Foreign Policy In Focus

A major change that has taken place in East-Central Europe in the last few years is the emergence of a new left.

Cross-posted from JohnFeffer.com. John is currently traveling in Eastern Europe and observing its transformations since 1989.

In the same way that the New Left in the United States distanced itself in the 1960s from the old-style Communist Party and its fellow travelers, this new left in Eastern Europe has taken pains to distinguish itself from the Communist Party politics of the Cold War era.

Partly this is a generational shift. Young people who did not live through the era of Todor Zhivkov and Wojciech Jaruzelski don’t automatically associate socialism with massive human rights abuses and failed economic planning. Partly too it’s a thorough disenchantment with what liberalism has brought – austerity economics, a widening gap between rich and poor, hollow democratic institutions, a disregard for environmental issues. Many people in the region have come up against these shortcomings of liberalism and veered right, into nationalism. Another group has struck off in the opposite direction to create a new kind of progressive politics.

Georgi Medarov, soft-spoken and pony-tailed, is part of this new generation of activists. He works at an environmental NGO in Sofia and also participates in a group called New Left Perspectives. “We accept the liberal position on human rights, but we don’t think it’s enough,” he says. “We don’t accept the militarism and capitalism that a lot of liberal organizations accept.”

Medarov joined the movement in Bulgaria against the U.S. war in Iraq, though he and his cohort made sure to distinguish themselves from the hard-line communists and hard-line nationalists that also came out for the demonstrations. The wars of the Bush era have faded into the background. The new left’s critique of austerity, however, has proven perhaps more enduring, as the economic crisis itself has stubbornly remained front and center. Here, the experience of East-Central Europe is cautionary and could provide lessons for other movements resisting austerity measures.

Similar austerity measures, Medarov points out, “were applied here in this region in the 1990s, and in a more radical way than in Greece or Portugal. So in a way we can witness the long-term effects of what will happen in western Europe if they continue with these austerity measures. The difference is that the resistance to austerity is much more organized. Here in Eastern Europe, the resistance was misguided. For instance, there was a general strike in the 1990s in favor of neo-liberalism.”

The economic hardship that so many people are experiencing in Bulgaria, and elsewhere in the region, has produced a certain nostalgia for the old days. Unfortunately, in Bulgaria, that nostalgia conceals a soft spot for authoritarian rule. “In the group I’m part of, we are trying to understand this nostalgia, but we’re quite critical of it,” Medarov explains. “This nostalgia is about oppression of ethnic minorities, about a strong state. It’s not so much nostalgia about human rights, about minority rights or about the social achievements of the past. There was some improvement of minority rights during the socialist era. But they’re not nostalgic about that.”

Unlike the Leninists of old and the Putinists of today, the new left has no illusions about authoritarianism. It has embraced many aspects of the social movement politics of the 1960s and 1970s: civil rights, feminism, LGBT activism. With a few exceptions, such as the Palikot movement in Poland, the new left in East-Central Europe has not registered yet in the electoral realm. In Bulgaria, the new right and the old left continue to dominate the political realm. But in the environmental protests that recently mobilized thousands of people against unrestrained economic development or the annual Pride marches that have gained in numbers and visibility, a new political sensibility is taking shape in Bulgaria. It shares many of the same perspectives as other new left groups in the region, such as Krytyka Polityczna in Poland or the organizers of the Subversive Festival in Croatia.

But as Georgi Medarov explained to me one night in October in the loud, crowded café attached to Sofia’s Archaeological Museum, Bulgaria’s new left has a sensibility all its own. My conversation with him is an important reminder that if I restricted my interviews only to the people that I talked to 22 years ago, I would miss many critical aspects of the current East-Central European reality.

The Interview

Do you remember when you heard about the fall of the Berlin Wall?

I remember when I was in first grade in 1989: we had to change the way we were calling our first grade teacher from “comrade” to “mister” and “missus.” I found this strange. Throughout the 1990s, I don’t have proper political memories. I remember the 1997 political mobilizations but as something distant.

Do you remember when you became politically conscious?

In the latter part of high school, during the war against Serbia. It was a negative experience that my country was involved even indirectly in this war. I thought that this was an unjust war. It doesn’t mean that I had a proper reflection on this. Some bombs even fell by accident in Bulgaria, on Sofia, and I found this stressful.

Perhaps when I was 20 I started to become involved in the environmental movement, and I was going to environmental protests. I was also involved in some small initiatives – especially after the invasion of Iraq, we were doing Food Not Bombs in Sofia in 2004-5. We were doing this initiative with an environmental organization. We were going to anti-war demos in Sofia as a separate bloc of people because we didn’t really agree with everyone at the demo. Part of the protesters were hardline communists and some were hardline nationalists – so we had a separate bloc together with the anarchists.

Much later I started thinking about the Berlin Wall. The impressions I got from my family were quite contradictory. My parents are very apolitical; they look at both systems quite ironically and are negatively disposed to both. My sister, ten years older, was involved in the political movement of the 1990s. My grandparents were communists of various types. So there was this contradictory thing between my sister and my grandparents. But I had no opinion.

I suppose I’m on the left now, whatever this means. I have had a very ambivalent position toward the past. Personally, my parents were lucky enough that I never experienced extreme poverty in the 1990s. They were educated in Sofia and were able to adapt. For most of the people, it was a loss. There’s not much to lament about the past from my perspective. But many people are quite nostalgic about state socialism because they lost everything.

In the group I’m part of, we are trying to understand this nostalgia, but we’re quite critical of it. This nostalgia is about oppression of ethnic minorities, about a strong state. It’s not so much nostalgia about human rights, about minority rights or about the social achievements of the past. There was some improvement of minority rights during the socialist era. But they’re not nostalgic about that.

There’s a displacement in people’s memories. Their nostalgia for social achievements has been displaced by a nostalgia for a strong authoritarian state.

But this nostalgia comes not because of some kind of totalitarian mentality. It’s a reaction to the last 20 years. In 1989, everyone was excited – both the people who were on the left and those in the democratic movements. Both social movements were enthusiastic. No one was happy about what was happening in the 1980s. But no one really expected what happened in the end.

Can you describe this new left here in Bulgaria?

We use this term to try to carve out space between the old left — what we call the hardline communist left, which is nostalgic about socialism in a conservative, nationalist way, because the socialists became nationalist and kicked 300,000 people out of the country for basically racist reasons — and the Social Democratic party, which became quite neoliberal and quite conservative at the same time. So, we are trying to distinguish ourselves from this hard-line left and the social democratic one.

But at the same time we try to distinguish ourselves from liberals. We accept the liberal position on human rights, but we don’t think it’s enough. We don’t accept the militarism and capitalism that a lot of liberal organizations accept. We were thinking in the beginning that if we offend too many people, everyone would hate us. It’s a very negative way of identifying ourselves. But it turns out that many people are open to us. They come to our events and engage in discussions. There is a social need for this stance.

In the last couple years it’s happening not only in Bulgaria, but in Eastern Europe. There has been a rise of new left groups, with various levels of radicalism. It’s particularly strong in Croatia. The Subversive Festival is attended by a thousand people! They invite mainstream radical and left intellectuals, and they hold discussions throughout the day. It’s not only the festival. There are lots of publications, demonstrations. It’s a mainstream thing, and it gets mainstream media attention. There was a summer school that some people from my group were involved in in Budapest in July: the idea was to gather critical activist groups that are more academic-oriented. We want to make something similar in Sofia.

What is being experienced throughout Europe in terms of austerity measures are perceived as something unique. But actually they were applied here in this region in the 1990s, and in a more radical way than in Greece or Portugal. So in a way we can witness the long-term effects of what will happen in western Europe if they continue with these austerity measures. The difference is that the resistance to austerity is much more organized. Here in Eastern Europe, the resistance was misguided. For instance, there was a general strike in the 1990s in favor of neo-liberalism. We had a general strike in 1997 that was organized by trade unions but which undermined trade union organizing in the long term. They basically lost their membership.

Is there much cooperation between NGOs and social movements east and west? Is there still an imbalance of power between the two?

Cooperation between eastern and western European NGOs is rather difficult even on the NGO level. It’s partly for financial reasons: we don’t have the resources to travel to western forums. But there are various other reasons.

Sometimes bigger NGOs, for example, they impose ready-made schema on the Bulgarian context. The Greens – which were formed here after 2007 –was very promising in the way it grew out of civil society. It was an honest initiative. But there was also an unequal exchange of ideas between west and east. The way they organized their grievances was to import ready-made policies, which were sometimes neo-liberal understandings of what policy should be, especially in realms not connected to the environment, like education. It doesn’t mean that the members really endorse this. But they see politics as a technocratic endeavor, that there are good policies and bad policies, and we should just adopt the best policies of the West and everything will be okay. But it’s more complicated than this. Many people feel that they don’t have to reflect, they just have to copy what western Europe is doing.

The NGO I work for, an environmental organization called Za Zemiata (For the Earth), is funded mostly by the European Commission. I would not call it “left,” but it definitely is quite critical and it is very open to progressive social movements and groups.  The EC requires cofunding where you have to raise 20-30 percent locally. But it’s more difficult here than in western Europe. We don’t have vast memberships with fees. We’re very pressed in financial terms. So, it’s difficult to reflect and think because you don’t have time. I see this problem in western Europe too, but here’s it’s more extreme. Because we don’t have public funding here, we’re dependent on western donors.

Some of the more critical NGOs in the west are interested to see the eastern European experience of neoliberalism because they think this experience will be useful to understand what’s happening in the west. But it’s also a critical tool to use against certain trade agreements. We in Za Zemiata wrote a report on water liberalization in Bulgaria that was used as part of the international and European water movement. They need examples to see what will happen, since water privatization is now an issue in western Europe. But it was something we experienced in the 1990s.

Za Zemiata was established in 1994. Before it was more grassroots and more radical as well, but now it has become more of an expert policy organization working with the government. It tries to work on both levels. For instance, we wrote two textbooks on ecological education that were approved by the government and adopted by the school system. But we still have grassroots activities. Every year there is a clean-up of the mountains org annually. It’s very volunteer; no one funds it.

We also take part in movements like the anti-GMO (genetically modified organisms) movement.  Six years ago, the Bulgarian government tried to liberalize the legislation connected to GMO food production. Za Zemiata and other NGOs managed to stop this through a protest movement. Then two years ago, the current government tried to liberalize it once again. But there was an even stronger movement against this, with support at every level of society, and once again, there was success. The movement was quite varied, involving many types of groups, such as those raising health issues. At Za Zemiata, we tried to complement this activity by focusing on other related problems, such as patents and intellectual property rights. We invited Canadian farmer (and anti-GMO activist) Percy Schmeiser to Bulgaria to meet with farmers and university students.

How do Bulgarians feels about NGOs these days?

The profile of NGOs has fallen dramatically. NGOs supported the most neoliberal measures and still do — even the Open Society foundation in Bulgaria. It’s a different kind of organization in the United States, more progressive and not as right wing as it is here. It’s not conservative in terms of being racist but in supporting economic policies and foreign policies that most people radically disagree with. But the problem is that Bulgarians don’t have a language to express this disagreement. So you get a lot of conspiracy theories about the Open Society foundation that are anti-Semitic, anti-American.

There is a hatred of NGOs here, but the way it’s formulated is horrible. There is a reason for this hate, however stupid it is. In that sense, there is a lack of belief in NGOs. People tend to believe that if you’re an NGO you just want to take money from the west, you don’t care about real social issues. They think it’s a really easy job and you get paid a lot of money, which is a misunderstanding of course. But in the public imagination, that’s the way NGO-type language sounds.

My personal opinion is that it’s impossible to make social change as I imagine it, in a more critical way, as a professional activist in an NGO. The simple reason is funding. Za Zemiata works with the European Commission, which is quite conservative, but still we can do things, there is no direct limitation on what you can say or do. But in general, you have to adopt Euro-bureaucratic language and this bureaucratic mentality. And especially if one does not have any other language, another way to see the world, one ends up accepting the Euro-technocratic ideology for one’s own. That’s the reason that it’s impossible to have something more radical. So, grassroots mobilization is the way forward, though these movements have to work closely with NGOs.

But what’s left out are intellectuals. Both NGOs and the grassroots often disregard the importance of serious analysis that exists in universities, in Bulgaria as well. The cooperation between these NGOs, grassroots movements, and intellectuals is really important.

I am involved in an initiative called New Left Perspectives, comprised mostly of Ph.D. students. It’s a project for political education, funded by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation – they would never tell us what to do and it’s easier than with the NGO job. Together with most of the same people from that project we are engaged in running a social center in Sofia, where Za Zemiata also participates. We don’t have a long-term vision. We think mostly a year or two ahead. Our long-term plan would be how to make a publication, like a monthly publication, or to develop our website, which would be a year or two ahead.

Can you tell me about LGBT organizing here in Bulgaria?

There’s been a Pride march every year since 2008. Each year there are attacks. The first year was the harshest when skinheads threw Molotov cocktails. But the government decided to defend the march. There was a heavy police presence. That’s why no one dares to attack now.

The first year was about 200 marchers and maybe 100 far-right skinheads and some representatives of religious organizations. Now there are 2,000 marchers. In this sense, the event is quite accepted. I’m not saying that people are tolerant in general, but they are tolerant about this type of march.

However, after every march, someone is attacked on the way home. These militant far–right groups attack not only gay people but leftwing activists, asylum seekers, Roma, Black people living here. There is a lot of this type of violence. There was recently a march in commemoration of a boy killed four years ago in Sofia. The murderers said that they killed him because they thought he was gay. This was their defense! So, they admitted the crime, but they have not been charged, even though it took place already four years ago.

The government deploys the police for the Pride march, but it charges the movement. LGBT activists have no critique of this, they accept this as normal: “They provide us security and we pay for it, and that’s okay.” But this is ridiculous. LGBT people pay taxes.

There is also an artistic Queer Forum, organized as a part of the New Left Perspectives project I mentioned, that is going to take place at the end of November, where we want to push a left understanding of the queer movement.

How would you evaluate the level of extreme nationalism in Bulgaria? The political party Ataka, for instance, has lost a lot of its support.

Ataka disintegrated for personal reasons. This sentiment still exists, though the political spectrum is very divided. There are many parties and groups on the far right. Four years ago or less, Ataka gave its full support to the ruling party. Two years ago, it still had this cooperation when supporters of Ataka attacked a mosque here in Sofia in 2011. People asked the ruling government – what about this coalition with Ataka? “Oh, this isn’t a coalition, it’s just cooperation,” the government said. But if Ataka or a similar party gets 10-15 percent of the votes in the next election, the ruling party will have to make a decision about forming a coalition with them again.

In 1990, the far-right movement split from the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP) on the decision to return Turkish names to ethnic Turks here in Bulgaria. The BSP managed to integrate them afterwards. But the Union of Democratic Forces (UDF) also had a far-right dimension. UDF people say, “Oh, we didn’t know that Volen Siderov [the leader of Ataka] had these ideas when he was editor of the UDF newspaper Demokratsia.” But Demokratsia was very involved in historical revisionism that said that there was no fascism in Bulgaria, that denied Bulgarian participation in Holocaust. The opposition worked on Turkish rights because it was against communism. But they also engaged in whitewashing Bulgarian history. And the anti-communist coalition included a group formed by former legionnaires, who were involved in pogroms in Jewish neighborhoods during World War II. These democratic forces were not totally innocent.

So, in a sense, Ataka is not a surprise. It’s not just Siderov. Many other members were ex-members of the democratic forces, such as Rumen Vodenicharov. Usually the far-right is presented as an attempt to restore totalitarianism. It is not seen as an outgrowth of the anti-communist movement.

A year ago, there were neo-Nazi riots all over the country after the case in the village of Katunitsa. There was a guy there, a gangster, a Roma oligarch basically who had been doing extremely illegal stuff for last 20 years, like producing illegal alcohol.  The local villagers hated him. He had an argument with a Bulgarian family, the family of the ex-mayor I think, and he threatened the son of the woman. A year later, the son was killed. The villagers protested against him. Initially it was not a racist riot, but it was provoked by the fact that he was an oligarch and could do whatever he wanted, that he was on good terms with all political parties over the last 20 years.

But then some football fans and various far-right youth groups saw this protest on television. They went to this village, along with some bikers, and they burned down one of this guy’s houses. The reason behind this attack was completely racist. It was because he was Roma and nothing else. The police allowed them to burn the house. It looked like a pogrom. Many far-right groups got very excited about it. In every city there was a racist march, and there many attacks against Roma. Some young kids, as young as 12 years old, were chanting, “Kill the Roma.” This type of extreme nationalism was not possible 20 years ago. I think this type of sentiment is increasing. The government is afraid to do anything against this.

The ability of these sentiments to mobilize people is much stronger these days. It’s not just the 15-20 percent always voting for far-right parties. They have managed to poison the discourse of all political parties. The parties have all adopted racist language at all levels. The BSP has campaigned together with the far-right party in support of nuclear energy. Rank-and-file members of the BSP have accepted these far-right movements. In this way these far-right arguments become mainstream.

It is quite clear what is happening. There are many examples of political parties cooperating with the far right. For example, some members of the democratic parties proposed to replace street names with the names of Nazis from the inter-war period. The most extreme propositions like this don’t go through. But it’s become normal for municipal member to make such proposals.

What about the Movement for Rights and Freedom (MRF)?

The sentiments against the MRF have become very extreme. People say, “We are not against the Turks, but we are against their party.” This is still racist, because it’s against the political organization of the Turks. Yes, this party is corrupt, just as corrupt as the other parties. But the attacks against the MRF, shared by democratic parties as well, are very extreme. These attacks were started by far-right groups, but they have been adopted even by some people who consider themselves anti-racist or liberal.

You mentioned groups here working on refugee issues. I’m curious whether there has been any effort to link the experience of refugees and immigrants here in Bulgaria with the experience of Bulgarians emigrating to other countries?

There are NGO groups that are engaged in refugee rights, but they would never make the connection between Bulgarian migration abroad in the 1990s and the migration inwards, like with refugee seekers. I don’t know if it’s possible to build solidarity on this basis. It’s not attempted at a mainstream level.

But there are some small, more grassroots-oriented groups working on refugee rights activism. They work with the NGOs, but they also try to make this connection. There was a project, for instance, called Repositions. In the first part of the project, they took pictures of houses squatted by undocumented refugee seekers. These were then screened in various parts of Sofia. It was a Bulgarian-German project. In the next part, they will do the same thing with Bulgarian migrants in Germany. They are trying to bring forward this argument, understanding migration through the perspective of Bulgarian migrants abroad.

There were other attempts as well. There were a few events connected to solidarity, with Konstanina Kuneva, a Bulgarian syndicalist in Athens who was attacked with acid in 2008 because of her trade union work. Some people in Bulgaria were trying to bring forward her case, speak about it. There was also recently one event at the Red House where they screened an interview with her, and compared environmental activism in Bulgaria with other places, such as the Greek protests and the U.S. Occupy movement.

"He insisted that I couldn't understand Bulgaria until I'd listened to the Balkan blues."

Cross-posted from JohnFeffer.com. John is currently traveling in Eastern Europe and surveying its transformations since 1989.

In my last road trip in the Balkans several years ago, I drove from Bosnia to Albania because the other methods of transportation either took too long or cost too much. I didn’t relish the idea of driving in Albania. Still, I managed to survive the reckless traffic of Tirana — only to have someone in a small town in Montenegro take a sharp right from the far left lane directly in front of my car. A Kafkaesque ordeal followed – which involved an unwanted weekend layover, a bout of food poisoning, a lengthy interview with a judge, a long argument in Russian about traffic rules in Montenegro, a late-arriving interpreter who was the son of the person who ran into me, and finally a minor fine that I would have been happy to pay at the point of impact just so that I could have avoided this two-day Montenegrin interlude. As it was, to catch my flight home from Sarajevo, I had to drive at near-reckless speed through the mountains straddling Montenegro and Bosnia, during a major storm and with my stomach still roiling from my run-in with, I think, a bad squid the night before.

Despite this experience, I decided to take another Balkan road trip this last weekend. The editor of a Bulgarian opposition newspaper from 1990 was now living in Varna, a Bulgarian city on the Black Sea. I rented a car in Sofia and set off across Bulgaria. I planned to stop over in Veliko Tarnovo, to see where the first Bulgarian parliament met in 1878 (and again in 1990 to celebrate the return of democracy). After a day in Varna, I would make my way back to Plovdiv, the country’s second largest city, and then on to Sofia for a final meeting on Sunday evening.

It’s not a road trip without music. I didn’t have any CDs, so I went back and forth across the radio spectrum in search of something palatable. It was not initially auspicious. The stations were full of bad U.S. rock and the Bulgarian version of turbofolk called chalga. Finally, I happened on a station playing choir music. A Roma choir from Plovdiv was particularly good, with the characteristic yipping sounds that anyone familiar with Le Mystere de Voix Bulgares would instantly recognize.

I arrived in Veliko Tarnovo on a musical high. The city too was a revelation – a gorgeous medieval hillside town that would have made a more picturesque and centrally located capital than Sofia. I was told that the 19^th-century Bulgarian leadership revealed their nationalist aspirations with the choice of Sofia. Although not as historically interesting as Veliko Tarnovo, Sofia was located closer to the lands to the west and south that the leaders coveted as part of their dreams of a Greater Bulgaria.

The next day, outside of Varna, I stopped for gas and bought a few CDs – a three-CD set of the music of Buddy Holly, The Big Bopper, and Ritchie Valens, some more Bulgarian choir music, and a compilation of Bulgarian rock music. It was on this last CD that I finally listened to a cut by Tangra, the legendary group that started out as a heavy metal band in the late 1970s and became a New Wave group in the 1980s.

A friend of a high school friend ended up marrying the lead singer of Tangra and moving to Bulgaria in 1990. So I was very fortunate to have a chance to interview Konstantin Markov. Rock and roll in the 1980s in Bulgaria meant freedom, he told me. So Tangra was constantly at risk of arrest – for transmitting Western influences to Bulgarian youth. Informers attended the concerts to make sure that the band didn’t depart from their officially approved lyrics. Still, they were able to write ambiguous lyrics that promoted freedom of thought in allegorical ways. Eventually frustrated by the worsening repression of the mid-1980s, the band left the country for Scandinavia. Once I’ve transcribed the interview – and I will go over all the transcripts with the interviewees to correct any errors – I’ll post the whole conversation.

In Varna, I was the guest of Vihar Krastev and Yassena Yurekchieva, who were the souls of hospitality. In 1990, I interviewed Vihar when he was the editor of an opposition newspaper called Vek 21. For two hours, with classical music playing in the background, he recounted his remarkable career. Kicked out of journalism in the 1980s because of his political views, he could only find a job as a bus driver. After the changes of 1989, he made his way back into journalism only. After a stint with Radio Free Europe, he did what many Bulgarians did in the 1980s: emigrate. A million people – out of a population of roughly 9 million – left the country. Many experienced what Vihar did. In Canada, the barriers to access to journalism were simply too high. So, he ended up doing something he’d learned how to do under communism: drive a bus. He eventually rose through the ranks to manage the Toronto transportation system, but it was a stressful job. He has now retired to Varna.

I left Varna in the early evening, with fruit and delicious homemade muffins courtesy of Yassena and Vihar. The drive from Varna to Yambol – about halfway to Plovdiv – was a harrowing experience that brought back memories of my Montenegrin odyssey. Navigating the mountains near the Black Sea coast at night was quite a challenge. There are few streetlights on the two-lane highway, of course. If you’re stuck behind a truck, you either creep along or muster the courage to pass. Meanwhile, drivers going up to the 140 km-per-hour speed limit are whizzing by you, sometimes around blind curves. At one point, an otherwise straight stretch suddenly banked to the left, and my headlights picked up the arrows only at the last minute. I simultaneously turned the wheel and braked, nearly spinning out of control and overturning the car. If there had been a car coming in the other direction, I would have had a head-on collision. Even without a collision, stuck with an upside-down car and a non-functioning cell phone would have made my Montenegrin experience seem like a holiday on the sea.

Once I turned away from the coastal highway and toward the interior, the road became much straighter, and the traffic thinned considerably. But one peculiar feature of the first section of this highway, before it became a brand-new expressway outside of Yambol, was the speed bumps. These are located in the small towns that the highway passes through. Perhaps during the day, these are easily anticipated. But at night, I’d be cruising along at 60 km per hour, having slowed down to pass through the town, and suddenly I’d be practically airborne as I flew over the hump in the road. It’s hard not to think of these speed bumps as a metaphor for Bulgaria’s development.

I had hoped to turn south from this road and venture into the Rhodope Mountains to track down an elusive Bulgarian poet and activist. Boris Hristev’s political career began in 1968 when he called up a Bulgarian radio station and asked why there were no reports about the invasion of Czechoslovakia. The producers at the station asked who he was: he gave his name. The next day the police came to his house and thus began twenty years of arrests and harassment.

While we were talking, Boris suddenly interrupted himself and asked me if I knew about the Balkan blues. I asked him what he meant. The color blue, he said, could be glimpsed in the architecture of Hungary, but as you travelled further south into the lands of the former Ottoman Empire, the blues became more and more significant. And it wasn’t just architecture, he said. It was also the music. He insisted that I couldn’t understand Bulgaria until I’d listened to the Balkan blues.

Later, I ran into Boris on the street. He pushed a cassette tape into my hands. “The Balkan blues,” he whispered into my ear.

“Whether or not listening to the music truly provides me with additional insights into Bulgarian culture, the music is certainly excellent,” I wrote at the time. There was panpipe music from Romania’s Gheorghe Zamfir, the flute playing of Bulgaria’s Theodosii Spassov, blues music from Albania and Greece, and much more crammed onto the cassette. I made copies for all my friends as a holiday present. It was one of my favorite stories from my travels in 1990.

Then, shortly before leaving for Bulgaria this time around, I was reading the Croatian writer Dubravka Ugresic’s collection of essays, The Culture of Lies. In one section, she writes of meeting a Bulgarian poet, Boris H. In the middle of their conversation, he suddenly mentions the Balkan blues and then…

Oh no, I thought. My wonderful story, which I always thought of as uniquely my own, was not unique at all. Boris Hristev was promiscuous with his musical affections! The mix tape, immortalized in Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity as a supreme expression of idiosyncrasy and affection, turned out in this case to be a more general means of communication. Next year, I will try to interview Dubravka Ugresic to dig out more details about her own Balkan blues experience.

The mysterious Boris H., meanwhile, is holed up like a hermit in a mountain village and isn’t scheduling interviews at the moment. I’ll continue my entreaties. I’ll continue to listen to the Balkan blues. And I’ll keep hoping for another road trip, this time to the Rhodope Mountains to discover what the Bulgarian poet is listening to these days. Next time, though, maybe I’ll take the bus…

We're honored to have Michael Busch dissecting the latest WikiLeaks document dump for Focal Points. This is the forty-first in the series.

Under normal circumstances, news this week that Bulgaria has announced plans to replace its aging fleet of Soviet-era fighter jets with planes that other countries actually might be scared of wouldn’t attract much attention.

But the news came right on the heels of a new cable released just days before by WikiLeaks, outlining efforts by American diplomats to get the Bulgarians to modernize their air force by purchasing planes from US corporations.

The cable was written in the wake of the Bulgarian Council of Minsters’

decision to revise [the country’s] "Plan 2015" military modernization roadmap [which] represents an important opportunity for the United States to influence the development of Bulgarian military capabilities over the medium and long-term.

Particularly, the United States was interested in helping Bulgaria develop its military capabilities so that the new European Union member could send more troops to various battlefields of the war on terror. 

Although Bulgaria possesses nearly 40,000 service members, it has no means to deploy and very limited means to sustain forces outside its borders. The overwhelming majority of its currently deployed 727 service members are drawn from the Bulgarian Land Force's four maneuver battalions, virtually all of which have been transported and are sustained by the United States. These realities represent the most basic limitations to increased Bulgarian commitments to Iraq and Afghanistan. The highest priority should be placed on encouraging Bulgaria to invest in the equipment, vehicles and weapons that will enable them to deploy and fight interoperably with U.S. and NATO forces overseas.  

A number of roadblocks to achieving this objective stood in the way, however, including wasteful investments in submarines and an antiquated surface-to-air missile defense system that were bleeding the already meager state budget dry.

Of particular concern to the Americans was the possibility that Bulgaria would look to European corporations to upgrade their military capabilities.

Bulgaria has been under intense pressure from France to sign a massive ship procurement deal worth over one billion dollars. While modernization of the Navy remains a goal, we will continue to advocate against Bulgaria spending an amount greater than its annual defense budget on this single procurement, particularly since this purchase exceeds Bulgaria's operational requirements and will not address its own stated top priority of improving Bulgaria's ability to deploy and sustain troops outside its borders.

Instead, American diplomats urged the purchase of Lockheed Martin C-27J transport aircraft. 

Theater lift capability will improve with the purchase of five C-27Js (one per year for the next five years with first delivery scheduled for Nov 07) and participation in the NATO C-17 consortium, but Bulgaria's current fighter force has reached the end of its useful life. Affordable, interoperable multi-role fighters are necessary for them to continue to police their airspace, but it is important to advocate for systems to which they can quickly transition. Bulgaria should be steered away from the purchase of additional Russian fighters, which are currently an obstacle to Bulgaria's transformation to a more operationally and tactically flexible organization as expected by NATO.

The fact that State Department diplomats have acted as travelling salesmen for the American corporations has been well-documented by cables WikiLeaked thus far. But the cable from Sofia is the first instance of diplomats playing the part of used car dealers. Embassy staff planned

to advocate against new, very expensive systems such as the Eurofighter, Swedish Gripen, and Joint Strike Fighter in favor of very capable older versions of the F-16 or F-18 as a bridge and catalyst for operational and tactical transformation. The Bulgarians may be eyeing new combat aircraft, and U.S. manufacturers will, of course, be in this hunt. But cost factors would exhaust the defense budget, and Bulgaria would be hard pressed to perform essential training and maintenance functions on such a squeezed budget. 

This last observation was confirmed this week, when the Bulgarians announced they would consider both new and used aircraft while shopping for upgrades to replace the current fleet. And while the final decision on what to buy has yet to be made in Sofia, the cable suggests that Washington has a distinct advantage in competing for Bulgarian bucks.

Key contacts within the Ministry of Defense see U.S. and NATO guidance in the revision process as vital to ensuring a productive and affordable outcome; without our input they are concerned that political interests will trump military requirements. These contacts have offered to help ensure a U.S. voice in the process and to share inside information on the behind-the-scenes maneuvering. 

All this jockeying for favor may all be for naught, however. While Bulgaria announced plans to buy an undisclosed number of planes this week, any purchase will not take place until 2012…at the very earliest. Currently, the country continues to suffer under a distressed economy which has been downgraded even further from its already weak standing by both Moody’s and Standard & Poor since the start of 2011. Even as Prime Minister Boiko Borissov confidently predicts a rapid recovery by the start of next year, it is far from clear the country will have the financial wherewithal to get itself up to snuff for deployment by the United States government.    

(Pictured: Bulgarian crime bosses the Galevi brothers.)

We're honored to have Michael Busch dissecting the latest WikiLeaks document dump for Focal Points. This is the twenty-eighth in the series.

A series of US cables WikiLeaked during the closing weeks of 2010 paint a discouraging portrait of the political economy in Bulgaria. In particular, the cables highlight the dispiriting degree to which organized crime has come to dominate the country, and the increasing frustration experienced by the country's European neighbors with Bulgaria's half-measure to combat mafia influence over society. 

Crime's grip over Bulgarian society is hardly news. Writing a decade ago, Robert Kaplan described the evolution of the country's tradition of organized crime. Discussing former satellite states of Soviet Russia, Kaplan notes that

By the 1980s, communist parties had evolved largely into large-scale mafias which, when the system collapsed, simply divided into smaller mafias that purchased politicians in all those new and weak democracies…Nowhere, however, were such phenomena so transparent as in Bulgaria when I visited in 1998…Bulgarian crime has no centuries-old tradition like Italy's, or even one of heroic thieves and warrior clans as in Russia, Serbia, or Albania. Nor is there the colorful ethnic ingredient here that distinguishes criminal circles in the Caucasus, particularly in Georgia and Chechnya, with their family mafias and highwaymen. The Bulgarian groupings essentially are the result of the transition from communist totalitarianism to parliamentary democracy.

But the cables released this past month reveal just how bad the mafias have headlocked the country's economic and political development. The first cable, dating from 2005, plainly states that

The strength and immunity from the law of organized crime (OC) groups is arguably the most serious problem in Bulgaria today...OC groups range from local street thugs involved in extortion to sophisticated international narcotic dealers and money launderers. An estimated 118 organized crime groups were operating in Bulgaria at the end of 2004...though many of these groups are relatively small and the landscape is dominated by a handful of big players. Organized crime continues to be pervasive in many spheres of Bulgarian life, despite domestic and international efforts to combat it. To date, not a single major OC figure has been punished by the Bulgarian legal system, despite an on-going series of OC-related assassinations.

The scale and scope of mafia activity in Bulgaria is staggering.

OC groups are known to be involved in narcotics trafficking, prostitution, extortion and racketeering, various financial crimes, car theft, and trafficking in stolen automobiles. Human trafficking for sexual exploitation, counterfeiting, and debit and credit card fraud also are some of the most common criminal activities engaged in by Bulgarian organized crime. Crime groups involved in human trafficking are extremely mobile, and victims are often sold or traded amongst various groups. Many groups use a host of legitimate businesses domestically and abroad to launder the proceeds of their illegal activities. Several well-known businessmen linked to organized crime have parlayed their wealth into ownership of sports teams, property developments, and financial institutions. (An organized crime activity that received special attention due to its growth in 2004 was VAT (value-added tax) fraud. The Ministry of Finance estimated that VAT fraud cost the Bulgarian treasury over $700 million in losses annually.)

The seizure of Bulgaria's political institutions by mafia groups, however, offers the most alarming evidence of Bulgaria's troubles. 

Organized crime has a corrupting influence on all Bulgarian institutions, including the government, parliament and judiciary. In an attempt to maintain their influence regardless of who is in power, OC figures donate to all the major political parties. As these figures have expanded into legitimate businesses, they have attempted -- with some success -- to buy their way into the corridors of power. During the 2001 general elections, a number of influential "businessmen," including XXXXXXXXXXXX and XXXXXXXXXXXX, heavily financed and otherwise supported the XXXXXXXXXXXX campaign.

Below the level of the national government and the leadership of the major political parties, OC owns a number of municipalities and individual members of parliament. This direct participation in politics -- as opposed to bribery -- is a relatively new development for Bulgarian OC. XXXXXXXXXX Similarly in the regional center of XXXXXXXXXXX, OC figures control the municipal council and the mayor's office. Nearly identical scenarios have played out in half a dozen smaller towns and villages across Bulgaria.

The problems with organized crime in Bulgaria have exacerbated Sofia's relationship with Brussels, as a cable dating from mid-2009 and released this past week makes clear. Discussing the relationship between the European Commission and the Bulgarian government, the cable relates that a confidential source

told us that the Commission feels they have "tried everything" to make the Bulgarians reform their  judicial system, but concluded "how do you make them reform when they do not want to?" The government's defensive arrogance -- and lack of political will -- is intensifying enlargement fatigue in Brussels.

With respect to a commission report on Bulgaria's efforts to combat the influence of crime in the country, the cable notes

The Bulgarian government -- especially PG Velchev and European Minister Passy -- are lobbying heavily for a positive monitoring report, magnifying modest progress. The government keeps presenting the Commission a list of on-going high profile organized crime and corruption court cases (the  number has grown from 30 to 52 over the last two and a half years) as "successes." Incredibly, several of the "success" cases have been suspended. Several other cases, against notorious shady businessmen Angel Khristov and Plamen Galev AKA the Galevi brothers, and others can hardly be called successes as these defendants gained immunity by running for parliament. XXXXXXXXXXXX said the team found this "loophole" quite disturbing, along with how some Bulgarian officials vehemently defend the law that permits this phenomenon.  Along with the "Galevization" of politics (referring to the Galevi brothers election campaign), Brussels is also concerned with vote buying and general election fraud.

The cable concludes with the observation that their EU source's

frustration with the Bulgarian government's lame and insincere reform efforts was striking.  It appears to be spreading in Brussels where at least the working level appears to be feeling "buyer's remorse" over letting Bulgaria and Romania into the club too early. According to reliable contacts, Brussels Eurocrats have dubbed enlargement fatigue the "Bulgarian Break," further tarnishing Bulgaria's bad image within the EU.

Not only have crime groups infiltrated Bulgaria's highest political institutions, but they have also effectively destroyed the country's national pastime, according to a cable released this week that dates from January 2010. 

Since the fall of Communism, Bulgarian soccer has become a symbol of organized crime's corrupt influence on important institutions. Bulgarian soccer clubs are widely believed to be directly or indirectly controlled by organized crime figures who use their teams as way to legitimize themselves, launder money, and make a fast buck. Despite rampant rumors of match fixing, money laundering, and tax evasion, there have been few arrests or successful prosecutions. As a result, the public has lost faith in the legitimacy of the league as evidenced by the drop in television ratings and match attendance. Recent scandals involving the most popular teams and the mass firing of the referee selection commission for a second consecutive year have deepened the public's disgust.

It isn't only that the teams are controlled by the mafias; the games themselves are often rigged.

Long-standing allegations of match fixing have probably done the most to damage Bulgarian soccer's reputation. According to the sports editor of the daily "Trud," Vladimir Pamukov, and sports journalist, Krum Savov, the most common match fixing schemes are bribing referees and paying off players on the opposing club to insure a team loses by a certain score. They argue that thanks to organized crime influences and economic disparity between the teams, match fixing has become an extremely common practice. This has caused many Bulgarians to view the outcomes of soccer matches like Americans view the predetermined outcomes of professional wrestling.

It's no wonder, then—given the country's hopelessly corrupt political institutions, suffering economy, and fraudulent football leagues—that Bulgaria ranks dead last on a global happiness survey, according to the Economist, as the saddest place on earth.