By IPS Correspondents
PORT OF SPAIN, Jul 11 2000 (IPS)

p Dominica’s Agriculture, Planning and Environment Minister Atherton Martin has resigned over the island’s vote at the International Whaling Commission (IWC) meeting in Australia.

Prime Minister Rosie Douglas chaired an emergency meeting of his cabinet on Monday, hours after accepting the resignation of Martin, a staunch environmentalist, who before accepting a post in the government in January, was President of the Dominica Conservation Association (DCA).

Martin’s resignation followed last week’s decision by Dominica and five other Caribbean states p St. Lucia, Antigua and Barbuda, Grenada, St. Kitts and Nevis and St. Vincent and the Grenadines – to support Japan, Norway, China, Guinea and Denmark against a proposed South Pacific Whale Sanctuary.

There has been a strong lobby in the Caribbean, mainly by conservationist and NGO groups against supporting Japan to commercially exploit whales in the South Pacific.

Australia had proposed the sanctuary, but Martin said the vote by the Dominica delegate, Lloyd Pascal, was against instructions given to him.

Sources in Dominica say that the DCA, is one of the Non- Governmental Organisations supporting the ocean sanctuary.

“There was no consultation with me as Minister on that issue,” Martin said, blasting the Caribbean for having fallen to the “cheap, extortionary tactics of Japan.”

In recent years Japan has pumped millions of dollars in technical aid to the Eastern Caribbean, beefing up their fishing industry by providing fishing vessels and refrigerated units to store fish catch.

The international environmental group, Greenpeace, has already criticised Caribbean states for the vote at the IWC. It said it was “unacceptable and shameful” that the Eastern Caribbean states “should allow their vote to be bought by a country that wants to commercially exploit whales thousands of miles from its own shores.”

The New Chronicle newspaper in a weekend editorial said the Caribbean “ought to have learnt from long experience that the Japanese have gained more from this region than we from them.”

“They bombard us with their manufactured wares: electronic products, cameras and automobiles. We buy their goods but have nothing to sell to them, incurring in the process, the most unfavourable balance of trade with Japan,” the paper added.

“For years their fishing trawlers have exploited the riches of our waters and we have got nothing from them in return p not even the promised aid,” it said, noting that the voting at the IWC showed that Caribbean states “are still prepared to be the robots of wealthy nations.”

Martin said that last week’s vote provided an opportunity for the Caribbean “to push our image as the premiere eco-tourism destination in the world.”

“Instead what happened showed how short-sighted we can be in the Eastern Caribbean and the level of desperation of some countries which find it hard to resist the prospect of a few million dollars dangled by Japan. Japan is simply taking advantage of us and it’s about time started to show a little integrity,” he added.

Further, Martin said that Japan was not interested in the region’s environmental issues, since it continued to ship hazardous nuclear waste through the Caribbean.

But Prime Minister Douglas dismissed Martin’s suggestion, saying that his former Minister had developed an “antagonism towards Japan for no reason at all …Where there was an issue not involving Japan at all he would raise it as a life or death issue and put us on a wrong footing with Japan for no reason.”

Douglas said he had tremendous confidence in the country’s delegate to the IWC meeting and had given him a free role as to how he should have voted at the meeting based on all the information available to him.

Douglas said the scientific opinion at the meeting did not support the need for a sanctuary at this time. But Martin said that Dominica’s tourism industry would be severely affected by the vote, noting that tourism brings in 40 million US dollars as opposed to 14 million dollars from the banana industry.

“Already tourism is a major foreign exchange earner. To do anything to jeopardise that industry is economic suicide. If we are serious about becoming premiere tourism destinations we must stop these environmental inconsistencies.”

“The IWC vote was a blatant attack against environmental groups with huge worldwide networks and tremendous power. We should be seeking to establish collaborative relationships with these groups instead of embarking on unwarranted attacks,” the former environment minister said.

Martin’s resignation has brought to the surface, questions as to the future viability of Dominica’s second coalition administration since it obtained political independence from Britain in 1978. The two main parties in the coalition are Douglas’s own social Dominica Labour Party and the conservative Dominica Freedom Party.

Martin himself was at one time associated with the left-leaning Dominica Liberation Movement Alliance (DLMA), now all but dead.

Douglas, in reacting to Martin’s resignation, spoke of the stubborn attitude of his former minister.

“There are three different factions, and what we tried to do in the new politics is to encompass all the different views into one amalgam, since we are no longer into the cold war, and put forward programmes for the country within the different philosophies,” Douglas said.

But he noted that throughout the five months since his administration came into office ” there have been more antagonism with Mr. Martin by way of his statements. What was very worrying about it, is that every time he made a statement, he would always say over his dead body, so and so would occur, he never said what was in the interest of the people he would support,” Douglas said.

“This over my dead body talk, indicates a level of inflexibility,” the Prime Minister added. But, Douglas said, despite such an attitude, his main aim “was to keep the coalition together”.

The New Chronicle newspaper, however, believes the coalition administration is beginning to lose ground in the country. It said the government was “gradually losing credibility” and that the ICW voting must call into question the country’s foreign policy position, “its seriousness about open and transparent government.”

Martin did not contest the January elections which resulted in the coalition administration, but he had been nominated by the Dominica Association of Industry and Commerce (DAIC) as its representative in cabinet in keeping with an alliance Douglas promised to forge with the island’s private sector. The DAIC has not yet made any official statement on Martin’s resignation.

There is speculation in Dominica that Martin would be replaced Pascal, a defeated candidate of Douglas’ Dominica Labour Party.

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