand, I hope not. I think, on balance, he has done something rough and dangerous but neces- sary. Somebody had to do it. It is as simple and basic as that. As somebedy who has attend- ed one annual meeting of the In- ternational Whaling Commission and followed its machinations for years, I happen to know, more than most people, just how many loopholes there are in what few international agreements there are in existence to protect threat- ened species like whales. The fact that they are afforded any protection at all comes despits the determined efforts over the years of whaling coun- tries like Iceland to block any moves toward conservation. Within the IWC, countries like Iceland, Japan and Russia have consistently manoeuvred to bend scientific findings to suit the de- mands of their own whaling in- dustries. Technically, Icefand can insist on killing some whales for “*research,’’ even though a moratorium on all whaling has been ordered by the IWC, effec- tive this year. The IWC’s charter contains a magnificent Catch-22 which does not set a limit on the number of whales that can be killed in the course of said research program. Iceland’s take of something like 150 whales is such a blatant mockery of the moratorium that only a moron would buy the Icelandic claim to be ‘studying’ these doomed whales. The fine print of the IWC pact can't obscure the reality of a slaughter that goes on behind a facade of jurisdictional respect- ability. No one will say how much of tceland’s whale kill is shipped off to Japan, but I have seen the ® strictly personal leat documentary film and photographs that show whale meat being packaged in cartons with Japanese markings. In the face of obvious vio- lations of existing international conservation agreements, what is the world community to do? Sit on its hands? The unfortunate fact is that while we do have a United Na- tions that can field miniscule peacekeeping forces from time to time, there is no similar mecha- nism to deal with crimes against nature in international waters. My view of the situation is that Watson was taking vigilante ac- tion against an organized gang of whalers who were looting the ecological ‘‘bank’’ of the ocean. Iceland has been thumbing its nose at conservationists around the world while it literally went about pillaging and destroying. The Canadian government, surely, can find little to fault with a computer being destroyed, at any rate. A lady named Anne Cools, who helped burn the computer at a Montreal universi- ty in 1969, was appointed to the Senate in 1984. Charges that Watson is a ter- rorist have been thrown around tather loosely, I think. Terrorists kill people. Men, women, babies. Modern day Luddites like Wat- son who smash machines and operate just out of the reach of | international law are out there because their targets have gone beyond reach, too. There is, of course, a complex irony at work here. France, right now, is being wracked by the ef- fects of real terrorism—bombs hurled at the public, killing inno- cent victims, hostages seized. How truly awful! Yet it was little more than a year ago that the French gov- ernment itself, on orders from the highest office in the land— that of President Mitterand— launched a bomb attack on the unarmed Rainbow Warrior, kill- ing a crow member. To this day, Canada has yet to express a single word of con- demnation of the French assault, even though France has admitted guilt. 1t would be odd, therefore, if Canada showed any interest in chasing after Paul Watson on behaif of Iceland. Some countries have laws that make ita crime to ignore a crime, that is, to refuse to lift a finger to save a fellaw human, No country has such a law concerning the rest of the natural world. 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