The federal government has issued at least 29 special permits to royal family members of the Gulf states — the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and the Kingdom of Bahrain — for hunting the internationally protected houbara bustard in Pakistan, it emerged on Saturday.
Pakistan is a signatory to various international nature conservation agreements that call for protection of rare species and national laws also ban houbara bustard hunting, yet special permits are issued to foreigners in violation of local laws and international commitments.
According to a new report’s sources, the government went back on the commitment it made last year that “Pakistan will observe a moratorium on hunting during the 2014-15 season to replenish houbara bustard stocks”.
The permit holders had even been informed about it. But after the approval of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, deputy chief of protocol of the foreign office Muazzam Ali issued the permits for the year 2014-15 on November 1, 2014.
The sources said that at least one president, one king, one Emir and one ruler besides two crown princes, the father and an uncle of country heads concerned are among those allowed to hunt the internationally protected houbara bustard, meat of which is considered to have aphrodisiac qualities.
The dignitary who has been given the largest area in the three provinces — Sindh, Punjab and Balochistan — is UAE president and Abu Dhabi ruler Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al-Nahyan. As many as 11 permits — the largest number of permits issued to a Gulf state — have been given to members of Qatar’s royal family.
This is the first time that an area in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa has been allocated for houbara hunting.
The federal government has not sent a code of conduct — which mentions number of birds to be hunted, hunting method, whether permit is person specific or not — to provincial wildlife departments, giving a free hand to the Arab sheikhs to hunt as many birds as they can.
The move is perhaps aimed at avoiding an embarrassing situation like the one that happened last year when a Balochistan wildlife department report that Saudi prince Fahd had hunted 2,100 houbara bustards, violating the bag limit of 100 birds, created an international uproar after it had been highlighted in the media.
