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SYDNEY - AUSTRALIA urged on Wednesday Japanese whalers and environmental activists heading for a showdown in the Southern Ocean to show restraint, warning deaths could occur if anything went wrong.

Announcing that Australia would deploy an unarmed customs ship and a surveillance aircraft to monitor the Japanese hunt, Foreign Minister Stephen Smith said whaling and protest ships needed to exercise caution.

'We are dealing here with an area of water that is thousands of miles away from mainland Australia, if there is an adverse incident on those seas, the capacity for rescue is very low,' Mr Smith told reporters.

'The capacity for adverse injury or fatality is very high.' Greenpeace and the militant environmental group Sea Shepherd have each sent a ship to Antarctic waters to try to disrupt Japan's plan to kill more than 1,000 whales, including humpbacks.

Greenpeace has vowed to stage a non-violent campaign but the Sea Shepherd's Paul Watson has threatened in the past to ram his ship, recently renamed the 'Steve Irwin", into Japanese whalers.

Mr Smith said the Australian customs vessel 'Oceanic Viking' would set off for the killing grounds in the next few days from the Western Australian port of Fremantle.

He said the ship and an A319 jet operated by the Australian Antarctic Division would monitor the whaling fleet's activities to collect evidence for a possible legal challenge to the cull in international courts.

The 105-metre 'Oceanic Viking", which has a reinforced hull to cut through ice, is normally fitted with two deck-mounted 0.50 calibre machine guns.

But he said the machine guns, as well as the firearms normally carried by the customs boarding crew operating from the vessel, would all be removed and stored below decks while it was monitoring the Japanese whalers.

'It will be surveillance, not enforcement, or intervention,' Mr Smith said, adding that customs officials would not attempt to board the whaling ships.

Mr Smith said Australia would lead a formal diplomatic protest to Tokyo over the whaling, which Japan says is carried out for scientific reasons, even though it admits most of the whale meat ends up on dinner plates. -- AFP
 

 


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