Corrupt authority accused of selling shooting permits for Unesco-listed area
From Gabriel Ronay in Budapest

ITALIAN bird-hunters have slaughtered tens of thousands of wild birds in the Danube delta's unique biosphere reservation with illegally issued permits, according to a statement just released by the wetlands' administration in the Romanian capital, Bucharest.

There has been a dramatic drop in the Delta's bird population as a result of a massive ongoing drought and the depredations of Italian bird-hunting syndicates, Paul Cononov, the governor of the Danube Delta Biosphere Reservation (DDBR) said in the statement.

The reserve, which is on the Unesco global reserve network list, is home to six globally threatened and near-threatened species, among them the slender-billed curlew, red-breasted goose, Dalmatian pelican, Ferruginous duck, pygmy cormorant and white-tailed eagle.

The bird population of the delta's primeval wetlands is breeding late this year because of the drought and has apparently delayed its winter migration. To give the fauna a chance to recover, the administration of the reservation, acting on the advice of the Romanian Academy of Sciences, put off the start of the autumn hunting season from September 15 to November 1.

However, Romanian hunting associations have ignored the ban and invited in rich northern Italian hunters.

The Italian "tourist visitors" have been illegally issued with hunting permits by local Romanian hunting societies, Cononov said. He singled out the Tulcea County Association of Hunters and Fishermen which, he said, has issued 68 individual licences to Italian hunters, with a further 40 permits awarded to Italian hunting syndicates. And there are several other local hunts that are guilty of similar money-driven offences, he implied.

"Several groups of Italian hunters, beneficiaries of these illegal licences, shot everything in sight and slaughtered thousands of wild geese and ducks in a few hours in the fenlands of Tantanir and Pardina," Cononov said.

His damning accusation was borne out by Costel Ifrim, the commander-in-chief of the armed nature protection guard of the DDBR.

"The Italians have illegally shot thousands of wild birds in the delta, but no sanctions have been imposed on the Romanian hunting associations which had illegally issued them with hunting permits, because they appealed against the authority's temporary hunting ban."

A heavy whiff of corruption is hanging over the Danube delta's "protected" wetlands. The stench of corruption has spread up to the Romanian Ministry of Agriculture, which sold concessions in the delta to six hunting associations in clear breach of the latest Romanian nature protection law.

The new measure explicitly prohibits the granting of hunting concessions "in protected or endangered nature zones". The drought-stricken delta wetlands are indisputably in this category. Cononov is personally blaming the Romanian agriculture minister.

"The minister has ignored these stipulations of the law and awarded huge hunting concessions in the delta to hunting associations which interpret the law as they please. If the law is not respected we are going to ban all hunting in the Danube delta," he threatened.

But not just yet and, anyway, the Romanian hunters do not appear unduly worried. Marin Sultan, the director of the Tulcea County Association of Hunters and Fishermen, has denied any wrongdoing and has challenged in court the right of the reservation's administration to delay the start of the hunting season. And, while the court proceedings are slowly progressing, the slaughter of the delta's dangerously diminished bird population continues unabated.

The membership of the Tulcea association is a mixture of former communist-era apparatchiks, the nouveau riche beneficiaries of Romania's shady privatisation of state assets, and subsistence farmers keen to squeeze Mother Danube's bounty dry.

Their "guests", the Italian hunters with inflated purses, have a reputation in the wetland reserves of Central and Eastern Europe for shooting at anything that moves. When the EU hunting regulations drove them east, they favoured Hungarian nature reserves for a while. But a series of mass slaughters of both migratory birds and protected local species landed several Italians in court.

Following a case in 2001, in which an Italian hunting syndicate was accused of illegally slaughtering 12,668 protected birds in the Danube-Drava National Park, public anger spilled on to the streets of the Hungarian capital. Hundreds of demonstrators showed their outrage in a candlelit vigil in front of the Italian Embassy in Budapest. Subsequently, the Italian authorities arrested five leading members of a Milan syndicate and charged them with "illegally smuggling and trading in protected birds".

The Italian bird-hunters promptly struck Hungary off their "tourist trail". And so far, there does not appear to be a similarly high-profile public reaction in Romania that could stop the Italian hunters' blood-spattered jaunts to the fragile Danube delta wetlands.