By Prensa Latina
Canberra : Greenpeace activists celebrated their success on Monday after chasing Japanese whalers out of whaling grounds off Antarctica.
Activists aboard a Greenpeace ship issued a statement that they had pursued the Nisshin Maru and Yushin Maru ships in dense fog and over hundreds of miles until they decided to leave, ABC Australian radio station confirmed.
“We came here to stop the fleet from whaling and we have done that.
Now they are out of the hunting grounds and they should stay out,”
said Greenpeace Japan campaigner Sakyo Noda.
But Greenpeace added that it expects the ships to refuel and offload whale meat onto a tanker outside the whale grounds, raising the possibility that the ships might try to return.
Greenpeace’s ship Esperanza confronted the Japanese whalers in the Antarctic Ocean early Saturday after a 10-day search, and the hunting ships immediately steamed off with the activists in pursuit.
They warned they would take non-violent action to try to stop the ships from killing whales, a promise that in the past has led to activists in speedboats trying to put themselves between whales and Japanese harpoons, and once to a collision of ships.
Australia, a strong opponent of whaling, for the first time this season sent a government-hired ship to collect photo and video evidence for a possible legal challenge to Japan’s scientific whaling program.
Commercial hunts of humpbacks have been banned worldwide since 1966, and commercial whaling overall since 1986.
Japan dispatched its whaling fleet to the icy waters of Antarctica in November to kill about 2,000 whales under a program that Tokyo says is for scientific purposes, but which anti-whaling nations and activists declare is a front for commercial whaling.
Norway is the only country that authorizes commercial whaling.