Prime Minister Helen Clark says she is appalled by the admissions of a senior Japanese fisheries official that Japan has been bribing poorer countries to help overturn a global moratorium against commercial whaling.
Helen Clark said yesterday that New Zealand and other countries opposed to whaling had long suspected that Japan was using overseas development aid money to persuade poorer countries to support Japan's pro-whaling stance at the International Whaling Commission (IWC).
Those countries appeared to have no direct interest in whaling, but had their votes bought.
"Japan must surely be embarrassed by today's revelation from one of its own senior officials," she said.
"For some time now, Japan has been under suspicion of effectively buying the support of poorer countries."
At the last annual IWC meeting, six Caribbean countries helped Japan defeat a joint New Zealand-Australian proposal for a South Pacific whale sanctuary.
"When put alongside Japan's long-standing but spurious assertion that it is taking large numbers of whales for purely 'scientific' and 'research' purposes, this confirmation of Japan's tactics shows the desperate lengths it will go to in order to maintain whaling."
The Prime Minister was responding to Japanese fisheries agency head Maseyuku Komatsu's admissions.
Mr Komatsu said Japan had few tools with which to influence other countries on the issue.
He told ABC radio that the minke whale, most commonly caught by Japanese whalers, was "a cockroach in the oceans."
"There are too many."
He went on to defend the vote-buying action as "simply diplomatic communication."
Helen Clark said the cockroach assertion was one "New Zealand and a majority of other nations on the IWC will never accept."
"If Japan is indeed indulging in the sort of behaviour alluded to by Mr Komatsu, it can only underline the bankruptcy of its stance on whaling."
Conservation Minister Sandra Lee was yesterday on her way to London for the annual IWC meeting, hopeful that member nations would vote to support the second joint New Zealand-Australian bid for a South Pacific whale sanctuary.
- NZPA
PM attacks Japanese official's admission on IWC vote buying
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