Japan’s Vote Buying at the IWC
No doubt, many of you have seen the headlines about an investigation that uncovered the fact that Japan pays support to smaller countries that vote in favor of whaling at the IWC:
The Sunday Times said it found officials from St Kitts and Nevis, Grenada, the Marshall Islands, Kiribati, Guinea and Ivory Coast were willing to discuss selling their votes at the International Whaling Commission (IWC).
They admitted they voted with the pro-whaling grouping because of the aid they received from Japan, or because they were given cash or call girls.
The paper said Japan denies the claims and the ministry of foreign affairs said in a statement: “The government of Japan does not cover any cost of any other IWC member countries related to the IWC.”
One Tanzanian claimed that he and the other ministers were provided with “good girls” when they visited Japan, an allegation that has led a lot of news sources to run headlines stating that Japan bought votes at the IWC with “hookers.”
Most of the articles, however, fail to mention the history of “vote buying” in the IWC. A quick check of Wikipedia reveals that the practice began in 1970′s and 1980′s, when anti-whaling activists paid for a bunch of countries to join the the organization and vote in a manner that supported their financial backers:
The purpose of the IWC as specified in its constitution is “in safeguarding for future generations the great natural resources represented by the whale stocks;” and the original members consisted only of the 15 whale-hunting nations. However, since the late 1970s and early 1980s, many countries which have no previous history of whaling (some of which are landlocked such as Switzerland and Mongolia) have joined the IWC. This shift was first initiated by Sir Peter Scott, the then head of the World Wildlife Fund. Labelling the IWC a “butchers’ club”, he mounted lobbying campaigns in developed countries with support from the green lobby and anti whaling block of IWC members to change the composition of the IWC’s membership, which was instrumental in obtaining the necessary three-quarters majority vote to implement the moratorium on commercial whaling in 1986. This campaign triggered the first accusations of vote-buying in IWC. According to Scott’s biographer, Elspeth Huxley, China’s decision to join was influenced by a World Wildlife Fund promise to provide $1 million to fund a panda reserve. Dr. Michael Tillman, former IWC Commissioner of the United States, said in a radio interview that “there was what we called ‘common knowledge,’ that a number of countries joined and that their dues and the travel support was reportedly due to conservation groups providing it. So that, in a sense, one could say that the conservation groups set out a strategy that the Japanese copied.”
Thanks to the anti-whaling activists (and the Japanese who copied their tactics), the group of 15 whaling countries has grown to include a great many nations, many of which have little or no interest in whales and simply joined because some foreigners paid them to do so. Now that the balance seems to be swaying in Japan’s favor, the media in anti-whaling countries is suddenly expressing outrage at the existence of a practice that is hardly new and hardly something only Japan has done.
To see the Times’ report about ministers receiving travel expenses and girls and conclude that Japan is “buying votes with hookers” is not an accurate picture of the situation. The delegates and ministers from these countries do not independently decide their countries’ whaling policies. They allegedly receive cash in envelopes from the Japanese, but the real action that decides their vote at the IWC takes place at a higher level. Most of the third world countries you see highlighted in red on the above map receive millions of dollars in foreign aid from Japan. Japan gives foreign aid to a lot of poor countries, some who are IWC members and some who are not IWC members. The foreign aid agreements do not require the recipients to vote in favor of Japanese proposals at the IWC or any other international organization. In both cases, if the nations consider the Japanese aid to be important, they probably aren’t going to assume foreign policy positions that would aggravate Japan. The sad reality is that many poor countries are perfectly willing to vote in certain ways in various international organizations if they think that such votes will keep the foreign aid money flowing.
Is “voting buying” at the IWC a good thing? Certainly not. However, it would be nice if the Times’ actually provided some background information about the “discovery” it made. Instead, we are left with a report that conveniently fails to mention how both the anti-whaling and pro-whaling sides have contributed to a situation in which “vote buying” par for the course at the IWC.
Somewhat Related Video: Here’s Al Jazeera program that aired the other day about the whaling issue. It includes comments from some interesting individuals, such as author C.W. Nicol and a Buddhist monk who eats whale meat:
- Akihabara News – Gadgetry from Japan (Subscribe)
- dannychoo.com – Your portal to Japan (Subscribe)
