I am a National Enlightener

Yesterday, Nov. 1, was the Day of the National Enlighteners (Den na narodnite buditeli) in Bulgaria. National Enlighterners are, above all, the people who led the Bulgarian National Revival during the 19th century which culminated in the April Uprising of 1876 and the restoration of the Bulgarian independence after the Russian-Turkish war of 1877-78. However, Enlighteners in a broader sense are considered all who have contributed to the cultural advancement of the Bulgarian nation, including all conscientous teachers and scientists. For that reason, schools and universities have a day off on Nov. 1. I am proud to say that I qualify to be called a National Enlightener not only owing to my occupation but also by the merit of my own deeds.

Of course this pompous statement is tongue in cheek, but it is based on a real recent achievement. Not that I have written a good educational text popularizing science or that some research manuscript of mine has been accepted for publication by a peer-reviewed journal with impact factor (or be it even a journal without impact factor). Nope. Keep in mind, however, that all this intellectual activity associated with "enlightenment" is, as Marxians would call it, a superstructure. To be possible at all, it requires a base - a set of material preconditions. If a person isn't fed, dressed and comfortably positioned, he is totally unable to engage in any intellectual activity. Our students, thankfully, come to us fed and generally well dressed. However, when we come to the comfortable position, we have problems.

The microscopic observation in our teaching labs requires lab chairs with variable height. For many years, it has been impossible for our Department to buy such chairs. The Bulgarian law requires all equipment for government institutions to be bought by a complicated procedure, so our demands must be sent "above", to the Rector's office. The aim of this procedure is to prevent corruption, but the actual result is what you can expect if you let clerks disconnected from teaching and not too interested in its success to buy all items needed for teaching. The most urgently needed things somehow get cancelled from the list, the rest are supplied with great delay (up to a year) and usually in a form unsuitable for the purpose. In the case of lab chairs, some were indeed bought with variable height as required, but the maximum height was about 35 cm. We cannot even figure out how could such close-to-mother-Earth chairs be produced in the first place. Our only reasonable guess is that they have been meant for kindergartens.

So I have for years used some of my time at work to try and repair our available old lab chairs that become fewer and more valuable with each passing semester. Some of them still have their labels indicating that they were produced in the 1950s. I receive little acknowledgement for these efforts. Most colleagues mock me, and the students never think that someone may be doing hard work so that they have something to sit on. However, I know I am doing the right thing. My maternal grandfather, who was a carpenter, would be proud of me if he could know. Unfortunately, sooner or later every chair has its metal part broken, and at that point I give up, because I haven't the equipment and skills needed for welding.

This semester, we have another problem. Our building has been in renovation for more than a year already, with no end in sight. While this process is taking place, normal teaching and research is all but impossible, and if you at least save your things needed for work you are lucky. We have already lost reagents for many thousands euro because of incompetence of some electricians who disconnected the power supply to a freezer full of antibodies. Now, the workmen have come to the task of renovating the central heating. It is a rule in Bulgaria to renovate and repair the heating systems in the autumn-winter season when heating is actually needed. In our building, this was done last in the cold and hungry winter of 1996-97. At that time, apart from writing about cell cycle and protesting against government, I was busy to manage some heating at my workplace. Happily, the room where I spend most of my time had a glassware dryer suitable also as a heater. The same was true for one of our four teaching labs. But what about the other three?

I found two electric heaters which were dispensable at home and brought them to work. One of them was initially not working. I had recently re-read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Pirsig, which claims that everybody has the mental skills necessary to repair moderately complex technology such as motorcycles. I was young, trusting and stupid, so I thought that electric heaters are even simpler than motorcycles and tried to repair it myself. After the attempt, when I plugged the heater into the socket, there was a "puff" and some sparkles, then everything went dark. So I strongly advise readers not to follow Pirsig's theory with any electric device (or anything significantly more complex than a chair).

Close to my workplace, there was a garage turned into a shop. It was conveniently selling and repairing simple electric equipment. I brought there my blackened heater. The electrician said that a short circiut had destroyed all parts of the heater except for its corpus. He added, however, that due to the ongoing hyperinflation, it was still more advantageous to buy and install all these parts than to buy a new heater. So my poor old heater got a new life. Indeed, it had lost its legs long ago, but we are putting it on a metal test tube stand and it is OK.

This autumn, as weather turned cold, I placed the two heaters in two of the teaching labs. But what about the fourth lab? I don't remember how we managed it in 1996-97, but now I am in charge of the practical teaching and feeling responsible for it. My mother had mentioned that a heater had stopped working and she had bought an electric radiator. She immediately agreed to give me this heater for my workplace, as she had given me the two older ones.

Unfortunately, my friends at the garage-shop were no longer in business. The garage was not their but municipal property. The Mayor's office had raised the rent to some ridiculous level (about EUR 350 per month, they said). They could not afford it and moved out. Nobody rented the garage-shop after then. It is locked and slowly deteriorating, illustrating how government attempts to manage business invariably turn to slaughtering the egg-laying hen. I don't know whether the electricians have found a new place, but the fact is that our giant Medical University campus is deprived of their services. Who would repair my heater now?

To cut the long story short - finally, my husband did it. He is a man of technology, not some inspired Pirsig reader. So on Monday I gladly informed my colleages that we already have a heater in every teaching lab. I only asked them (and I keep praying) that nobody forgets to unplug the heater when leaving the room. Otherwise, a fire could easily ensue, we could share the fate of the Department of Pathophysiology, and to cap it all, I would be held responsible for bringing the heaters in the first place.

But let's not think of disasters likely to happen. At least, now we can let Grannie Winter come with all her merry white granddaughters (as a Bulgarian nursery rhyme says) without worrying that we have to teach at Celsium 5. And I have all right to call myself a National Enlightener, haven't I? Just try to say I haven't, to see your comment moderated :-).

Greeting to Libyan rebels

This is The Song of the Rebels of (the town of) Panaguirishte, a popular song from the 1870s - the age of Bulgarian struggle for independence; lyrics by Ivan Vazov, the author of music is unknown. Below is a slightly compressed translation:

The fight is starting and hearts beat loud.
Our oppressors are coming now.
Courage, my loyal friends, show the world
We are no longer submissive herd!

Show we have broken the dirty chains
And we are free men, rather than slaves!
Let us begin the glorious fight
And God will help us with all His might.

Chorus:
Come on, brothers, all like one - to the fight we rush!
Come on, brothers, all like one - enemy to crush!
Oh you my mother, dear my homeland,
Lovely as Eden on this earth you stand.

Monster mosque to be built next to Ground Zero

(The expression in the title borrowed from Atlas Shrugs blog.)
First, I am copy-pasting below most of the article Plan for mosque near World Trade Center site moves ahead, by Joe Jackson & Bill Hutchinson, published earlier this month in NY Daily News, but for the moment just follow the link and read.

"A proposal to build a mosque steps from Ground Zero received the support of a downtown committee despite some loved ones of 9/11 victims finding it offensive.
The 13-story mosque and Islamic cultural center was unanimously endorsed by the 12-member Community Board 1's financial district committee.
The $100 million project, called the Cordoba House, is proposed for the old Burlington Coat Factory... just two blocks from the World Trade Center site.
"I think it will be a wonderful asset to the community," said committee Chairman Ro Sheffe.
Imam Feisel Abdul Rauf, who helped found the Cordoba Initiative following the 9/11 attacks, said the project is intended to foster better relations between the West and Muslims...
Daisy Khan, executive director of the American Society for Muslim Advancement and Cordoba Initiative board member, said the project has received little opposition.
"Whatever concerns anybody has, we have to make sure to educate them that we are an asset to the community," Khan said.
Khan said her group hopes construction on the project will begin by the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
Once built, 1,000 to 2,000 Muslims are expected to pray at the mosque every Friday, she said.
No one at last night's meeting protested the project. But some 9/11 families said they found the proposal offensive because the terrorists who launched the attacks were Muslim.
"I realize it's not all of them, but I don't want to have to go down to a memorial where my son died on 9/11 and look at a mosque," said retired FDNY Deputy Chief Jim Riches - whose son Jim, a firefighter, was killed on 9/11.
"If you ask me, it's a religion of hate," said Riches, who did not attend last night's meeting.
Rosemary Cain of Massapequa, L.I., whose son, Firefighter George Cain, 35, was killed in the 2001 attacks, called the project a "slap in the face."
"I think it's despicable. That's sacred ground," said Cain, who also did not attend the meeting.
"How could anybody give them permission to build a mosque there? It tarnishes the area."

Frankly, I find it unbelievable. After some Muslims sacrificed their lives in order to destroy the Twin Towers together with the people inside, now other Muslims are keen to build a giant mosque almost on the cleared spot. As I wrote in my post about Samir Kuntar two years ago, "if we remove the fragile frame of civilization, what remains from the human? A Darwinian creature who will happily kill other people's children in order to make more space for his own progeny."
I am only slightly surprised that Muslims have come with such an idea. It is just the umpteenth piece of evidence about the nature of Islam. I am, however, surprised that the city is giving green light to this insanity.
The same NY Daily News page offers an opinion poll:

"Do you think it is appropriate to construct a mosque near Ground Zero?
- Yes, it will encourage tolerance.
- No, if the 9/11 victims' families are opposed.
- I'm not sure."

I cannot take part in such an opinion poll; I can just wonder at its authors' dhimmitude and stupidity. The first symptom of these is their priority of problems - regarding the intolerance to Islam as a more important problem than the deaths and suffering caused by Islam at Ground Zero and elsewhere. Following the same logic, we should build Nazi and Communist propaganda centers near the former extermination camps in order to encourage tolerance to these doctrines.
Second, I find it wrong beyond description that opposition to the plan is justified not with the need to regard Islam as the doctrine of supremacy, oppression and genocide it is, but with political correctness - not to hurt the feelings of 9/11 victims' families. So, if the Islamists had killed the whole families, there would be no problem at all, right?
I am outraged because the grieving relatives, instead of being allowed to devote themselves to the memory of their loved ones and the challenges of life, are now forced to fight against the trivialization of their loss and the planned building of an actual memorial to the murderers. We have observed the same in Bulgaria and other former Communist countries - the pressure put on the surviving victims of the regime, and on the relatives of dead ones, to put their hard feelings aside and embrace the Communists for the sake of "peace" and "reconciliation". It was wrong here, and it is wrong in New York now.
Another similarity is that Communists filled East-European cities with their landmarks and actively struggled for their preservation, because they knew the importance of architectural environment for shaping the collective mind. Russia successfully pressed Bulgaria to preserve the numerous memorials to Soviet occupiers. When a landmark of evil is standing, growing young people walk in its shadow and think, "How powerful they are - to kill so many of us, to do us so much evil and still to make us keep their monuments. We must always give them what they want, then they probably will leave us alive." The same is planned to happen in New York.
Disclaimer: I do not advocate any action against Muslims. I am against Islam, not against Muslims, as I am against AIDS, not against AIDS-infected people. And I do not like the fact that I feel obliged to include such a disclaimer. When I write against Nazism or Communism, I do not feel obliged to disclaim that I do not advocate any action against individual supporters of these doctrines.

Update from May 27: I voted with "no" in the above mentioned opinion poll, mainly to see the results. They are: 68% "yes", 31% "no", 2% "not sure".

"Rufinka": Bulgarian folk song about death in spring

One of the best known and beloved Bulgarian folk songs is Rufinka bolna legnala (Rufinka was lying ill), originated some 150-200 years ago in the Rhodopa mountain (although, similarly to other Rhodopean songs, it is very difficult to sing). It was created by Bulgarian Muslims and, as far as I know, is the only element of their culture incorporated in mainstream Bulgarian culture. Once I read an article about the background of the song. According to it, Rufie (informally Rufinka) was a real person, a girl from a well-to-do family. About age 20 and before getting married, she succumbed to a progressive fatal disease, probably tuberculosis. Before her death, she was asked what she was more sorry for - her wedding dress or the world. The historical Rufie reportedly answered, "For the dress, because I shall never put it on." However, the character of the song gives a different answer - see below.

The lyrics in Bulgarian (in the original dialect) can be found e.g. at this forum. The participant supplying the text writes, "This is perhaps the only folk song I truly admire and when I listen to it, everything in me bristles up." My opinion is similar. This song in a very simple way gives you the tragedy of being human, of having a self-aware spirit longing for existence but trapped within a mortal body. It is felt even more clearly because of the mentioned abundance of life in spring, and because Rufinka despite her religion does not seem to believe in afterlife.

Here is my (quite rude) attempt of translation:

RUFINKA WAS LYING ILL

Rufinka was lying ill / there in the high mountain.

No one was by her side / only her old mother.

She was telling Rufinka, / "Rufinka my dear daughter,

Are you sorry for your wedding dress, / your dress and your beloved?"

"My dear, my dear mother, / I am not sorry for my dress,

I am sorry for the world, / because spring has come now,

Everything's coming out of earth, / and I shall go into earth.

Mother, call Mizho's Fatma, / let her come, and I'll tell her

To marry my beloved, / to take my wedding dress.

More about the ship Rudnicar and captain Gorbatenko

In my June 4 post The Rudnicar mission, I had written about the two 1939 voyages of the ship Rudnicar under the command of Anton Prudkin. The Bulgarian Jew Baruh Konfino had organized them to bring Jewish refugees from Bulgaria to Palestine. Reader Chaim left the following comment:

"Many thanks for your article regarding Rudnichar. I was among the fortunate ones to be on it. I was 2 years old then. My parents told me that they came to shore of Palestine in barges. We arrived in January 1940. What I understand is that it was the 4th voyage of the Rudnichar. I wish to know from what port did it sail and who was the captain. This link reports on 3rd voyage."

At the Air Group 2000 site, I found information about the later Rudnicar voyages (after Prudkin's resignation). It is supplied by Atanas Panayotov, quoting the German professor Jurgen Rohwer. I'd immediately refer the Bulgarian reader to this site, and here I'll translate the relevant parts of the text. After the first two voyages under Prudkin's command, the Rudnicar made two more with Grigoriy (Grigor) Gorbatenko as captain.

"In Tel Aviv, our team met and talked with Baruh Konfino's younger son, Itzhak Konfino... He was certain that his father had never approved hiring Anton Prudkin as captain and fully trusted captain Gorbatenko, under whose command Struma perished... The captain's exceptional professional skills are illustrated by what happened on Nov. 7, 1939 (during the third voyage of the ship - M.M.). The Rudnicar and the Cooperator dragged by it found themselves in a heavy storm and only the navigation expertise of Gorbatenko allowed the crew to bring successfully the two ships back to the port of the Rodos Island for emergency repair...
The fourth voyage of the Rudnicar took place from Dec. 1, 1939 to Jan. 7, 1940, between the ports of Varna, Sulina and again Varna and then to Palestine. The passengers were approximately 500..."

This voyage brought my reader, then a young child, and his parents to Palestine. It was the last voyage of the ship bringing Jewish refugees to Palestine. Shortly after it, the Rudnicar was rented by a German company to be used as a cargo ship. As mentioned in my earlier post, its end came in 1942 because of captain's error.
"It is difficult to say why Dr. Konfino did not appoint Gorbatenko as captain of Salvador. The experienced navigator would have prevented the tragedy of Dec. 14, 1940, when 204 passengers, including 66 children, perished. Itzhak Konfino claims that his father had virtually no part in organizing Salvador's voyage, which explains Gorbatenko's absence from this ship." (In my earlier post, another explanation is given - that "no one serious captain agreed to take its command because everybody feared that the passengers and the crew were doomed"; however, the source used there is apparently biased against Konfino, so I would not judge without additional information.)
The Air Group 2000 site then describes the fatal voyage of Struma. According to it, Turkish authorities were not happy with the evacuation of European Jews to Palestine through Turkish waters, but did not want to openly take measures to stop it. Instead, they deliberately ordered Struma to spend more and more days in a limbo, relying on the Soviet submarines known to lurk in this region to do the dirty job. These submarines considered all ships in sight as German and had submerged the Turkish ship Chankaya only days before Struma and almost at the same spot.
Captain Gorbatenko is described by sources as "a Bulgarian of Russian origin". I suppose that he was an ethnic Bulgarian who had no Bulgarian citizenship, because he wasn't treated by the authorities the same way as the other perished Bulgarian crew members. Death certificates were issued to their families but not to Gorbatenko's family. His relations awaited the document for decades.
Struma, "the Bulgarian Titanic" as Panayotov calls it, and the people on its board - passengers and crew, are all but forgotten in Bulgaria. However, the memory is kept in Israel. The source mentions that Dr. Sonya Levi, of Bulgarian Jewish origin and researcher at the Yad Vashem memorial complex in Jerusalem, helped to find the names of Bulgarian crew members. They are:
Grigor Timofeev Gorbatenko, Lazar Ivanov Dikov, Damyan Stoyanov and Osep Garabedov.

The Rudnicar mission

A commenter recently asked me to "quote in English some information about the Rudnicar mission of Prudkin". I had written about Prudkin in my 2007 post Prison art.
Below, I am translating parts from the article "The collapsed building at the Alabin Street in Sofia had a dark secret related to Ruse", by Boyan Draganov, published in RuseNews on Nov. 13, 2006. Follow the link to the original page to see photos. Because I have never read anything about navigation in English, my translation is fairly illiterate; but as people say, better than nothing.


"At the Alabin Street in Sofia, a 5-storey building collapsed, killing two young women. This tragedy reminded us that until Sept. 9, 1944 this house had belonged to the eye doctor Baruh Konfino. His name and activity are related to (the town of) Ruse via Captain Anton Prudkin who had been born in Ruschuk (the old name of Ruse - M.M.)...
In 1912-1913, many Jewish families from the White Sea beach and the neighbourhood of Odrin moved to Bulgaria. They were not granted Bulgarian citizenship but still lived happily for more than 25 years. However, in 1939 they were ordered by the government to leave Bulgaria. Hundreds of men, women and children from all parts of the country gathered in (the port city of) Varna. There came also many Jews from Poland, Hungary and Romania. All were seeking a way to sail to the Promised Land. However, they hadn't the papers that would allow them to use the regular ships. The only option was to travel illegally...
Konfino was a rich Jew and a Bulgarian citizen. He made a plan to bring by his own ships to Palestine those Jews who wanted to go there. This was a very difficult undertaking because very few fit ships were offered for sale and they were unbelievably expensive. The market was offering only old small wooden ships deserving retirement. Their owners wanted to get rid of them by sale rather than by decommissionment. Konfino's arrival was a chance for these owners and they used it properly... Nobody thought that the old ships would almost certainly bring tragedies. Most of the refugees also viewed them as their only chance for escape.
In 1939, Baruh Konfino and his wife Dora became owners of the 400-ton Rudnicar ship originally produced in Stockholm in 1875. (The name means "Miner" and is pronounced "Rudnichar" - M.M.) Until 1939 Rudnicar transported coal from Burgas to Varna. After that, it was abandoned in the channel connecting the sea with the Varna Lake and was described as "a wreched wreck with the shape of a ship". Dr. Konfino realized the risks presented by Rudnicar and was very careful in his choice of a captain to carry out the difficult voyages.
He picked Anton Prudkin, an experienced navigator with adventurous life, the only Bulgarian captain able to sail the Bosphorus the Dardanelles without a pilot and eager to accept any deal and risk... He accepted Konfino's offer. A difficult repair of the obsolete ship began. After disinfection, 23 baskets full of dead rats were carried out...
In the summer of 1939, Rudnicar sailed for Palestine with the first group of Jews, most of them rich. Prudkin successfully brought them to the shores of Palestine. There, in open water, the Jews were transfered to boats that brought them illegally to the Promised Land... After a short repair Rudnicar, carrying about 100 passengers above its capacity, began another risky voyage. This time, it was dragging the large boat Success, also full of refugees. During the voyage, a storm began. Rudnicar began to leak. Worse, the S-wheel of Uspeh was damaged. A sailor jumped in the unruly sea and repaired it. Both vessels reached Palestine successfully.
For the two voyages, Prudkin received 250 000 leva. However, he refused a third one, because Konfino declined his demand for a bonus per each transported Jew. On Oct. 6, 1939 Prudkin resigned as captain of Rudnicar. He considered organizing a voyage without Konfino, but failed.
The fate of Rudnicar was sad. In 1941, Germans rented it to transport military equipment. On Feb. 14, 1942... near the Bosph0rus it hit ice and started to leak. The captain Georgi Karlovski musjudged the situation and panicked. Instead of bringing the ship to the shore and rescuing it, he and the crew took to lifeboats and abandoned it. After that, Rudnicar kept afloat for about 20 hours before sinking.
The Konfinos did not miss Prudkin and began to develop their high-profit business on even a larger scale. In the spring of 1940, they bought a ship initially called Shipka and renamed to Libertat... Because illegal voyages of refugees to Palestine had become more often..., the British government warned the Bulgarian Jewish community that each such ship, if caught, would be confiscated, its captain sentenced to 8 years and a fine, and the refugees deported back. However, nothing could stop the Jews longing for freedom. In the early morning of June 14, 1940, Libertat sailed off to Palestine. 360 people were crowded aboard... Libertat reached the shore of Palestine successfully but was confiscated by the British. The fate of the crew and the captain was not known...
Next, Konfino bought the wooden ship Salvador... It was 100% antiquated and rotten... A cosmetic repair was done, in which the Jewish refugees worked for free... The ship was supplied with only 80 lifebelts. No one serious captain agreed to take its command because everybody feared that the passengers and the crew were doomed. Konfino required the refugees to sign statements that they were boarding on the ship voluntarily and were accepting all risks of the travel. Finally, a man with no expertise of navigation was appointed as captain. He did not even buy navigation devices. The crew consisted of 4 sailors.
On Dec. 26, 1940 (there is some error, presumably it is Nov. instead of Dec., see below - M.M.), Salvador departed from Varna with more than 320 Jewish passengers (different sources give their number between 327 and 360). 89 of them were children under 12. The ship was overcrowded. The refugees had paid expensively... It is thought that Konfino had a profit of 900 000 leva from this voyage...
In the night of Dec. 11 to 12, 1940, the ship found itself in a violent storm... The merciless waves threw it on the rocks of Djambaz Tepe, near the town of Silivri. Only 123 people survived, the rest perished. The drama of Salvador became known in Bulgaria and was discussed in the Parliament. Many voices accused Konfino and wanted him to be prosecuted. However, the tragedy of the unfortunate Jews was soon forgotten.
Dr. Konfino hastily organized the next voyage of refugees to Palestine. The ships of death continued to travel. This time the Konfinos bought a ship named Struma. It was built in 1867... The Konfinos adapted it for passenger transport. Struma was sailing under the flag of Panama but had a Bulgarian crew under the command of captain Grigoriy Gorbatenko...
After leaving Varna, Struma sailed to Constantza where it was overcrowded with 778 Jews. 103 of them were children. Before the ship had even left the port, its engine broke. A Romanian ship was rented to drag it to the Bosphorus. The refugees paid for this with gold, wedding rings and family jewellery.
Turkish authorities kept the ship in front of the Bosphorus for 71 days without water and food supplies. Dysentery broke out aboard; nevertheless, the refugees were not allowed to step on land. Then, Struma was ordered to leave the Bosphorus into open sea.
In the morning of Feb. 24, 1942, at a distance of 14 miles north-east of the Bosphorus, the ship was shot at and submerged by the Russian submarine ДЩ 213'' under the command of D. Dezhenko. The Russians had mistaken Struma for a German cargo ship. Only a 19-year-old Ukrainian Jew named David Stolyar survived in the ice-cold sea water.
The fatal voyage of Struma put an end to the illegal emigration (from Bulgaria) to Palestine."

The good and the bad side of Bulgarian money

Bulgarian money (image copied from here). At the bottom of the photo, i.e. the right sides of the bills, you can see the figures for recognition by the blind - circles, triangles and rectangles.

Current US dollars can be recognized by vision only. However, as Monique Garcia wrote in Chicago Tribune on May 21, "A ruling Tuesday by a federal appeals court in Washington may change all that. The judges found that because different denominations of paper money are indistinguishable by touch, the government is discriminating against blind people. The decision could force the Treasury Department to make significant changes to currency, such as printing different-sized bills for different amounts or giving them raised markings."

The news, plus a link to Garcia's article, was reported by a member of autism-disability forum AutAdvo. This started a discussion about how bank-notes (bills) could be made distinguishable to the blind. I wrote, "Our bills of higher nominals already have signs for the blind. They are circles and triangles about 3 mm big and slightly protruding." In fact, as you can see in the above image, even the smallest bill of 2 leva (EUR 1) is marked by figures, in this case two rectangles. I was mistaken because I don't rely on the raised marking to recognize bills. When holding a bill, I can only sense that this place of it is different; I hope that blind people with their trained touch can really sense the figures.

This money story makes me proud of my country (which doesn't happen often at all). We have surpassed much more developed and civilized nations. Watch us, Americans, and learn from us!

However, there is a sad moment in my delight, because I remember a night radio program in late 1996 or early 1997. The radio host had invited the representative of the International Monetary Fund for Bulgaria - an unusually high-ranking guest for a program broadcasted live between 12 PM and 3 AM. The host asked him whether he would advise Bulgarians to trust their currency and if so, what arguments he would use. The IMF man replied jokingly, "Yes, I would tell Bulgarians to like their money, because it is very beautiful!"

This dialogue, taking place in the most surreal hours of the night, quite fitted the surreal situation in Bulgaria at that time. We were suffering hyperinflation of the type usually observed after a world war. Upon receiving my salary, I thought what I could do to prevent it being eaten away by inflation and decided to buy paper for the printer at my workplace. (Of course my employer had to buy this paper, but Bulgarian university teachers are forced to finance their work with their meager wages.) So I went to the bookstore just to discover that a package of print paper costed a little more than 3 my monthly salaries. At the maximum of hyperinflation, my salary had thawed to the equivalent of $ 4, and $ 0.6 of it was actually held as income tax.

The next government, after quashing the hyperinflation, made a monetary reform. The beautiful bills to which the IMF representative was referring were replaced by new ones, also beautiful, and with raised marking for the blind. So far so good.

However, poverty remained chronic in Bulgaria and ordinary people were trained to think that there is nothing wrong if their incomes increase at a slower rate than inflation. Now, analysts are warning us to prepare for a new surge of inflation, based on increase of fuel and food prices.

But at least we have better money than the Americans.

Germanea

My husband and children in front of St. Nikola church in Sapareva Banya.

A month ago, our family spent two days at Sapareva Banya, a town at the foot of the Rila mountain. This is a pleasant town I would recommend as a family resort. There is just a small detail - bring your own slippers. The owners of the small hotel where we resided required guests to leave their shoes and use slippers, as is traditionally done in villages and small towns. We obeyed because we had no slippers of our own and didn't want to buy, but the practice is bad. This is the way fungal infections are transmitted.

I had been in the town before in 1995, to express my support for the locals. They protested against the Skakavitsa project that would take the water supply of Sapareva Banya and divert it to the city of Sofia. The protests were eventually crushed by anti-terrorist police and the project was implemented. (These events are partly covered in my 2006 post Water regime, or how to create and perpetuate misery).

I wasn't presented at the actual clash - it happened in a week-day when I was at work. After it, at Saturday I bought some banitsa (Bulgarian cheese pasty) and took a bus. If you wonder how one could just go to a town and express support to strangers by offering them cheese pasty - I also wouldn't and couldn't do it now, people lose some inspiration and skills as they age.

Arriving at Sapareva Banya, I saw a barrier marking the site of the protests and several policemen guarding it. It was enough to look into their eyes to know that they had recently abused people with impunity, had liked it, were bored now and were looking for new targets. With a slight change in the uniform, they could excellently play the parts of Nazi concentration camp guards in Schindler's list. So I was careful not to trigger an attack. The previous day, these policemen or their colleagues had beaten a 60-year-old local woman in her own yard without any apparent reason.

They asked me where I was from and how I had arrived to the town - with public transportation or with my own car. I guess that, had I replied the latter, they would fine me for some made-up traffic violation. Then they defended the use of force against local residents, saying, "Laws are to be kept, aren't they?". I answered nothing; the statements was correct in itself, but used in a bad context (I used it more appropriately as a title of my Feb. 27 post).

After that, I left the barrier and talked with several local people I met in the street. One of them even invited me to her house. Naturally, they were sad and desperate after the defeat. Their houses were remarkably clean and well kept, but the people were so poorly dressed that my heart ached.

During our present visit (I am already talking about last month), the town looked so renovated that I couldn't recognize it. More importantly, the people seemed more cheerful and not so poor. I mentioned the 1995 events to the hotel owners and asked whether the Skakavitsa project was still working. They said that it was but part of the water was reserved for the town and it was enough to satisfy its needs.

When I visited the town in 1995, I naturally didn't behave like a tourist and had no interest in the local landmarks. Now, as we went sight-seeing, I was surprised to learn how many of them were there. During the Roman rule, the town was called Germanea and was quite important. There was born Belisarius, a 6th century "defence minister" of the Byzantine Empire. The beautiful little St. Nikola church (see image) in the center of the town is dated to the 12th or 13th century. We also made a ride to the Panichishte region of the Rila mountain, where crocuses were already sprouting between the pine trees.

Our second day in Sapareva Banya was March 3, the Bulgarian national holiday. It marks the date when a peace treaty mentioning the creation of a Bulgarian state was signed between Russia and the Ottoman Empire in 1878. I am not nationalistic enough to be driven to ecstasy on such occasions, and that particular March 3 wasn't very cheerful due to the death of 9 people in a burning train only days ago (briefly mentioned in my March 6 post). So the celebration was modest. On the central square, Bulgarian national revival songs were broadcasted and bypassers were stopping to listen to them, some were leaving flowers at a small memorial. For the first time, I heard Stambolov's song We want no wealth/ We want no money/ We want freedom/ And humane justice. I liked the celebration. It couldn't take place in Sofia; to begin with, there is nowhere to make it because Sofia, among many other attributes of a normal city, lacks a central pedestrian zone. In fact, it doesn't look like a city at all. It is rather some hybrid between stock market, industrial site, college campus and refugee camp.

Another, not so pleasant aspect of the Sapareva Banya reality were the trucks and other vehicles participating in the illegal construction of a ski lift in the Rila National Park. We saw them first-hand during our ride to Panichishte. Unfortunately, the Municipality of Sapareva Banya is an accomplice in this destruction of the mountain; Bulgarian readers can read the details in this open letter by conservationists to local residents. However, I wouldn't blame too much the local authorities and residents. In 1995, they were opposed against another nature-damaging project and what was the result? Riot police beating them, water taken away from them as a punitive measure and the project still implemented. Now, I don't believe their opposition would halt the unscrupulous greedy investors, so why waste energy and possibly put themselves in harm's way. If Rila can still be saved, it is not by the residents of Sapareva Banya and not even by those of Sofia, but by European opinion-makers and institutions (see my previous today's post).

"Don't judge harshly because you/your people can one day be in the same shoes"

Left: Katherine "Katie" McCarron, copied from Not Dead Yet, originally supplied by her family. Right: her mother and murderer Karen McCarron, copied from HoiNews, original source unknown.

About a week ago, I had an argument with a relative about the Mideast conflict. It naturally brought me to saying that Palestinians were such and such (let's not repeat adjectives unnecessarily, I have explained my opinion in detail in the post Mideast Conflict: The Dire Consequences of a "Deadly and Disgusting Bias").

Then, my relative replied, "The same things you are saying about the Palestinians have been said by (West-) Europeans about our Bulgarian revolutionaries in Macedonia."

Well, I know that some of these revolutionaries, while not doing quite the same things as today's Palestinians, weren't the sort of person you want for your son in-law, either. The best example perhaps is Yane (Jane) Sandanski (1872 - 1915). He has been unduly euphemized by historians (see e.g. his Wikipedia page) and today has a resort town named after him. Consider, however, how he raised funds for his cause: "In 1902 Yane Sandanski, together with some of his companions, kidnapped the Protestant missionary Ellen Stone and exacted ransom of 14 500 TRL for her, which initiated the so-called Miss Stone Affair. Despite the persecutions, they managed to take the ransom and use it for weapons, which were needed for the revolutionary struggle. Miss Stone was released and later she read lectures for the Macedonian cause in America" (source: BGglobe).

I have read details about this kidnapping in For Freedom and Perfection, a sympathetic biography of Yane Sandanski by Mercia MacDermott. Miss Stone had a pregnant companion (her name was Tsilka, if I remember correctly). The kidnappers seized her together with her mistress and didn't release her despite her pregnancy advancing to term. She gave birth literally in Stone Age conditions, in a cave, with only Miss Stone to help. It was sheer luck that she and the baby survived and did well. So I have no kind thoughts and words for Sandanski and his gang of terrorists, no matter how Bulgarian they were and what noble causes they claimed.

The Scripture says, "Judge Not Lest You Be Judged". We have a proverb with a similar meaning, "Laugh only at a priest, because you will never become one." It is true that we shouldn't indulge in excessive and hypocritical judgement of others. But this doesn't mean that we must never judge anybody in order to avoid being judged ourselves. Would you like a society where everybody would let others do as they please in order to enjoy the same "freedom"? I think that we not only can but should demand others to keep some norms - and of course apply the same norms to ourselves, our families and our community.

This reminds me of an event that was the central subject at Autism Hub ten days ago. On Jan. 17, Illinois physician Karen McCarron was convicted of first-degree murder of her 3-year-old daughter Katherine "Katie" McCarron (see above photos). Karen had smothered the little girl to death with a plastic bag. The motive: Katie was autistic.

Society showed mixed reaction to the murder and the verdict. Some people, notably disability advocates and parents, strongly condemned Karen McCarron. However, as Wikipedia puts it, "news articles and weblogs have emphasized the difficulties in raising a child with autism, and some suggested that McCarron may have been stressed by lack of support and dealing with Katie's autism." In fact, Karen had no reason to be stressed so much, because she hadn't even cared for her daughter after the diagnosis. As you can read in the same article, Katie had been taken by her father Paul to North Carolina, where the educational opportunities for autistic children were better, and was reunited with her mother only ten days prior to the murder. Paradoxically, the fact that Karen had been free from care was also used by some to exonerate her. Quoting the HoiNews article from where I copied the photo: "Authorities are not commenting as to her motive, but people who know Karen McCarron said the challenges with autism can be too much to handle... Her husband took Katherine to North Carolina, Karen stayed with their other child at their home in Morton. “And that had to be overwhelming in itself, because now your support's not there, you're both separated, you know... she was an excellent mother and she was out there to help her daughter the best that she could,” (therapist and autism mother) Floyd said." (However, see also the outraged comments to this article by parents of both special-needs and typical children.)

Blogger "Doubting Thomas" touches another aspect and so brings McCarron's case to the subject of this post. He writes, "Prosecution attorneys say she was mentally stable. However, they are attorneys, and not doctors, and should not diagnose on the fly. She also just killed her daughter. How stable is that?... But here is the big money question, and ultimately, my point: Do any of you realize that **your autistic child** could be in the same position as Karen McCarron someday?"

Eh well, every murderer, with or without a disability, has parents. And I am sure that in quite many cases they have been good parents. We know well "where children come from", but we do not know, and never will, where their souls come from. I pity Karen McCarron's parents. However, we cannot keep our pockets filled with excuses for all sort of criminals, just in case some of our children happen to become criminals when they grow up.

In a sense, every murderer is "not normal". I always wonder when I watch on Discovery channel programs about how murderers' brains have different wave patterns and their attorneys use this to demand a lighter sentence. I mean, why is a murderer's brain expected to be exactly like a non-murderer's brain? However, from this "difference" there is a long way to "mental illness" pronounced enough to account for a lighter sentence. And unlike Thomas, I don't think McCarron (who had no previous diagnosis) qualified for "guilty but mentally ill" verdict. People like her are so dangerously close to us, to "good normal" people. Had Katie happened to be a typical child, nobody would ever know about the monster hidden inside her mom.

Our civilization has reached a stage when diseases, disabilities, accidents and wars are a rare exception, rather than rule of life, as they have been in previous centuries. However, this has had the unpleasant effect of making us intolerant to everything depriving our lives of the comfort we feel entitled to. Have a non-perfect child? - Get rid of him. We want perfect children only. As autistic blogger Joel Smith put it, "Being a parent of an autistic child gives you a special right: a “Get Out of Love Free” card."

In a society where so many people can blame a disabled child for her own murder (just read some of the above quotes), too many parents may be tempted to follow Karen McCarron's footsteps. This, to my opinion, gives "high degree of public danger" to her crime. The concern that we, or somebody of our circle, may some day be in a criminal's shoes should not be a reason for lenience. On the contrary, in such cases the sentence must serve to ward off future similar crimes by scaring potential criminals. I think the jurors have done their job well and while nothing can bring Katie back to life, their verdict has likely saved the lives of some other children.

Aftermath of the 2007 local elections, part 3: Ahmed Dogan

This post will be the last about the past local elections (the previous one dated Dec. 12).
Ahmed Dogan is the leader of the Movement for Rights and Freedoms DPS, a.k.a. "the Turkish Party". I have blogged about it in one of my earliest posts on Apr. 4, 2006. On Dec. 12, I wrote about Dogan's treacherous role for Bulgarian democracy. The Black List of destroyers of Bulgarian nature defines Dogan as "godfather of the Bulgarian wood mafia responsible for most wildfires in the country (and, hence, also for several deaths of firefighters in the line of duty)" owning "over 300 hotels built semi-legally in or in close vicinity to protected areas".
Bulgaria has an ethnic Turkish minority and also a Bulgarian-speaking Muslim minority. According to Wikipedia, Muslims are now 12.2% of the Bulgarian population and 9.4% of them are ethnic Turks. (We've had until recently some Turkish-speaking Christians, but they have blended with the Bulgarian Christian majority.) Unlike Muslim minorities in other European countries, which are composed mainly of recent Mideast immigrants, Bulgarian Muslim minorities are remnants of the Ottoman era. I have blogged about their origin in my last year's post Convert to Islam, or else.
After Bulgaria was granted independence in 1878, the authorities have made various attempts to re-integrate the Muslim minorities. Most of these attempts were done in an incredibly stupid way, without any respect to the people involved, and were counter-productive in the long run. The approach to the Bulgarian Muslims was especially aggressive. Bulgarian writer Chudomir in one of his stories describes how their names were changed to Christian ones. The main character is a photographer sent to a Muslim village to help the urgent preparation of new identity documents. Unable to cope properly in the short time given to him, he chooses four typical faces - with and without moustache, with and without a beard - and multiplies them for the ID papers of all residents, rebutting their protests that the photos don't look much like them. The story itself is fiction (I hope!), but it is true that the Turkish names of Bulgarian Muslims were repeatedly changed to Bulgarian ones and then allowed to be returned back. I've read (can't cite a source) that there were 7 (!) rounds of such renaming until the Communist regime took the job seriously in the early 1970s. By this time, the early resistance against the Communists had been completely crushed and forgotten, and it seemed that their rule would have no end, so people didn't protest, no matter what the regime was doing.
Encouraged with his "success" with the Bulgarian Muslims, the dictator Todor Zhivkov in 1984 proceeded to change the names also of the ethnic Turks. In the previous years, he had pampered them with a sort of affirmative action, hoping that they would express their gratitude by exporting Communism to Turkey; but they were of course very far from such intentions. So Zhivkov decided not to tolerate The Others any longer, after they weren't serving his purposes. It is very likely that the renaming was a rehearsal for an eventual similar move in the Soviet Union, where the authorities were worried by the population growth and separatist sentiments of Muslims. At any rate, it is unthinkable that a Soviet satelite like Bulgaria would do such a serious move without first receiving a go-ahead by Moscow.
The renaming of Turks was a fiasco. Because they had stayed a little aside from the mainstream political and economic life, their spirit wasn't completely crushed by the regime. So they mounted protests, which were cruelly suppressed. Many civilians were killed (the exact number isn't known to this day). To their credit, the Turks didn't resort to violence. There was only one terrorist group which bombed railway stations and trains themselves, preferring the compartments for mothers with young children. The terrorists were eventually arrested and convicted. It is notable that of the three main group members sentenced to death, two were also members of State Security, the secret service of the Communist regime. This made my mother hypothesize that they had actually been ordered by their employer to plant the bombs, duped with false promises of immunity and then sacrificed. A far-fetched conspiracy theory? Maybe, but this explains well how the group was able to organize its activity so quickly, and also why it was the only Turkish terrorist group. This incident also illustrates how the otherwise isolated Turkish minority had its elite ensnared in the tentacles of the infamous State Security.
In 1989, new protests by ethnic Turks forced the Communist regime to allow them leave the country, which was generally not considered a right of Bulgarian citizens. It is in fact quite possible that the regime itself provoked the protests, wanting to get rid of the Turks. However, here Turkey also had its word heard. It had its Bulgarian population ethnically cleansed long ago (understandably, after these Bulgarians had served as casus belli), but wouldn't accept all Bulgarian Turks, because then it would have no occasion to mess with Bulgarian affairs. About 200 thousands of ethnic Turks emigrated to Turkey in the summer of 1989 before the door closed. The ethnic Bulgarian majority, while looking at the Turks with suspicion and using the situation for its own material benefit (e.g. by buying cheap homes from the emigrants), still didn't show much nationalistic enthusiasm and silently refused to join the dictator's game. This saved Bulgaria from the fate of neighbouring Yugoslavia and weakened the regime, helping its fall in the autumn of 1989.
Ahmed Dogan, a philosophy graduate, tried some political activism in the late 1980s on behalf of his ethnic Turkish people and was jailed. I remember signing a petition for the release of "Medi Doganov" (the Bulgarized version of Dogan's name) in late 1989, without knowing who he was. He was released before the year was over. Unfortunately, he had been recruited by State Security under the alias "Sava". This fact is beyond doubt and Dogan has actually never tried to deny it. I don't know whether the recruitment happened while he was free (and, hence, having the option to refuse) or during his imprisonment. In the latter case, no reasonable person would blame Dogan much. However, recent Bulgarian history has shown that State Security agents, no matter how excusable the circumstances of their recruitment may have been, remain agents for life, continue to serve their masters in one or another way and do immense harm to our fragile nascent democracy.
In late 1989 and early 1990, two important events shaped the emerging Bulgarian multi-party system. The first one was the foundation of the Movement for Rights and Freedoms, or DPS (Bulg. dvizhenie za prava i svobodi) by Dogan and other ethnic Turks, most of them also State Security agents. The second one was the acceptance of proportional representation, rather than a majority one. Fresh from the one-party dictatorship, few Bulgarians knew the plagues of the proportional rep system. As we know now, it usually fails to produce a good majority of votes and, hence, a stable government. Instead, coalitions are made based not on common political goals and principles but solely on the wish to stay in power and the necessity to make some government. These coalitions too often depend on some small party extorting its partners and changing its political bedfellows like a whore. And if the population isn't homogenous, the proportional representation system encourages tribal vote. This was exactly what happened in Bulgaria. Although the major parties tried to lure the minority vote by making concessions to the Turks and including their members in the lists, almost 100% of ethnic Turks and a large percentage of Bulgarian Muslims keep voting for DPS no matter what.
It is difficult to explain why the ethnic Turks invariably vote for DPS even after its harmful role became evident. In my Dec. 12 post, I wrote how Dogan betrayed the first democratic government in the new Bulgarian history. Later, he gave his supports to governments dominated by the Bulgarian Socialist Party (i.e. the recent oppressor of the Turks) and heavily influenced by organized crime. A friend of mine who, unlike me, has lived among ethnic Turks, thinks that they vote for DPS so that "to show their strength to the Bulgarians". I don't think it is a very wise way to show strength; it is akin to showing strength by making a hole in the hold of a ship you are travelling in. The DPS policy has a major contribution to the chronic Bulgarian poverty and I don't see how this poverty could end unless DPS is de-fanged by introduction of majoritarian representation system.
Another reason underlying the pro-DPS vote is the tobacco industry. Our ethnic Turks and Muslims traditionally live in isolated, rather backward regions. In many of them, growing tobacco is the main means of living. The poor quality of our tobacco and the primitive methods used in its growth and processing makes the industry unable to survive without being heavily subsidized. Our authorities, instead of letting it die a natural death and supporting the Muslims integrate into mainstream economy, choose the easy path by continuing the subsidies. And DPS has a major role in it. In fact, it should be expected to stay in the way of the integration of our Turks and Muslims, because if properly integrated, they are likely to stop voting for it.
Yet another reason to vote for DPS is the hope that if not I, the actual voter, then some relation of mine will benefit from the party. While keeping the majority of ethnic Turks and Muslims in poverty and isolation, DPS serves well the minority elite by giving undue protection to ethnic Turkish business and securing positions for Turks in the administration. This of course means that companies owned by Bulgarians (and other minorities) are unfairly driven out of business, Bulgarian government employees are fired to make place for (often less competent) Turks and sinecure positions are created in government agencies especially for Turks. These processes are most evident with regard to natural disasters. Recently, a special Ministry for disaster management policy was founded and given to DPS activist Emel Etem. In English, it is called "Ministry for State Policy for Disasters and Accidents", making journalists joke that it actually works to cause and perpetuate disasters, rather to control them. And this is too true. The Ministry serves mainly to syphone taxpayers' money into Turkish-owned companies that allegedly would do work to prevent similar disasters in the future but actually just take the money and don't do the work. Next time the disaster comes, the same companies receive money again. Besides, too many government positions with key role in disaster control have been given to DPS to provide its incompetent activists with comfortable lives. Unfortunately, while during the Communist era ethnic Turks were known for their hard work and professionalism in various crafts, the DPS activity has made Turkish names synonymous with incompetence and corruption.
However, I don't want to hypothesize extensively about the thoughts and motives of Bulgarian Turks and Muslims to vote for DPS. They are generally silent; they don't speak with us, don't speak to us, don't even speak at us, except by their votes. After reading Muslim blogs for years, I know much more about the mindset of Libyans, Iranians and Egyptians than about our own Turkish compatriots. So I fear that I may write something injust that I would regret later.
Anyway, even if Turks and Muslims want to vote for other parties, it is doubtful that they will still have the opportunity. Inofficial reports say that in Muslim-majority regions, the local DPS authorities have effectively put the secrecy of vote to an end, so Muslims are just forced to vote for DPS (or leave the region). Some even report that DPS forces Bulgarian Christians to vote for it, though I don't know whether it has gone that far. Also, DPS has from the beginning used rogue Bulgarians as activists in an attempt to conceal its tribal nature. A good example is Fidel Beev (note the first name!), DPS Member of Parliament and actual feudal owner of the mountain resort town of Velingrad. He is to appear before court on Jan. 25. He is accused that in 2004 as Mayor of Velingrad ordered the municipality kindergartens to be supplied with fuel by his company Beevi Bros at a higher price in violation of the law (source: Today, in Bulgarian; you can see there a photo of Beev, left).
Besides the ethnic Turks who have remained in Bulgaria, DPS relies also on the votes of those who emigrated to Turkey in 1989 or later and have double citizenship. At election time, buses bring many thousands of these emigrants to Bulgaria to cast their votes. So they have their word on the fate of a country in which they do not live, work, bring up children or pay taxes. To their credit, many of them say that they regard Bulgaria as distant past and wouldn't mess with its politics but are pressed to vote by the Turkish authorities. With its large population and geopolitical importance, Turkey is unfortunately a regional power (translation: a bully state forcing its interests down the throats of its neighbours). And it gives whole-hearted support to Ahmed Dogan and DPS. You European fools who seriously consider letting Turkey join EU, please take notice! Details about the "election tourism" can be read e.g. here.
The moral of Ahmed Dogan is so low that you may step over it without even mentioning it. Every time when he doesn't receive what he wants, he stresses that he guarantees the peace in Bulgaria and threatens with civil war. Unfortunately, Bulgarian politicians give in, although (as I pointed above) our Muslim and Turkish people actually haven't shown any inclination to violence even in their hardest times. After 1989, surviving members of the 1984-85 terrorist group built a memorial to the three executed members. Yes, the same wonderful guys who put bombs on trains, placing them between toddler seats. Dogan resisted all attempts to bring down the monument, saying that it must stay. It was recently destroyed by Bulgarian nationalists; I don't know whether it has been reconstructed. In his personal life, Dogan first married a girl half his age and then abused her, which resulted in a scandalous divorce. This not only didn't harm his political career but he later remarried without problems.
Because of his permanent success, Dogan is often praised by journalists and other commentators as being a "great politician" and "very clever". My opinion is that, while he is indeed intelligent, he owes his success not as much to his intelligence but to occupying in time a good ecological niche. If I have a subscription to unconditional ethnic vote of 10% of the population, plus the support of a neighbouring country, I guess I could also become a great politician!
Boozed by his success and impunity, Dogan in recent years began to make more and more blunders. His advisers try to control the situation by saying after each blunder that Dogan, as a philosopher, expresses deep thoughts that cannot be properly understood by simple-minded people like us. As I blogged on Apr. 4, 2006, he e.g. openly stated that "DPS is surrounded by a ring of companies" (Bulg. obrachi ot firmi). This fact was of course known to everybody in Bulgaria, plus all serious foreign observers, but it is another thing to hear it in plain text from the horse's mouth!
After this autumn's elections, Dogan made another blunder. Defending himself and his party from the allegations of vote buying (used by DPS to supplement the voluntary ethnic vote, the forced vote in majority-minority regions and the "tourist vote" from Turkey), he described vote buying as "a European phenomenon" (Bulg. evropeysko yavlenie). This outraged some Europeans and also the US ambassador. These bad Americans are messing as always!
These elections also marked the first challenge to Ahmed Dogan's authority since 1989. Former DPS Minister of Agriculture Mehmed Dikme applied to be elected as a Mayor in the Municipality of Ardino, where he had broad popular support. However, Dogan showed his force by directing to Ardino the buses with election tourists from Turkey. This way, Dogan's nominee was elected against the wish of the locals. Dikme unsuccessfully appealed the result. Part of the story is covered in English here.
Do you understand now why I put on my rubber gloves when blogging about Ahmed Dogan? Politicians aren't too charming in general, but this person disgusts me. Former rightist Prime Minister Ivan Kostov appropriately called him "the curse of Bulgaria". And I don't see any realistic prospects to have his sinister shadow removed from the Bulgarian political life. Although the recipe is rather simple: introduction of majority rep system, re-inclusion of ethnic Turks and Muslims in the lists of mainstream parties and honest dialogue with the minorities in question. As for the local DPS rule in majority-minority regions, I see no solution other than evacuation from these regions of all Christians, plus all Muslims who pursue their well-being by hard work and competence, rather than by connections, corruption and tribal activism.

Aftermath of the 2007 local elections, part 2: The rightist crisis

This is a sort of a sequel to my Nov. 14 post.
As an anti-Communist and a person unwilling to rely on government for everything, I consider myself a rightist and vote right. Unfortunately, the right part of the political spectrum is in a deep crisis and has been so for years. This is one of the posts I am writing because I "must" write it, not because I enjoy writing it. I am doing it with a heavy heart because it calls grim thoughts about Bulgaria's past and future. To begin with, do you remember the finance minister Plamen Oresharski who during the teachers' strike deliberately protracted the negotiations and called them "village party"? He was at one time in 2003 nominated as a rightist candidate mayor of Sofia. Does this need a comment?
After the one-party Communist rule in Bulgaria ended in 1989, the main rightist political force in Bulgaria has been the Union of the Democratic Forces (Bulg. Sayuz na demokratichnite sili, abbreviated SDS). It did surprisingly good job, considering the fact that it was actually conceived by the Communist Party and the secret services. Most of the time of course SDS has been in opposition. At the parliamentary elections in 1991, it received a little more votes than the Bulgarian Socialist Party and formed a minority government supported by Ahmed Dogan's "Turkish Party" DPS. However, the next summer Pres. Zhelyu Zhelev, who was also from SDS, betrayed his people and called for a campaign to overthrow the government. This campaign was carried out viciously by the media, the trade unions (who organized an endless succession of strikes) and finally by Dogan, who withdrew his support from the government and gave it, as he said himself, "a DPS kick". Prime Minister Filip Dimitrov in late 1992 turned to the Natonal Assembly (the Bulgarian Parliament) for a confidence vote, didn't obtain it and resigned. The media presented it to the public as if Dimitrov had irresponsibly "surrendered the power" himself. Almost nobody broadcasted, heard or remembered Dimitrov's explanation that "you just cannot for more than two months rule a parliamentary republic against the will of the Parliament".
In early 1997, the unprecedented economic crisis created by the Videnov's Socialist government led to widespread riots and midterm elections. They brought to power the second (and so far, last) rightist government in recent Bulgarian history. It had an absolute majority of seats in Parliament to rely upon and did not depend on treacherous allies like Ahmed Dogan. This allowed it to have a full term. I remember it as a reasonably good government. However, it is important to remember that Bulgarians had elected it, as my brother said, "not because of having suddenly become intelligent or freedom-loving but merely because there had remained literally nothing to eat in the country". In other words, Bulgarians dislike good people and sound policies and will vote for them only in rare moments of national disaster. After being rescued from the world of hyperinflation, monthly salaries equivalent to $ 3-4 and bread disappearing from shops, they began to dislike the government. Not that it was perfect, but they disliked its good features and blamed it for them, or for imaginary sins.
The media demonized the government and particularly the Prime Minister Ivan Kostov, leader of SDS. It is strange how people tend to believe what they are told, rather than what they are actually experiencing. This well-known phenomenon underlies commercial advertising, placebo effect and, of course, political propaganda. Showered by every paper and TV channel with assertions how bad the government was, even intelligent people began to talk seriously about a "SDS failure" in governing, without of course explaining what this failure was. President Petar Stoyanov, who was from SDS, betrayed Prime Minister Kostov in a way similar to Pres. Zhelev' betrayal of PM Filip Dimitrov in 1992. When election time approached, voters began to look for some nasty person with quack promises in order to elect him. So in 2001 Simeon Saxe-Coburg-Gotha came out of the blue and won a landslide victory.
Being in opposition isn't very healthy for a political party, at least in Bulgaria. There was a tradition for SDS leaders to resign after losing elections. So Ivan Kostov stepped down and the party leadership was given to Nadezhda Mihaylova, a person with mediocre abilities combined with giant craving for power. In one of my posts about the HIV trial in Libya, I wrote, "Foreign minister in Kostov's government was Nadezhda Mihailova, a lady who did much harm to the Bulgarian democracy (Bulgarian readers know that I don't mean the Libyan case alone). She not only didn't hold to any moral principles, but evidently had too little intellect for the positions she occupied and used this intellect exclusively to enrich her family. Historians will (hopefully) reveal what brought her to the top of Bulgarian politics and kept her there for so long."
As a SDS leader, Mihaylova made too many blunders to list, so I shall mention just the one I find most serious. After priest Stefan Kamberov, supporter of democracy, was beaten to death by two pro-Communist priests in 2002, she took the side of the murderers.
The 2003 local elections were a fiasco for SDS. The party failed to win even in its stronghold, the capital Sofia. According to the tradition, Mihaylova had to resign but she refused. Discontent grew among SDS members and supporters at grass-root level. Activists expelled from the party formed an "association of citizens" called Dialogue. Craftsmen signed an appeal for less government intervention in economy and lower taxes that was published in the Pro & Anti paper. All these people called to Ivan Kostov to leave SDS and to form a new party.
He had no choice but to do it. A new party, Democrats for strong Bulgaria (DSB), was founded. Unfortunately, things went wrong. Ivan Kostov was, and still is, a very strong personality. People like him tend to dominate and not to let other strong personalities around. If such a person is a party leader, he is likely to make the party a leader-type one. That is, even supporters of the party (like me in this case) have difficulties naming distinguished members of the party. Where are the Dialogue people, where are the craftsmen? They have been driven away.
What remained of SDS didn't develop better. Mihaylova clutched to the leader's chair for so long that a journalist and SDS member joked that apparently a NATO operation was needed to remove her. Finally, she resigned. Former President Petar Stoyanov (who had lost the 2001 presidential elections to Georgi Parvanov) took the leadership. And surprisingly, only several months before the local elections Stoyanov was "convinced" to resign and Plamen Yurukov was elected as SDS leader. I know nothing about Yurukov except what I read in The Guerilla's blog. I'll translate almost all of his July 30 post:
"Why SDS has no chance
'I don't remember. When you buy such a thing you immediately forget the price. Pleasure has no prime.' This was the answer of Plamen Yurukov, the new SDS leader, when Express (paper) asked him about the price of his new car Maserati Quattroporte.
In a normal country, such a purchase followed by such a statement means immediate political suicide. In Bulgaria, it means a slow political suicide. In other words, at the next elections SDS will have fewer votes than members."
A commenter wrote, "What's bad in this (answer)? The man has a successful business and has bought himself a nice car." The Guerrilla replied, "If "the man" had answered, 'I have a successful business which is... and the legal profits from it allowed me to buy this car which costs xxxxx leva, then he might have some future as a politician and SDS as a party, but he answered the way he prefered to answer..."
I have nothing to add.
And then, a month before the local elections, DSB and SDS in Sofia formed a coalition and nominated a common candidate mayor. This was good, with one "small" exception - the choice of the candidate.
In the pre-election Oct. 19 post on my Bulgarian blog, I wrote, "I don't truly like any of the candidates. In such a situation you vote for the one who seems the least evil. For Sofia, this is Martin Zaimov. Yes, I know the objections against him. I also don't like his tainted and troubled family history and (as a result) personal biography. I dislike his expensive campaign, his nervous communication style, his magician's posture ("I know everything, I can do everything, I have money for everything"), his desire to be liked by everybody and his refusal to answer unpleasant questions. But for whom (else) to vote?"
There is a rumour that Ivan Kostov was personally responsible for Zaimov's nomination. If this is true, I think Kostov must resign and leave the political landscape for good. I'll even add, as the politically incorrect Bulgarian saying goes, that he deserves a good beating for this.
Why? First, because of Martin Zaimov's origin. He is grandson of Vladimir Zaimov, a general sentenced to death and executed in 1942 for being a Soviet spy - the only Bulgarian general ever convicted of espionage. During the Communist era, Gen. Zaimov was of course regarded as a hero, had an important street and a park in Sofia and other objects named after him. His family members enjoyed privileges. Because in Bulgaria being rightist means first and foremost being anti-Communist, it was a folly to nominate Vladimir Zaimov's grandson as a rightist candidate, especially in Sofia which is an anti-Communist stronghold and where the Zaimovs have lived in front of people's eyes.
Well, you'll say, a person isn't responsible for what his grandfather did. This is a valid point and I tried to make it to my father. But his answer was also valid: "Although such an ancestor isn't your fault, he is a part of your social heritage, and a part that you cannot brush aside. If you are in this position, it is only decent to stay away from politics."
Events that followed proved my father right and me wrong. Martin Zaimov, when asked about his grandfather during the campaign, tried to convince people that the latter actually hadn't been a Soviet spy and his death sentence was a miscarriage of justice. Some "helpful" historians and rightist politicians tried to perpetuate this new version of history, which was perceived by the anti-Communist voters as an additional insult. (Gen. Zaimov's treachery is proven beyond any reasonable doubt. Immediately after his execution, a military ceremony was carried out in the Soviet Union as a tribute to him. The only detail still worth discussion is what was more important for his motivation - his leftist and pro-Russian views or the money he received.)
Martin Zaimov's opponents of course used his mistake well. They not only kept talking about his granddad but used their positions in the Sofia Municipality Council to restore the name of the Vladimir Zaimov park (which had been renamed to Oborishte after 1989). Martin Zaimov was against this change but he lacked solid arguments because he had whitewashed Vladimir Zaimov himself. After all, if the general hadn't really been a traitor, why not name a local landmark after him? Now, the park will carry the traitor's name long after the entire Martin Zaimov's campaign is forgotten!
The family problems don't end with the grandfather but continue into the next generation. Vladimir is the maternal grandfather of Martin. Martin is the son of Vladimir's daughter Klaudia. Then, why does Martin carry the Zaimov family? Maybe in some cultures it is normal to inherit the mother's family but in Bulgaria this indicates troubled family history. Klaudia Zaimova worked in Geneva and met there Martin's father, British journalist Michael Goldsmith. Little is known about this man, Martin and his campaign team avoid talking about him. Martin's Wikipedia page states that "the mother gave her son the well-known Zaimov family". Some inofficial sources, however, say that he used his father's family when this would be beneficial - in some Western and Jewish circles (Goldsmith was a Jew). This is just a rumour but I make a connection with Martin's strange reluctance to show his diplomas - it would be easy to explain if they carry the name of Martin Goldsmith.
Klaudia Zaimova was in Geneva to work for an UN institution. The family was always privileged during the Communist regime. Unfortunately, Martin Zaimov tried to deny this and in his blog said he was a nevazvrashtenets - so were called the people who had left Bulgaria for political reasons and were refusing (and not actually allowed) to return. Martin's British citizenship and family position allowed him to escape the military service mandatory for all non-disabled men of his generation.
I have noticed a long time ago that there are people who bury in secrecy the most basic facts of their life, such as their education and family status, and this is a sure sign that the person doesn't deserve to be trusted. This is quite true for Martin Zaimov, where the uncertainty begins with his name. It continues with his educational degree. He reportedly has studied technology in Sofia and economics in London but refuses to show his diplomas. After former PM Saxe-Coburg-Gotha and other politicians claimed to have degrees they actually hadn't, the Bulgarian voters are understandably reluctant to believe such claims unsupported by documents. I would also add that a person born in Geneva to a Bulgarian and a British parent has the right to enroll as a foreign student in any university in the world, so even if he has graduated, his diploma wouldn't weigh as much as that of the other graduates of the same university. Indeed, he did a good job as a head of the currency board introduced in 1997.
Possibly the most unclear aspect of Zaimov's life is his family status. You can search and compile different sources for a day and you'll still be unable to say how many children Zaimov has from how many women and whether he has ever been married to any of the mothers.
During the election campaign, Zaimov displayed nervousness and communication problems that seemed to be partly inherent to his personality and partly due to the situation - after being pampered and cushioned for all his life, now he was for the first time on his own. This was in stark contrast with the confident stance of his rival Boyko Borisov who has many sins but also the merit of a man building his success himself. Zaimov also made the mistake that Petar Stoyanov had made before him - an attempt to appeal to everybody. He even refused to state what his sexual orientation is, possibly fearing that homosexuals would dislike him if he stresses on his heterosexuality.
The results of Zaimov's nomination were inevitable and disastrous. The rightist Bulgarian voters don't like communist nomenklatura offspring, don't like privileged boys who escape the Army, don't like fathers refusing to marry their children's mothers and don't want to be ruled by people coming from abroad. I was an aide to a strongly anti-Communist disabled voter. He disliked Borisov but voted for him, saying that it was unthinkable for a person with his anti-Communist views and background to vote for Zaimov. This seems to have been the case with many. Borisov received 53% of votes, Zaimov only 18% and a friend of mine (who, like me, had voted for Zaimov) told me that she liked the result because she expected even a worse one! After losing the elections, Zaimov predictably failed to meet his defeat with dignity.
I am afraid that this post became unfair to Zaimov. Most likely he didn't push himself to be a candidate mayor but was convinced by rightist politicians such as Kostov. And if not anything else, we must acknowledge Zaimov's courage to enter and fight a lost battle. I wrote so extensively about (against) him in order to attack not him but the politicians who nominated him. A commenter wrote on my above cited post that "Martin is the greatest disgrace of the rightists". Sadly, this is true.
Indeed, the political stagnation in Bulgaria led to a severe shortage of people fit to be nominated. As Marfa wrote, "campaign teams began literally scraping the bottom of the marsh, hoping to retrieve some not quite unknown life form." And perhaps Martin Zaimov was chosen because of his expertise in finance. After all, some economic and governing expertise is necessary for the mayor of a capital city populated by 1.5 million. Unfortunately, 18 years after democracy was restored, in many fields we still lack experts with non-Communist background!
But more important than expertise is electability. Once elected, a mayor could hire some experts, while an expert disliked by the voters will never make it to the position and so will not have a chance to use his expertise. Perhaps the biggest problem of our rightist politicians is their disrespect to the voters. You cannot neglect and scorn the voters in a democracy without being severely punished by them.
How to save the vital right part of the political spectrum? I am not the only one who thinks that a new party must formed by the few decent current rightist politicians such as the SDS member of Parliament Martin Dimitrov. This party should be open to all citizens with rightist views who now stay aside, alienated and often expelled by the two current parties. Will it come to life? I am pessimistic. In Bulgarian politics, what should happen rarely happens in reality.

Prison art

In the late 1940's, as the Communist regime was tightening its grip on Bulgaria, my father was among those who opposed it. He became member of a secret anti-communist organization. Unfortunately, the founder and leader of the group was a provocator. He lured the others and then gave them up to the authorities, quite as O'Brien did with Winston Smith in Orwell's 1984. They served prison time, 4 years for my father. While awaiting the trial, they were placed in the Sofia Central Prison.
Several days ago, my father remembered the prison church. Until 1950, priests in magnificent Orthodox vestments were allowed to read sermons there. The church was beautifully decorated. Inmates serving sentences in the first half of the 20th century had painted murals on the walls. They were excellent, although the prisoners were amateur artists. My father remembers, in particular, a Christ walking on water painted by Anton Prudkin. This interesting person was naturally drawn to the sea theme because he was a sailor. He was a terrorist and Russian agent and this was why he was jailed from 1925 to 1936 and later executed in 1942. However, he was not entirely evil. In 1939, he was captain of a ship that sailed 3 times between Bulgaria and Palestine, bringing there more than 2000 Jewish refugees.
In 1950, the religious freedom in the Sofia Central Prison was put to an end. The church walls were whitewashed with lime. (The Bulgarian reader will remember the moment in Ivaylo Petrov's novel Wolfhunt where the Communists led by Stoyan Kralev burn the icons of the village church.)
What is remarkable, the prison authorities themselves were clearly reluctant to destroy the murals. The chief jailer in front of some inmates scratched the newly formed lime layer with his fingernail and said, "Oh there is no problem. It will be easily scraped away." (The Communist regime often abolished the acts of folly it had ordered itself, sometimes quite shortly after imposing them.)
However, in this case the order was not cancelled. My father was transfered to another prison and had no more first-hand information, but other former inmates later told him that the lime layer had become tight and impossible to remove. My father wasn't surprised because he knew that lime becomes more and more stable with time. As he explained to me, this happens because calcium oxide takes up carbon dioxide from the air and turns into calcium carbonate.
At one moment, the former church reportedly became room for executions.
What has been its fate in recent years? I have no idea but I think that experts in chemistry and restoration must know a way to remove even an old, tight lime cover without much damage to the underlying paintings. But more than half a century later, does the prison personnel include even one employee who knows about the murals? And would anybody care?
There is little time to restore the prison art and capture the images. The municipal authorities of Sofia have scheduled the Central Prison building for demolition.

Anti-Bulgarian bias of historian Alan Kramer and the New York Times

The Nov. 4 issue of the New York Times published the book review Extermination States by S. S. Montefiore. It is about the book Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War by Alan Kramer (Oxford University Press).
Below is a quote from Montefiore's article:
"In some ways, the war against Serbia had been fought already in the two Balkan wars of 1912-13, caused by the nationalist goals of the region’s new states... The massacre of tens of thousands of civilians in Macedonia and Thrace by the Bulgarians was “not merely ... a short-term byproduct of war” but a “part of a longer-term project of nation-state construction.” Meanwhile, in crushing Serbia, Austria and Germany killed 250,000 soldiers and 300,000 civilians out of 3.1 million. No combatant faced higher per capita losses."
I'll let to historians to disprove these statements (though I bet that their contra-arguments will not be published by the New York Times or the Oxford University Press). Let me, as a lay person, add just a common-sense remark.
Nations, similarly to individuals, usually try to convince themselves and others that they do what is right while actually doing what they consider to be in their best interests. After World War I, the winners took from Bulgaria land populated by Bulgarians and gave it to Serbia. So portraying the Bulgarians as villains and the Serbs as cute innocent victims would serve well to justify this act.
But, guys, what year is now? Nearly a century has passed after these events. Isn't it already OK to write things nearer to the truth?
I am happy that I am working in the field of natural and not social sciences.
As for the New York Times, its anti-Bulgarian bias is no news. Let's remember the 2003 article Bush's Warsaw War Pact by Maureen Dowd, a gossiper unfortunately misled by somebody to think that she is a journalist:
"In diplomatic circles, our new allies from Eastern Europe are dryly referred to as ''Bush's Warsaw Pact.'' As one Soviet expert put it, ''Bulgaria used to be Russia's lapdog. Now it's America's lapdog.'' The Bulgarians were such sycophants to Russia that in the 60's they proposed becoming the 16th republic of the Soviet Union. Mr. Bush will not be the only one having trouble with the Bulgarian prime minister's name. We all will. In some press reports it's spelled Simeon Saxcoburggotski, and in others Simeon Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. The tall, balding, bearded prime minister was formerly King Simeon II, a deposed child czar. He is a distant relative of Prince Albert, Queen Victoria's consort, but not Count Dracula. That's our other new best friend, Romania. Is this a good trade, the French for the Bulgarians? Sketchy facts about Bulgaria rattle around: It has a town called Plovdiv; it wants to become big in the skiing industry; its secret service stabbed an exiled dissident writer in London with a poison-tipped umbrella -- a ricin-tipped umbrella, in fact; its weight-lifting team was expelled from the Olympics in a drug scandal in 2000; it sent agents to kill the pope... In ''Casablanca'' there was the Bulgarian girl who offered herself to Claude Rains to get plane tickets."
As you see, this so-called author blames Bulgarians not only for having been sacrificed to the Soviet Union after World War II but also for the way they are portrayed in old movies. This reminds me of primitive cultures where you can be held responsible for what you have done in somebody's dream.
UPDATE: People who had read Kramer's book told me that it described events in a more balanced way. Mentioning the "tens of thousands of civilians" allegedly massacred by Bulgarian troops, the author made it clear that this was alleged by Greeks and not confirmed by any independent source. It was Montefiore who, in his review, made Bulgaria the chief villain. It seems to me that, as long as we are a US ally and a Coalition member, we have a subscription for bashing by The New York Times!