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Showdown looms between Antarctic whalers, activists

A potentially violent showdown is looming in the icy waters of the Antarctic between shipborne activists and a Japanese whaling fleet, a conservationist warned yesterday.

Sea Shepherd president Paul Watson said in a satellite telephone interview from his flagship, the Farley Mowat, that he would do everything in his power to prevent the Japanese killing whales, including ramming their ships.

Watson, who expects to encounter the Japanese fleet in the Southern Ocean within days, said the 54m Farley Mowat had been fitted with a ram which could slice into the hull of a whaler.

Asked whether he would be prepared to use it, Watson, 56, replied: "Yeah, above the waterline, you know, enough damage to force them back to port."

Watson said the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society was this year also deploying a second, faster ship, the Robert Hunter, a helicopter and a total of 70 crew from 14 countries against the whalers.

The International Whaling Commission in 1986 imposed a moratorium on commercial whaling, but Japan has continued hunting for what it calls scientific research.

Critics reject this claim and Japan has made no secret of the fact that the meat from the hunt winds up on dinner plates.

A fleet of six Japanese ships was deployed to the Antarctic on an expedition to kill about 850 minke whales and 10 fin whales during this year's southern hemisphere summer, the Japanese Fisheries Agency announced.

"We're not going down to protest whaling, we're going down there to obstruct and harass and do everything we can to stop them from continuing to kill whales illegally," Watson said.

He acknowledged that his ship was unregistered and thus illegal after Belize cancelled its registration last month, but said he did not care.

"When people call us pirates I don't really have a problem with that -- we're pirates of compassion in pursuit of pirates of profit," he said.
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