“Theater of the absurd” continues in a Greenland jail
NUUK, Greenland––Perhaps the most obvious difference between the Paul Watson saga since his July 21, 2024 arrest in Nuuk, Greenland on a 15-year-old Japanese warrant and the 1949 Samuel Beckett play Waiting for Godot is that most performances of Waiting for Godot run only two to two and a half hours.
Waiting for the Danish government, ruling Greenland, to decide whether to send Watson to Japan has so far taken more than four months, and will have taken nearly five months before Watson’s next scheduled court appearance on November 13, 2024.
This, coincidentally, will be two days after the Japanese whaling factory ship Kangei Maru returns to port in Sendai, Japan, at the apparent end of the 2024 Japanese coastal whaling season.
Why is Paul Watson in jail?
Watson, 73, denied bail, has remained all this while in the Nuuk jail.
The Captain Paul Watson Foundation vessel, the John Paul DeJoria, reportedly arrived on October 23, 2024 in St. Georges, Bermuda, having little chance of reaching anywhere the Kangei Maru might visit to kill whales in what remains of 2024, even if the Kangei Maru heads into Antarctic waters after refueling in Japan.
Watson was arrested in Nuuk for disrupting Japanese whaling in Antarctic waters in 2010 when the John Paul DeJoria made a refueling stop en route to the North Pacific via the Northwest Passage, between northern Canada and the Arctic ice field, to try to disrupt the fall 2024 self-set Japanese coastal whaling season.
How Paul Watson resembles Samuel Beckett
Credited with more-or-less inventing his theatrical approach to opposing whaling and sealing circa 50 years ago, Watson was informed of the further delay before the Danish government announces a decision on whether to extradite him to Japan at an October 23, 2024 hearing, the fourth since his arrest, each scheduled about a month after the last.
Godot, credited with inventing what is called “The theater of the absurd,” was an Irishman, a decorated hero of the World War II French Resistance against the Nazis, who had a French wife.
Watson, renowned for his anti-whaling and sealing activity as a founding member of Greenpeace, 1972-1977, founding director of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society 1977-2022, and of the Captain Paul Watson Foundation since then, is a Canadian with a French wife.
(Sea Shepherd France photo)
The French connection
The French connection is central to Watson’s present focal strategy for avoiding extradition to Japan, where he would face felony charges likely to send him to prison for 15 years.
French attorney Jean Tamalet, representing Watson, told Agence France Presse on October 24, 2024 that “Watson has requested French nationality,” having previously asked French President Emmanuel Macron to grant him political asylum.
The request, Tamalet said, “makes total sense when you realize that Watson has been giving everything to protect the marine ecosystem, whereas France has the second-largest coastline in the world.”
(Beth Clifton collage)
“The allegations do not justify detention”
Agnes Pannier-Runacher, the French minister of energy and ecological transition, responded that France would work to secure Watson’s release.
“The allegations against him, from our point of view, do not justify detention,” Pannier-Runacher told the French radio news network FranceInfo.
“French officials have previously urged Copenhagen not to extradite Watson,” Agence France Presse reported, “but have said that a person must be in France to file an asylum claim.”
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