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within the IWC to complete all aspects of the Revised Management Scheme." Gore secured provisional adoption of the hunt protocol for the Scheme at the May 1994 meeting of the IWC in Mexico, where the International Fund for Animal Welfare dismissed the shaky math concocted to generate the protocol's "sustainable" kill figures that could be plugged into the RMS, but supported its provisional acceptance anyway in the name of compromise.
Meanwhile, the government of Japan has been steadily buying the IWC votes of Third World countries with "fisheries aid." This year, figuring in the compromise contingent, they think they may have the votes to install the RMS and overturn the moratorium.
Are the U.S. government and fellow RMS proponents correct in believing there is simply no alternative to this plan? Four events from the recent past suggest otherwise.
In 1991, at its 18th General Assembly in Perth, Australia, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) resolved that the IWC should "maintain the existing moratorium on the commercial killing of all whale stocks indefinitely." The meeting was attended by representatives of governments, non-government organizations, research institutions, and conservation agencies from 118 countries. The resolution, along with its numerous scientific bases, was endorsed by the Global Cetacean Coalition, an alliance of 60-plus national and international NGO's in two dozen countries.
In 1996, more than 100 UK Ministers of Parliament signed a motion calling for the moratorium on commercial whaling to be extended for at least another fifty years. Shortly thereafter, the Australian government's National Task Force on Whaling recommended to the Environment Minister that Australia "work towards the insertion in the [IWC] Schedule of a commitment to a fifty-year moratorium, using a precedent such as the Madrid Protocol to the Antarctic Treaty (on exploitation of mineral resources.)"
By 1997, the group Breach Marine Protection UK had gathered ten million signatures on a "Popular Resolution on the Abolition of Inhumane Commercial Slaughter of Whales," which was formulated in the language of a UN treaty, calling for a permanent ban on commercial and "scientific" whaling and the establishment of a global whale sanctuary in all the oceans of the world. In 2000, Breach Marine succeeded in getting whales onto the agenda of the UN Millennium Forum --1,350 representatives of 1,000-plus non-government and civil society organizations from more than 100 countries -- with an initiative that called for the establishment of an International Convention for the Conservation of Cetaceans (ICCC), a new iteration of the IWC with the goal of keeping whales alive, minus the goal of resuming their slaughter.
And in 2001, the government of Japan received a letter signed by 73 prominent Japanese organizations, including the Japan Wildlife Conservation Society, the Japan Consumers' Union, the Elsa Nature Conservancy, the Hokkaido Animal Conservation Society, and Japan Animal Welfare Society. They informed their nation's leaders that "the consumption of whale meat is not an indispensable part of the Japanese diet," the government's insistent claims to the contrary. They demanded that Japan "stop killing whales in the name of science," cease using fisheries aid to buy the pro-whaling votes of other countries at the IWC, alert consumers to the health risks of eating chemically contaminated whale meat, and "stop using the taxpayer's money to propagate biased reports designed
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