I send out a periodic newsletter. You can subscribe in the box in the right-hand column. I will be updating this list as I add the latest interviews from my four trips to the region.

Milan Antonijevic, Human Rights in Serbia

Sonja Beserko, Serbia’s Future: Back to the Past?

Irfan Besirovic, Becoming Erased

Jelena Bojovic, Courting Capital

Philip Bokov, A Tale of Two Reforms

Luchezar Boyadjiev, Curating the Curators

Daniel Bucan, Croatia on the Brink

Oleg Chulev, The Same Mistake as Solidarity

Kasim Dal, Challenging the Movement

Snezhana Dimitrova, The Perpetual Crisis

Miroslav Durmov, Inside the Movement

Iskar Enev, Bulgaria’s Political Future

Branko Franceschi, High Times in Yugoslavia

Daria Gajic, Finding a Normal Path in Serbia

Vihra Gancheva, The Bulgarian Turn

Pavel Gantar, Punks and Professors

Rayna Gavrilova, Losing My Illusions

Tin Gazivoda, Defending the Underdogs

Yonko Grozev, Religious Freedom in Bulgaria

Tom Harrison, Regretting the Region’s Right Turn

Dusan Jordovic, Serbia’s Truth-O-Meter

Violeta Jovanovic, Courting Capital

Petya Kabakchieva, Remembering the Calm Life

Vasil Kadrinov, The Politics of Memory

Krassimir Kanev, Human Rights in Bulgaria

Anton Karagiosov, The Ghettos of Eastern Europe

Biljana Kasic, Staying Critical

Tchetin Kazak, Representing the Movement

Vihar Krastev, Escape from Ignorance and Chalga

Andreja Kuluncic, The Artist as Bullhorn

Deyan Kyuranov, The Regime Changer

Joanne Landy, Regretting the Region’s Right Turn

Marin Lessenski, Playing Catch Up

Sonja Licht, The Oracle of Belgrade

Konstantin Markov, Rocking the Regime

Srdjan Majstorovic, Serbia’s Strategic Ambiguity and EU Integration

Georgi Medarov, Bulgaria’s New Left

Maria Metodieva, The Persistence of Discrimination

Mariana Milosheva-Krushe, Organizing the Public

Nevena Milosheva-Krushe, Bulgaria: The Next Generation

Bojana Milosevic, Serbia’s Truth-O-Meter

Ognyan Minchev, Where Bulgaria Went Wrong

Maya Mircheva, The Pinnacle of Pessimism

Irina Nedeva, Voice to the Voiceless

Stefan Popov, Taming the Wild East

Dragoslav Popovic, Speaking Openly in Serbia

Zarko Puhovski, Democracy Is Not Enough

Vukosava Crnjanski Sabovic, Serbia’s Truth-O-Meter

Neza Kogovsek Salamon, Restoring the Erased

Milena Dragicevic Sesic, Life under Sanctions

Volen Siderov, The World According to Ataka

Daniel Srb, Croatia’s Unpopulist Party

Krassen Stanchev, The Green Marketeer

Orhan Tahir, The Failure of Funding Roma Integration

Yanina Taneva, The Ideas Factory

Vojko Volk, Reconnecting the Balkans

Danilo Vukovic, Two Cheers for Government

Roumen Yanovski, One Step Forward and…

Aleksandar Zograf, Lucid Dreaming in Pancevo

Jelka Zorn, Erased and Forgotten

Modern ghettos are reserved for immigrants, marginalized minorities, and the poor. In Eastern Europe, these ghettos are predominantly populated by Roma. The modern ghettos are the legacy of both Communism and capitalism. The Communism governments conducted campaigns to settle Roma in cities and provide jobs in industry. During the transition to capitalism, the jobs disappeared, social stigmatization increased, and the gulf widened between the Roma and non-Roma populations.

The experience of today’s ghettos has many echoes with the past. Consider for example the Stolipinovo neighborhood in Plovdiv, Bulgaria’s second largest city. Last September, I met with Anton Karagiosov, of the Foundation for Regional Development ROMA. The story he told me could have come directly out of the Middle Ages.

“In the Stolipinovo neighborhood and in other Roma neighborhoods, we are forced to build vertically,” he told me. “We will soon explode because of lack of space. There are 50,000 of us only in the Stolipinovo neighborhood.”

The population of the neighborhood has increased significantly even in the five years since we last talked. Karagiosov recently won election as a municipal counselor in Plovdiv. I could sense his frustration at being closer to power and yet not being able to solve this housing crisis.  “I can say that the government has no strategy to resolve the housing issue,” he continued. “It’s a time bomb, and in three years it will explode. The neighborhoods are so densely populated with very poor infrastructure. I don’t know how this can be resolved at all. We’ve had fights within families: fathers, sons, brothers all fighting just for a piece of land.”

Over coffee in Plovdiv, we talked about why there are no strong Roma political parties, the role of education, and the stagnation of civil society.

The Interview

The fist three questions are quantitative questions. When you look back to 1989 and all that has changed in this country until today, how would you evaluate the changes on a scale from 1 to 10, with 1 being most disappointed and 10 being most satisfied?

Five. A lot of good things happened, but many things also happened that are not good for our people. The good thing is that now we have democracy and we are freer. The bad thing is that democracy brought unemployment, and this is especially true for the Roma minority. A lot of state-owned companies collapsed; others were privatized or closed down. And there has also been the economic downturn internationally, and the Roma have been the most severely affected by that.

Remember: most Roma do not own their places of living. And the inability for large numbers of Roma to find jobs here in their own country has forced them to emigrate, to look for a better life in France, in Belgium, in the Netherlands, in Greece. This is why my score is 5, because there are good things but other things that are not so good.

The same scale and the same period of time: your own personal life from 1989 until today.

I am very satisfied that I managed to set up a Roma organization, a very strong one, and this has changed my personal life substantially. I have had an opportunity to visit several great countries, including the United States, England, the Netherlands, Italy. More importantly, through this Roma civil organization, I’ve had the opportunity to implement various projects related to improving the lives of the Roma people. So 6 or 7 is my score here.

Finally, when you look into the near future, the next couple of years, what is your feeling about where Bulgaria will be? Scale from 1 to 10, with 1 being most pessimistic and 10 being most optimistic.

These are challenging questions! Having in mind the economic crisis, and the current situation in Bulgaria, it’s not a very bright future ahead of us. The situation is quite dire not only for the Roma but for Bulgarians as well. Three or four is my score here.

Why do you feel more pessimistic today than when we talked five years ago?

Five years ago we were more advanced in terms of improving the life of the Roma people. But now, stagnation, the economic crisis, the political struggle and rivalry that we had has set us back by 10 years – even though Bulgaria is an EU member. There are more serious policies in place for the Roma, but they are more difficult to develop somehow.

Do you remember where you were when you heard about the fall of the Berlin Wall and whether you thought about its impact on Bulgaria?

I remember. I was working at that time in a company and we discussed this piece of news, the collapse of communism. So this is how it all started, with the Berlin Wall, with Lech Walesa in Poland, and then it came to Bulgaria. The fall of socialism here started with an attempt by some of the followers of Todor Zhivkov to take things into their own hands. But democracy was gaining strength, and I remember that most of civil society desired or aimed for democracy. Everybody in Bulgaria wanted democracy, because we thought that a democratic society would mean freedom.

However, 20 years on, a good part of this society has been disappointed. A lot of things happened. There was the privatization of the state and the enterprises. The rich became richer. The factories that made it possible for the socially disadvantaged and the illiterate to have jobs are no longer there. When I discuss these things with Roma, they tend to be nostalgic about those times, because these were the times when they had jobs, they had the opportunity to work, and they were happier. And if they were working, they had money. They had less money, but they felt freer. This is why a lot of people pine after those days, because right now the situation is not very good. There may be a time when it will improve, but it hasn’t arrived yet.

The crisis is severe in Bulgaria, and it is even more severe for the Roma community, because the Roma have no land, no property. A lot of them are not educated and lack qualifications. They can’t start up their own businesses. They’re not competitive in the labor market. The Roma that used to have jobs and mortgages from banks are no longer paying back this money. So there are now a lot of bad debts, and this is a serious problem. A lot of people are concerned that they might even lose their lives over this.

When you were working in the company in 1989, do you remember what the reactions of your fellow workers were to the fall of the Berlin Wall?

I remember that we discussed the events every morning. We started each morning with these discussions. We read newspapers, we listened to the news on the radio, and we were filled with hope that communism was over, freedom was arriving, and democracy would be here shortly. We were all expecting better lives ahead of us.

Do you remember a point when your hope turned into disappointment?

Personally, I managed to adapt. I established one of the first Roma civil NGOs, and my life was very busy and full of exciting events. I wanted to draft good policies to improve the lives of the Roma people through employment, through education, through healthcare, through the resolution of social issues. This is what I’ve been doing for 20 years now.

Civil society used to be more active. There was a point in time when civil society started stagnating as well. The most serious and best-organized ones remained. But a lot of organizations could not sustain the struggle.

Was there a point when you became disappointed with how the political parties were addressing Roma issues?

It wasn’t just me. Most of the Roma population used to think that with democracy there would be freedom for everyone, better lives for everybody. But a few years later, they realized that this democracy was not meant for them. The first ones to lose their jobs were the Roma. The large companies where thousands of Roma people used to work— meat-processing companies, tobacco companies—were closed down. So the unemployment rate is 90% for Roma. There are families in which nobody works, neither of the parents. This is why a lot of them are living in France, in Germany. Some succeed there, but most of them come back.

So, disappointment overshadows democracy. I suppose democracy is a better social order for more affluent countries, for more affluent people. Those that used to own factories or land or property became only richer. But those who didn’t have such opportunities are left with their disappointment.

I want to jump to the current situation now and ask first about education and the attempts to desegregate the Bulgarian school system.

For eight consecutive years we’ve been working on a pilot program for the desegregation of Roma children through education. In over 10 cities, including Plovdiv, for the eighth consecutive year we’ve been working on this project. We take 200 children from the Roma neighborhood of Stolipinovo, and we put them in five schools scattered around Plovdiv. The funding comes mainly from the Roma Education Fund of Budapest. This pilot project is one of the best of its kind.

Roma children should not be segregated. They should be integrated into the mainstream schools. With the solid support of the parents, of the grandparents, children will receive better education. Through better education and opportunities, Roma children can change their lives.

The good experience that we gained through this pilot project should be converted into a government policy. The government should take over the integration process of the Roma children. However, the government has not yet become involved in the process. And financing organizations are more limited in number. We’re continuing to take 200 children again every year. But our colleagues from other cities do not have financing and the process is put on hold. And this is very bad. This process should continue for at least 5 to 10 years. The National Roma Integration Strategy is in place in the EU, and a lot of money is expected to pour in to improve the lives of the Roma. But it all depends on the governments that will be in power in the Balkan countries.

I understand that the current government in Bulgaria is not interested in the desegregation program.

There is a national council on the integration of minorities, which adopts good policies. But they’re hard to enforce. At this stage we rely on the operational programs of the EU. But they involve very cumbersome procedures and not every Roma organization can apply for funding through these programs.

When we talked five years ago, Ataka seemed to be much stronger than today. Politically it seems that Ataka has lost its support. But do you think that the sentiments behind Ataka are still strong? Does this nationalist, or xenophobic, or racist sentiment in the society remains as high today?

I think that the nationalist sentiment in Ataka is still going strong, and not only within Ataka. There is also another organization VMRO—the Macedonian Liberation Organization. They blame everything on the Gypsies and the Turks. There is still a lot of racism hidden in Bulgarian society.

When we talked five years ago, we talked a bit about Roma political parties. And there were several at the time. Do you think that the political situation in terms of Roma parties or Roma representation has improved?

No, not really. On the contrary, they have disappeared. Several years ago, there was a boost for setting up and developing Roma political organizations. But then afterwards they shrank and became the satellites of the larger political parties. At this stage there is no independent Roma political party. The various national Roma leaders have coalitions with different political parties, mainly with the Bulgarian Socialist Party or with the ruling party. There is no unity among Roma.

And what do you think are the principle reasons why there hasn’t been unity?

That’s a difficult one. I don’t know. There used to be a serious organization six or seven years ago. This was the party of so-called King Kiro. He invested a lot of money in it, and a lot of Roma mayors and counselors were elected. But later, this disintegrated too, and it’s now out of the picture.

There are about 10 Roma parties, but we find it hard to unite. I can’t explain why. Everybody wants to be a leader. And the Roma parties usually join coalitions with the larger political parties. It requires a lot of money to set up a serious political organization, and this hasn’t happened so far.

When I talk to people about the best way of improving the lives of Roma, people have given me three different answers: 1) good jobs; 2) political power; and 3) education. If you had to choose one of those three, which would you choose?

I would go for education, although they are related. We can’t achieve our goals without political will. And the more educated people who are among our ranks, the more development we will achieve — and the policies will become better too.

Here in Plovdiv, have you seen concrete improvements in Roma neighborhoods—in terms of electricity, in terms of roads, buildings, public services?

This is an interesting question. Five or six years ago when we met, I spoke about the difficult problem with the electricity. Now I can say that for the last three years we are no longer facing this problem. The Austrian company EVN set up electricity distribution, eliminating this problem. And now we rank among the first in terms of payment of electricity bills. This is one of the best things to happen in the Roma neighborhoods.

However, in terms of infrastructure development, it remains poor. So, in the Stolipinovo neighborhood and in other Roma neighborhoods, we are forced to build vertically. We will soon explode because of lack of space. There are 50,000 of us only in the Stolipinovo neighborhood.

I recently won election as a municipal counselor in Plovdiv. And I can say that the government has no strategy to resolve the housing issue. It’s a time bomb, and in three years it will explode. The neighborhoods are so densely populated with very poor infrastructure. I don’t know how this can be resolved at all. We’ve had fights within families: fathers, sons, brothers all fighting just for a piece of land.

Have there been any proposals?

At the national level, there is a plan adopted on resolving this issue. But there is no action plan, and nothing is happening. We are talking about a lot of money, and we need political will. Somebody should make a decision, and it’s something to be decided by the government. Stolipinovo alone has a population of 50,000 Roma, and there are three more neighborhoods: about 80,000 Roma living around Plovdiv.

At a municipal level, have you seen other, non-Roma neighborhoods in Plovdiv develop in a good way, because money is available?

Yes. Things are happening in those neighborhoods.

Is it frustrating to see movement in other neighborhoods?

Yes, I am disappointed. Back in socialist times these ghettos were set up without any plans, without any regulation. Now we see the results of that policy: neighborhoods without any plan for territorial development, without legal permits for construction.

As I travel around Bulgaria I see signs from the European Union on the highways, on the newly renovated opera house in Varna. Why can’t the EU work on the areas that need the most assistance?

There is a national plan, as I said, on improving Roma housing and making them legal. The European Union provides 9 or 10 million Euro. It has selected several small municipalities and, in two of them, built 20 houses just as an example. But this is not the solution. The government should have an action plan to implement. It requires a lot of money, but most of all it requires political will.

As a municipal counselor, could you go directly to the EU with a proposal?

Yes, that’s possible. I haven’t done it. I need support from experts in the field, because this is a serious business and I’m not an expert. I’ve only been in office for one year now.

And the term is for how long? Four years?

Yes.

Are you enjoying it?

Yes. I’m very active, and I think my place is there, in this small parliament. There are three of us representing the Movement for Rights and Freedoms, out of the 51.

The Movement for Right and Freedoms was set up to represent the rights and freedoms of everybody, but it has made its reputation in some sense working with ethnic Turks. Do you think the Movement has evolved to represent Roma in a better way?

Yes, over the past several years, they’ve definitely opened up to Roma. Definitely. A lot of Roma are Muslim believers, and they have been attracted. I’m a Gypsy, but I became a counselor representing MRF.

I don’t really know anything about the functions of municipal government. How many hours a week are you expected to work on this?    

Once a fortnight, all day. So, twice a month.

It’s a big responsibility, but it’s not that much time.

Yes, everything about Plovdiv is decided at this venue.

When you think about the situation of Roma here in Plovdiv, compared to Roma in other cities and Roma in the countryside, do you think that the situation here for Roma is relatively good?

No. The problems are similar. Smaller municipalities, with a smaller concentration of Roma population, are doing better. For example in Kavarna, there are 4,500 Roma, and the mayor is making new houses, good streets. But there are only 4,500 Roma there, and there are 50,000 of us in Stolipinovo in Plovdiv. Here, we have no territory available: that’s the problem. Stolipinovo is one of the most densely populated neighborhoods not only in Bulgaria, but in the Balkans as well.

When you think about the best tactics for improving the situation of Roma, which do you think is better: confrontation through demonstrations and boycotts or consultation through legislation and work with community organizations?

Consultations and public debate are the ways to find the best solution.

No confrontations at all?

I’m convinced that if consultations take place and if there is political will to resolve the issue with the Gypsies, there will be a way out of the problem. We found a solution to the issue of electricity bills. When there is a will, when there is debate also, there is a way. Conflict will only create more trouble. And we should have more dialogues within the Roma minority, and the government should have a dialogue with Roma leaders.

Racism in Bulgarian society is pretty deep, just like racism in U.S. society is very deep. And even though we had a successful civil rights movement, and we currently have a Black president, we still have racism. My question for you is, what do you think it will take to change the minds of non-Roma Bulgarians?

I very often listen to the nationalist leaders, and they keep saying, “The Gypsies should study. The Gypsies should have good education. The Gypsies should start paying taxes just like Bulgarians.” I think that if there are more educated people among our ranks that are normal, law-abiding citizens who follow what the constitution says, we would be better accepted. I have three sons, three daughters-in-law, and they have two children, so they are modern people. They are modern citizens of Bulgaria, and they live well. And I think that they will be better accepted by the Bulgarian community.

That’s a very interesting response, but you actually haven’t asked non-Roma Bulgarians to change anything at all.

If we act normally, Bulgarians will see us as their equals, but it we violate the law…Unfortunately, a lot of us do that and of course they are marginalized. And we suffer because of them too. We should work harder and longer to change the mentality of one or two generations of our people. And then we will deserve the respect that we desire.

My personal observation is that we are changing, but very slowly, and this whole process is full of difficulties. I’m 56 years old. When I was young, 45 or 50 years ago, we lived differently. I clearly remember the houses. We all used to share one room. We slept on the floor. Our domestic life was different. We were marginalized to a great extent.

Now, 40 years later, I’m on equal terms with Bulgarians. My family, we have a house. We have a bathroom. We have several rooms. We have bedrooms. The change is coming, but it’s very slow and it’s very difficult.

Plovdiv, September 30, 2012

Interview (2007)

ON THE WORK OF HIS ORGANIZATION

I come from Plovdiv. It has the biggest, compact quarter of Roma population. There are 40,000 Roma who live in this quarter. I was a leader of one of the Roma NGOs for more than 10 years. We worked mostly on social programs: labor employment, a second chance program for adults, some projects related to legal defense. And now we’re working on the desegregation of Roma children. Our school integration involves 10 cities, and is based on the American model.

ON GOVERNMENT POLICY TOWARD ROMA

Before 1989, the government carried out a policy of enclosure. Others made decisions on how Roma should live. These were decisions that Roma themselves should have been making. Over these many years, the government of Bulgaria pursued a policy of pushing Roma into towns without any infrastructure, without plumbing or sanitation. Now this problem is exploding.

The democracy period after 1989, there was an opportunity for Roma to wake up from a very deep sleep. We created the first organizations with Roma leaders. Between 1992 and 1994, Roma in the countryside began to wake up. This was a period of self-organization. We established parties. We made contacts with the executive branches of the country. We created the first Roma organization in 1992. In 15 years, we have taken several steps forward. The Soros Foundation really did a lot for Roma. Before 1989, it was not possible to speak of a Roma intelligentsia. The American University was a school where it was possible to develop the Roma intelligentsia. Over 500 Roma students with high education have since graduated: lawyers, teachers, journalists, politicians.

This is a new time for us to participate in society. There have been many European programs for the development of Roma civil society. They have financed individual projects related to Roma issues. We created a national council for the integration of ethnic issues. On the basis of this council, over 30 Roma NGOs developed a national program for the integration of Roma into Bulgarian society. Part of this program involved providing land to those Roma who had previously been without property. Before 1989, Roma mostly worked for collective farms as hired hands. So, based on the decision of the national assembly, any person without land could apply for such land.

Another step was the experience of Roma organizations in the process of integration into education. In the past seven or eight years, Roma children who had previously gone to schools on the outskirts have begun attend schools in the central district. Young Roma parents want their children to study in those schools. They want their children to have better education, and the opportunity to go on to higher education. This is a radical change from the situation before 1989. So, in the last 15 years, Roma organizations in particular demonstrated to the Bulgarian government how Roma issues can be resolved.

ON THE ATAKA PARTY

To me, the appearance of the Ataka party is not so much a reaction to Roma but a reaction to the Turkish party. The phenomenon of a very nationalistic party leads to the creation of dangerous tensions. Roma parents are afraid to allow their grandchildren to go to school downtown. Over the last several months there have been skinhead assaults. Although Ataka is provoked more by the Turkish party, it has led to the overall aggravation of ethnic tensions.

It is true that our fellow citizens with a lower sense of culture and in a difficult economic situation commit criminal acts. This happens with other communities, too. Yet somehow, what happens with our community attracts more publicity. This negative publicity feeds hatred of the Roma. Over the last several years, though, Roma have been mostly accepted as equals.

Also, for the past several years, political parties have been in the habit of abusing the Roma. In one example, Roma were not paying for their electricity, and some political parties took to saying, “Vote for us and you don’t have to pay for electricity.” This created resentment in Bulgarian society that in turn has emboldened parties like Ataka. Because we didn’t have the legal infrastructure, because our houses are not legitimate, nobody was checking how much electricity was consumed. This was a huge problem. Thank God that in the last couple months, a company has taken charge of electricity distribution. It is changing the electricity lines and the electricity meters, so now people know how to keep track of the service and pay for it. It’s not true that we didn’t want to pay for electricity. It was simply that we were being used in some kind of political game.

We feel that Bulgaria is our motherland. We want to develop here, and contribute to Bulgaria to the best that we can. Yet as Ataka becomes a nationwide phenomenon, Roma must think twice before going out in public and doing normal things. Ataka simply slows down the integration of Roma into Bulgarian society.

ON RACISM

In Plovdiv, at the beginning of the year, there was an outbreak of Hepatitis A. Parents of Bulgarian students in some of the schools protested. They wanted to remove Roma students from the schools. Ataka also incited the parents and created serious tensions. Fortunately, due to our experience in our local municipality and with the health authorities, we managed to overcome this problem, and children were not prevented from attending school.

ON EUROPE

As Bulgarian citizens, we already feel like European citizens. Since 1989, we have tried to become more educated, more European. Little by little we sometimes forget typical Roma things. This is a fact. For instance, I have six grandchildren. After they are two-and-a-half, they attend kindergarten. They practically don’t speak Roma any more. But there are things that we cannot forget, such as our customs. We closely follow our Roma holidays, such as the New Year. There is also an important holiday for Roma in April. Then there is the Roma family culture, the respect of the children. There is the traditional dress, the traditional music. We don’t live in huts any more. We live in separate rooms. Forty years ago when I was growing up, there were only two taps in our whole neighborhood. We slept on carpets made of cane and small twigs. Many things like that are now history. But now we have other possibilities.

ON INTEGRATION

At the beginning of school integration program we encountered many difficulties. We are in our third year now in Stara Zagora. We are in our sixth year in Plovdiv. We are now starting in Sliven and Padzernik. At this moment, the discrimination that exists is more racial than economic. Bulgarians cannot easily accept that Roma are equal. Here’s an example. When my children began to go to school, they were the only Roma. I had to go to the public secretary to get permission. Over time, more and more Roma children enrolled in this school. If you go there today, there is not one Bulgarian kid there. When they saw too many Roma kids, the Bulgarians transferred their kids to another school. Now with our desegregation program, there are one or two Roma in the classes. In 20 years, we will see the fruits.

The architecture of Kosice’s many cities now forms one harmonious, unified whole. But Kosice contains multiple cities in another, more ominous sense.

Across from Jakab’s Palace, a faux-Gothic castle built in 1899 that also briefly served as the residence of Czechoslovak president Eduard Benes, both locals and tourists sit on the patio of a cafe and drink espresso. There are many such gathering places in Kosice. In the café society of democratic, polyglot Central Europe, spirited discussions take place in Slovak, Czech, Hungarian, English, and many other languages.

Outside the Palace itself, several Roma are having their own meeting. The Gypsies lean against the wall of the building or squat on their haunches. Roma constitute about 6.5 percent of the Slovak population: slightly more than 350,000 people. Kosice has the largest Roma population in Slovakia, nearly 23,000, which is also nearly 20 percent of the district’s population. Although the street that separates the café from the grounds of the Palace is very narrow, there is no commerce between the coffee-drinkers and the group of Roma.

Throughout much of Central Europe, there are two cities: for the Roma and for the non-Roma. These cities rarely intersect. During the Communist era, not only did the vast majority of Roma work, as you might expect in a system that espoused full employment. They also interacted at the factories, the farming collectives, the workplace cafeterias, and the bars after work. Today the vast majority of Roma are unemployed. The unemployment for Slovakia as a whole is about 13 percent. In some parts of eastern Slovakia, around Kosice, the unemployment rate for Roma rises to about 80 percent.

I recently travelled to a village 24 kilometers outside of Kosice. More than 90 percent of the residents of Kecerovce are Roma. There’s not much for the several thousand residents of the town to do, other than walk the streets, visit one of the two humble pubs, or shop at the small grocery store.

The Roma social worker in Kecerovce told me that there are virtually no opportunities of the Roma in this countryside village to interact with non-Roma. Some of the better students will eventually make it to Kosice. Thanks to a project funded by outside donors, some Roma youth from Kecerovce have met with non-Roma in both Slovakia and Hungary to participate in trainings, conduct formal debates, and just hang out. Inspired by this project and with the help of the municipality, several young Roma of Kecerovce created a youth center with a book-filled library, a computer, and many after-school activities. The center helps Roma from the village connect with the outside world.

But in Slovakia, as in other parts of the region, this is the exception. In fact, the trend is heading in the other direction. More and more Roma, forced out of the cities by the high price of rent, end up in villages like Kecerovce, in makeshift accommodations and overcrowded houses.

Few non-Roma venture out to these Roma outposts in the countryside, which are becoming more and more homogeneous. Meanwhile, in the big cities like Kosice, non-Roma wander around eating ice cream and viewing the splendors of the Old Town without really ever seeing the Roma. If by chance they do catch sight of Roma, such as the group outside Jakab’s Palace, they quickly look away. The level of anti-Roma sentiment, already high, continues to rise in many countries in the region.

In the novel The City and the City, China Mieville describes two cities, Beszel and Ul Qoma, which occupy the same space in some corner of Central Europe or perhaps the Balkans. The cities occupy a complex checkerboard in which the inhabitants of Beszel can only walk on the black squares, the residents of Ul Qoma on the white ones. Although they share the same topography, they are legally prohibited from interacting even to the point of “unseeing” one another if they pass each other. It would be as if East and West Berlin had existed on top of one another, rather than side by side, with a complex set of rules governing points of contact across the gerrymandered Cold War boundary between them.

This bit of fantasy fiction might sound highly implausible. But in fact, this is the reality for Roma and non-Roma throughout East-Central Europe. Increasingly, the two communities are acculturated into “unseeing” each other. Yes, of course there are exceptions. A Roma elite participates in the larger society. And a few non-Roma – anthropologists, social workers, teachers – navigate the world of the Roma. But despite the Decade of Roma Inclusion, despite millions of dollars, despite many trainings and workshops and conferences and reports, we are confronted with the city and the city: two separate economies, two separate public spaces, two separate realities.

Central Europe has become an Apartheid region where Roma and non-Roma inhabit increasingly separate and decidedly unequal worlds.

Driving between Hungary and Slovakia to visit Kosice, I breezed through the old border station, which was as abandoned and boarded-up as Check Point Charlie had been when I visited Berlin in 1990. The disappearance of borders within the EU has become second nature to the people in the region. For me it still remains breathtaking.

But not all the borders have disappeared within the EU. The one that exists between the city and the city also takes my breath away, but for a very different reason. Sadly, outrageously, this dividing line may prove far more difficult to erase than even the Berlin Wall itself.

Lunik IX Ghetto in Kosice where 5500 Roma live. Photo by Nigel Dickinson

You can sense this persistent gap whenever you take the train from Vienna the short distance to Bratislava or the ferry from Finland to Poland. As you move east and south, people in general have less money, the infrastructure looks more run-down, there is more talk of corruption, and citizens have considerably less trust in their political institutions. Of course there are pockets of wealth in the East and pockets of poverty in the West. But these impressions of a continued disparity nearly 25 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall are borne out by the statistics. The GDP per capita of Austria and Finland is approximately $47,000 compared to the Slovak figure of $16,899 and the Polish figure of about $12,000.

But gut impressions and GDP figures are just rough estimates. If you want a more precise evaluation of Europe’s development gap, check out the Catch Up Index. A project of the Open Society Foundation in Bulgaria, the index looks at four different kinds of indicators: economy, democracy, governance, and quality of life. Each of these categories aggregates a basket of measurements that includes everything from GDP per capita (for economy) and Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index (for governance) to the Gini coefficient measuring inequality (for quality of life) and the Press Freedom Index from Reporters without Borders (for democracy).

The latest Catch Up Index, published this January, has no overall surprises. Scandinavia remains on top, and the Balkans are still on the bottom. But some of the details are important. The economic crisis, for instance, is bringing about a minor convergence between rising Eastern European countries (Poland, Czech Republic) and falling Western European countries (Ireland, Spain, Italy).

Marin Lessenski has been working on the Index out of Sofia. Bulgaria has not fared particularly well in the charts. It currently ranks 29th out of 35 countries. To add insult to injury, it fell a spot in the latest edition.

“What we saw in the previous edition was that Bulgaria changed places with Romania,” Lessenski told me in an interview in Sofia back in September. “Previously Bulgaria was one notch above Romania. Romanians were very unhappy, I was told. The Romanian foreign minister was talking about this index. I told them, it’s not a big thing. It’s just a notch. It’s not statistically significant. Now this year, Bulgarian is one notch below Romania.”

We talked about the growing divide between the Balkans and the rest of Europe, the expectations that EU accession have produced, and what it means that Bulgarians like Turkish soap operas so much.

The Interview

Do you remember where you were when you heard the news of the fall of the Berlin Wall and what your reaction was?

I don’t have any memories of the fall of the Berlin Wall. But I remember vividly the moment when Ceausescu fell. I was in the army as a regular conscript soldier. But for some reason, they decided to broadcast everything happening in Romania and Bulgaria. I’m not sure to this day whether it was staged or not, but it was happening in front of our eyes. It was almost a civil war.

The officers went somewhere for three days and were nowhere to be seen. It was only a brief period that the officers were not sure whether they would survive after the fall of Ceausescu. They worried that there would be a revolution and we would take up arms against them. Then it appeared that it wouldn’t happen and everything calmed down.

How long had you been in the army at that point?

For two years. It was the full term that we were required to do. I entered the army in 1988. When I was discharged in 1990, it was a completely new world. Some of my classmates had moved on: some had already gone to the States or elsewhere. We’d never been to Western countries. It was a completely new life. I remember being very hopeful. I thought that in five years — don’t laugh! – I thought that by 1995 Bulgaria would be something like Greece. Now the Europeans are hoping that Greece will become something like Bulgaria!

You left the army and Bulgaria was a different country.

It was a transition country. It was also a time of amazing personal change for me. Of course we lived during the so-called perestroika time. Bulgaria didn’t experience much of this. But when I was in high school, we were reading the Russian publications Ogonyek and Komsolmolskaya Pravda to show how liberal we were. I remember somewhat naively talking about things, like capitalism and this and that. But it seemed very distant. And then all of the sudden the change happened.

My personal plan was turned upside down. We lived during communism and I had one kind of personal project. I was already accepted to university. You had to apply to university beforehand, you see. Then you served in the military and then you went to university. And you knew for 30 years what you were going to do. But in 1990, everything changed and I was suddenly in doubt about what I was doing.

Were there any changes that took place in the army itself while you there?

I don’t think so. It was only a brief period. I was in the construction unit, like engineering. That’s where they sent minorities and unreliable elements, like me probably. There were a lot of Jews, Armenians: it was colorful in the army. All the people from art school and the musicians were there – so it was fun. But what was happening at the time — the changing of the names of Turks and the exodus — somehow we didn’t feel it. Of course it was different for the people who suddenly had different names, who maybe didn’t speak Bulgarian very well.

I remember the first free elections. I was still in the army. The officers were exerting pressure on us — we were punished because we brought in newspapers and some posters of the opposition. Basically nothing changed. The former Communist Party won the elections, so that was that. For the next several years, nothing happened. Only in 1996/97 did some change happen.

You went to university once you came out of the army.

I studied history. That was my first wish.

Even before you entered army.

Yes. Again, it was strange because in the university, we talked about intellectual things, big stuff, broad frameworks. At the same time there was a big struggle in politics and in everyday life — because it was the economic crisis. There was scarcity of food. It was terrible. We had power outages all the time. That’s when the first wave of emigration from the country occurred. My high school friends started to emigrate. They said, “Nothing will change in this country.” This was after the first elections. For me, the turning point was my first visit to a Western country in 1992. I went on a brief exchange visit to the Netherlands. It was a culture shock.

I’ll come back to this, but first tell me something about the work you do here at Open Society.

I work on this big project, the European Policy Initiative. It’s focused on different aspects of European policies, such as the integration of Bulgaria and other post-communist countries into the European Union. We started with the decision-making process to see whether these countries are actively developing their positions in the EU. For the last few years, we’ve been working on the Catch Up Index. We created an index that includes four dimensions, not only the economy which is the usual thing, but also quality of life issues such as education, health care, democracy, and governance – for the countries trying to catch up with EU leaders.

How long have you been here?

4.5 years. But I’ve been working with OSI as an external expert on European integration issues for something like 10 years.

You said that your first trip to the Netherlands in 1992 was a shock. Was that when you decided to work on these European issues? Before that you were studying Bulgarian history?

Actually I was working on archaeological and ancient history since I was in high school under the supervision of people from museums. I wanted to study this when I entered the university. Intellectually it was magnificent. Of course I was interested in Balkan history. But there was a saying among my colleagues: if you study the last 200-300 years, it’s just journalism. When I was in the Netherlands in 1992 and 1993 as an exchange student in history, it provided me with a different perspective. I developed an interest in inter-ethnic relations.

My personal experience from the army and also from my childhood years was of mixing with people of different ethnicities…

Where did you grow up?

Plovdiv. In Plovdiv, I studied English in a community center called Shalom. My classmates had Armenian names, Jewish names. In Plovdiv, there was a vibrant Armenian and Jewish community. I was very surprised when I went for the first time to Armenia in 2000, and they didn’t understand Bulgarian! I expected this from my childhood experience.

That’s how I developed this interest in identity politics and the Balkans. That’s why I went to study Southeast European studies in Budapest at the Central European University. It was not only academic interest but also personal interest. There were people there from different backgrounds — Macedonians, Croats, Cypriots. For the first two months, we were just quarreling among ourselves, talking about our national histories. We didn’t learn new facts. We learned old facts with new interpretations.

Was there a point in your personal life when you decided that you would no longer focus on ancient history and you would focus on the present?

It was a long process. I started with ancient history and archaeology because it was a great background for everything else. But then I followed a more personal history and came into this whole topic. I spent almost ten years in an institute dealing with the Balkans and the Black Sea. This is where the background of ancient history helped me. It’s why I don’t buy historical explanations about Balkan politics. I know when history is manipulated and instrumentally used. That’s why I’m focused on current politics and policies.

Let’s talk now about EU and EU relations. Has the concept of Europe in your opinion changed in the perceptions of average Bulgarians compared to the pre-accession, pre-membership period when Europe was a goal? Now Europe is a reality.

When people here say, “I’m going to Europe,” it means that they don’t think they’re from Europe. This belief that Europe is somewhere different is in Maria Todorova’s book, Imagining the Balkans. I’ll give you an example. I was in Varna, near the seaside. They have a booming economy. And I was listening to the news there. They started with the local news, about the municipal council, the mayor, local business. Then they said, “Now the news from Sofia and Brussels.” That was it. It was as if the national and international news was something happening outside their world.

The first thing that changed for us, even before the moment of entering the EU, was that moment of visa-tree travel. That’s when personal contacts started. People became freer. The concept of Europe began to change. If you ask the average Bulgarian — Joe the Bulgarian or me — to answer the question if we are Europeans, the first answer would be “no.” This is not about cultural identity. It has much more to do with incomes and material things. If you ask a Bulgarian, “What is Europe?” they’ll say it’s richer, it’s cleaner, it’s civilization. There is a divide in this society between those who are mobile, who travel to the EU, and who know languages, and those who are outside this process, who cannot afford to travel, who don’t have the contacts or the languages. These people feel isolated.

I remember this moment just before entering the EU, in 2006, when there were a lot of people — the middle class, people with small businesses, people who could pay their bills – who we assumed to be the motor of European integration. But these people were more afraid of accession because they were afraid of competition from the EU, from big companies. So there was this backlash at that moment. It has changed a bit over time. These people have come to see that Europe is not such a dangerous place.

Bulgaria is still one of the most enthusiastic countries in the EU, one of the countries that believes in the EU. But I think that even in Bulgaria there’s a healthy dose of realism. Bulgarian politicians told the public that January 1, 2007 would be the end of history, that we would be entering something that would be constantly progressing and that it would be an irreversible process. Then, all of a sudden, the crisis started, and now people are not so sure where they are. Compared to the old system, they’re still enthusiastic but…

It’s often said that Bulgarians have the highest level of enthusiasm for Balkan identity as well.

Bulgarians don’t have problems with Balkan identity in comparison to the other Balkan countries. There’s no inferiority complex.

Does that have any implications in terms of Bulgaria’s relationship to the EU? Does Bulgaria feel it has a certain commitment to other Balkan countries to help in their accession, to create a Balkan bloc in the EU?

That’s only on the official level. The Balkans is our natural environment. But people here are not interested in their neighbors. They are interested in where they can have stake. They’re interested in where they go on holiday, where they can make business.

There is interest in Greece and in Turkey, for instance. In Turkey, it started with these Turkish soap operas. They’re a big thing in Bulgaria. It’s been going on for several years. I was talking with a colleague from Syria, and I asked him about this. He said, “Yes, these Turkish soap operas are very popular in the Arab world.” I asked why. “Because,” he said, “they show modern values and modern lifestyles.” In Bulgaria, they are popular because they show traditional values, the family values, that we have lost. They are popular in the Arab world for completely different reasons.

This interest will probably wane. They were showing at least six of these shows. People are still watching them. The newest one just started, The Magnificent Century, which is about Suleiman the Magnificent, the conqueror of the Balkans. I thought there would be a backlash. The others are about love stories, timid things. But this one is also very popular.

Is there Ottoman nostalgia going on here?

No, no. People can be nationalists and still like these Turkish soap operas. I’ve talked to a psychologist about this, and she told me, “These soap operas allow Bulgarians to get in touch with their Oriental self.” It’s very simple. The Bulgarian identity was forged in opposition to the Turks, not so much because they’re Muslim but because they’re “backward,” or at least that was the myth of the 19th century when Ottoman power was waning. Even today, Bulgarian identity is forged in opposition to the Turks and other Oriental peoples who are “backward.”

We’ve been measuring social distances. It turns out that Bulgarians are three times more tolerant toward Turks and other minorities than they were three years ago. Even the Roma. Bulgarians are not very tolerant, of course, but still this is three times more

Is this the soap opera effect? In America, we have the Will & Grace effect. Tolerance towards gays and lesbians has increased because people not only see and like gays and lesbians on this TV show and others, but they actually think that the people they see on TV are their friends. The most important thing for changing attitudes is to have a relationship with someone in a different category. Even a virtual relationship. Is there a similar Will & Grace effect here because of Turkish soap operas?

Yes, partially. But, it’s not only that. I don’t have an explanation

In high school, we had military training. Retired colonels told us about civil protection, what to do when the nukes come. It was the 1980s, no one cared about this: it was a joke. This colonel said, “Get ready for when the Greeks and Turks invade us!” And now, Greece and Turkey are the favorite holiday destinations for Bulgarians.

Tell me some more about the Catch Up Index.

Usually when they measure countries trying to catch up with the EU, they talk about incomes. When we designed the Catch Up Index, we thought that the EU is much more than just income. We put in economic indicators, indicators of quality of life, quality of public services. Then we had a category of democracy. And we also had a separate category for governance. Our definition of EU is that it’s economically developed with high standards of living, and it’s also democratic and well governed. Obviously, there are some countries that are rich, but not democratic, democratic but not well governed.

As you say, there’s a range within the EU on all four of those indicators. Where does Bulgaria fall? Is it below the lowest EU member at this point?

We decided to go with a cluster analysis. We found out that there are six groups in the EU. The computer combined countries with the most similarities across the four categories. In cluster one were the most developed countries, the richest, the most democratic, the ones with the best governance (Scandinavia, Netherlands, Luxembourg). In cluster two was the core of Europe (Great Britain, France and Germany). The third cluster was also doing well but not so well (Spain, Ireland). The fourth cluster was a mixed picture of some countries going down and some other countries, the champions, going up (Greece and Italy but also Poland and the Baltics). Bulgaria was in the fifth cluster. And the last cluster was the worst (Albania, Bosnia).

Here’s the most interesting part. When you put the clusters on the map like a coloring book, the Balkans are separate from everywhere else. It’s like we have own version of Europe: there’s European Europe and then there’s Balkan Europe. We have a new edition now of the Catch Up Index with data from 2010 after the crisis. It’s even more telling. Greece has now slid into the Balkans. And we were once using Greece — and Portugal and Ireland — as role models! The countries that are trying to catch up have been hit worst by the crisis. But some countries — Slovenia, the Czech Republic – are doing very well. The favorite example is Estonia.

There was a New York Times op-ed recently about the Estonia example.

It’s amazing how such a small country can attract so much attention!

Have there been any statistical improvements for Bulgaria on this index?

We’ve only been doing this for a couple years. What we saw in the previous edition was that Bulgaria changed places with Romania. Previously Bulgaria was one notch above Romania. Romanians were very unhappy, I was told. The Romanian foreign minister was talking about this index. I told them, it’s not a big thing. It’s just a notch. It’s not statistically significant. Now this year, Bulgarian is one notch below Romania.

And now maybe the Bulgarian foreign minister is having big conversations about this!

Bulgarians are a pessimistic people. They expect to be at the bottom of any index. So, it was not a big surprise. The shocker was that in some of the indicators, like health care systems, Bulgaria was much worse than, say, Serbia or even Albania.

The golden age of adjustment in the EU seems to have been in the past. When Portugal entered the EU, there seemed to be more resources available to bring Portugal up to the level of the rest. What’s your estimate of the resources available to Bulgaria through the adjustment funds?

It’s really about the capacity to absorb money. Even Bulgaria has had at its disposal a lot of money. It just didn’t manage to use it. The so-called “absorption rate” in those first years was 1 percent. Now, it’s just 10 percent. Bulgaria could go to about 40-50 percent. I mean, even if they give us more money, we don’t have the capacity to manage this money properly. The EU is not a charity. It’s project based.

The lesson learned is that the transition from a totalitarian system is much more difficult than the transition from an authoritarian one. Spain and Portugal were never so separate from the rest of Europe. You can’t compare them. That’s why the United States cannot compare the political change in the Balkans with what is going on in the Arab World. You can derive some lessons, but it’s quite different situations. Maybe there can be lessons for North Korea and China from our countries. We are very close to each other: this Homo Sovieticus phenomenon. Of course I’ve never been there, but when I talk to people from North Korea or China, I see some similarities.

I was surprised when visiting North Korea to discover that the level of control was so much higher than here. And there’s so much greater segmentation in this region than in North Korea. It’s homogenous in North Korea in ways that you just don’t see in this part of the world: ethnically, economically, socially, and even politically. But still, the lessons will be relevant for North Korea in a way that the lessons from Spain and Portugal were not so applicable here.

Yes, at the end of the day, I’m not making the comparison between Bulgaria now and Bulgaria 1989 but Bulgaria 1989 and what we expected it to be. That margin is very big.

What are the most important tasks for the Bulgarian government and for civil society on this issue of catching up? What are the most important tasks for getting ahead of Romania? More seriously, what are the important tasks for Bulgaria to get into the more developed clusters?

It’s self-evident. Good governance and then democracy, that’s what we’re missing. Probably it’s my bias from civil society. If you ask economists, they’ll probably say economics first. The difference between Bulgaria and Central Europe and the Baltics is good governance and the level of democracy.

You’re speaking of accountability.

And corruption. I don’t know how to achieve this. The problem with Bulgaria is that its party system is in a terrible stalemate. The government has been talking about this so many times here and nothing happens.

I know I’m dreaming, but I want a professional administration that’s not so dependent on political changes. From what I see now, even if you have very good, competent people in public administration, they are so dependent on the political level to make decisions, and the government just grinds in place. The executive should give more authority to the administration. We have a cycle here. One year before the elections, everyone is campaigning and nothing happens. The people at the lower levels, they can’t do anything.

Civil society level is also in transition. There’s a new kind of activism involving people who are not related to the NGOs from the 1990s. This is quite encouraging. Now, civil society revolves more around ad hoc coalitions of professionals and issue-based coalitions.

Let me ask then about this new wave of activism. Are NGOs outdated? Some people have told me that governments are structured in such a way that they need conversation partners that are similarly structured, and those are NGOs. On this topic of corruption, however, perhaps these ad hoc formations might come up with a different set of solutions?

Until now we’ve used a narrow definition of civil society: professional NGO activists who are registered in court and do this work for a living. When these new types of activism emerged, someone said that the old NGOs are dead and are no longer needed. But you need both, the professional NGOs, even people in think tanks, because they have accumulated a lot of experience. But you also need these ad hoc coalitions. So, why can’t they exist hand in hand? That’s what you have in the United States.

I’ve just come from another discussion about the role of NGOs in the EU. Someone said that there were 35,000 NGOs in Bulgaria. What was implied is that they’re not doing enough. But the truth is that NGOs can be anything: soccer clubs, choirs. The professional NGO sector has to get accustomed to the idea that there are other people working on these issues; and ad hoc coalitions have to learn how to use the networks of the NGOs.

Returning to the European level: if we want a EU, we need to create European people. This has to be engineered somehow, and NGOs, trans-border NGOs engaged in much more cooperation, will be important in this.

When you think back to what has changed here in Bulgaria from 1989 until today, how would you evaluate those changes on a scale from 1 to 10, with 1 being most disappointed and 10 being least disappointed?

4.

When you consider all that has changed in your personal life since then, using the same scale, what score would you give it?

Considering that I was in the army then, I would say 10!

When you look into the future and the next 1-2 years and you think about the prospects for change here in Bulgaria, what number would you give it, with 1 being least optimistic and 10 being most optimistic?

3.5.

Sofia, September 25, 2012

In addition to the usual charges of corruption, fully one quarter of the votes in this election effectively didn’t count. One in four voters chose parties that didn’t make it over the 5 percent threshold. In addition to the two top vote-getters, only two other parties made it into parliament: the Movement for Rights and Freedoms and Ataka. The former, which has traditionally advocated on behalf of minorities such as ethnic Turks, was buoyed by a high turnout of overseas Bulgarians living in Turkey (many of whom were unceremoniously kicked out of the country by the Communist government in the 1980s). The latter, led by journalist firebrand Volen Siderov, has capitalized on discontent with the economy.

So, now the fun begins. Four parties that don’t necessarily have a lot in common must figure out how to form a governing majority. It’s a perennial feature of Bulgarian politics, with the occasional wild card thrown in like a returning King. In fact, it’s so predictable that I talked about the challenge of forming a coalition government way back in October with Iskar Enev, an independent IT professional who helped set up many of my interviews in Bulgaria.

“The biggest winners will be GERB and the Socialists, and the MRF will be the coalition partner that no one can ignore,” he told me. “This will be an unfortunate configuration, and a very unproductive coalition in terms of passing laws.”

Like many Bulgarians, Iskar Enev is pessimistic. He views emigration as a live option. He has lived abroad but now stays in Bulgaria largely out of inertia.

“Maybe something will change and I can help,” he offered in a glimmer of optimism. But it passed quickly. “It’s a minor possibility,” he concluded, “nearing zero in probability!” The May 12 elections, for the time being at least, seem to have confirmed this conclusion.

The Interview

Do you remember where you were when you heard about the fall of the Berlin Wall and what your reaction was?

I actually remember when they were announcing this on TV. I was tying my shoes and preparing to go to school. My father and I were watching TV. I thought that interesting times were to come. But my father said, “This is staged, it’s not genuine. Don’t be so excited.” But I was excited because it was a change and no one knew what would happen. The same day, I was seeing some kids from neighborhoods and we were making political jokes about Todor Zhivkov. But we didn’t know that later that day there would be an announcement of his resignation.

Did much change in your school after that?

Yes, up to that time, we were referring to the teachers as “comrades.” I remember that the teacher came to the classroom and said, “From now on you will call me Mrs.”

How did you feel about that?

It was fun. Now I start to wonder how I was perceiving socialism when I was living in it. I don’t remember now how I was understanding it. I was in the Pioneers, but I didn’t like the uniforms and ties. All the boys were playing cowboys with the ties, and they were dirty all the time. Our parents said we would get in trouble because we weren’t keeping the uniforms clean.

Do you remember the first moment when you became politically aware?

I lived in France from 2001 to 2004, and there I was exposed to extremely political movements like left-wing unions and different informal political groups informal.

You were corrupted by Western leftism.

Yes, you could say that!

You’ve been quite negative in your assessment of what has happened since 1989. Why?

I compare to what could have been done in the health care system, for instance. We’ve gone in the opposite direction, and it’s led to the destruction of so many things.

How do you think the minority question influence the next elections? Will it play a critical determining role or only a minor role?

I think that the ruling party, the Citizens for European Development of Bulgaria (GERB), will make a coalition with the Movement for Rights and Freedoms (MRF) and maybe the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP). I think that BSP will have better results in the next elections, so GERB will have to reconsider. GERB is playing the anticommunist card that makes a coalition with BSP seemingly impossible. But the reality after the next election, in which GERB will still get a lot of votes but not enough for a majority, is that they’ll have to make this coalition. I think that the nationalists will not make it into parliament or they will be very marginal, like Ataka. Ataka has almost ceased to exist. VMRO is very vocal in the media, but I don’t think they have a big enough base to make into parliament. Meglena Kuneva will have better results than the nationalists, but I don’t know. The biggest winners will be GERB and the Socialists, and the MRF will be the coalition partner that no one can ignore. This will be an unfortunate configuration, and a very unproductive coalition in terms of passing laws.

People have a strange love of Borisov. I made a connection to the French Revolution. There was a moment when the people went to the castle of the French kings and took the king to Paris. Even then they were thinking of him as a good king involved with bad people. They even claimed that, for example, Marie Antoinette was spending too much on dresses and that was the reason for the bankruptcy of the country, and it wasn’t the fault of the king.

Some people have told me that things won’t change here until an entire generation dies off. What do you think? 

I don’t think that’s the case. That’s a biological perspective on transition. I don’t like it.

What will it take for there to be a fundamental change that you and others are waiting for?

I don’t know what it will take to change things for a better. I used to say as a joke that someone should establish a party for the forced emigration of people. The sole objective would be to make agreements with other countries to forcibly remove all Bulgarians from Bulgaria.

It’s like when the body has a severe infection and you have to replace the entire blood supply!

It was just a joke. People joke that there are only two ways to change Bulgaria. Terminal one and terminal two. That’s where I got the idea from. There have been three waves of mass emigration. The first was after the changes in 1989. The second was in 1999-2000. That’s when my mother went to France. And now in the last 2 years, another wave has been developing.

If these people come back, do you think they will change things?

There are two models. The first group was the young people who came with the Tsar’s party with some western knowledge. They promoted themselves as young qualified Bulgarians coming to help. Then there was the other Bulgarians who came back and were just disappointed. Either way, I don’t see outside people coming back and changing things.

You’re still here. Why didn’t you go to Terminal One or Terminal Two?

I’ve been there. And I came back. I’m party of this second group of disappointed people.

You could leave again.

I came back for personal reasons. And then I just stayed. Inertia. But the prospect of emigration is always valid.

There’s no positive reason for you to stay?

Maybe something will change and I can help. It’s a minor possibility — nearing zero in probability!

What is your feeling about the prospects of the new Left here in Bulgaria?

The new Left has a hard time and will continue to have a hard time because of this perception that it’s associated with the past. It’s very hard for the new Left to introduce any perspectives. I hope this is not the case but the traditional Left in the form of the BSP may try to coopt this movement.

Some people have told me that 15-20 percent of the population supports Ataka policies even if its vote count fluctuates. There’s an even larger number that supports a softer extreme nationalism. What do you think?

I think that the core supporters of these extreme nationalists are really marginal. But as you said, the support for this soft nationalism is much larger. What concerns me is that not many politicians or other people address the problems that these supporters of soft nationalism are worried about. It’s a mistake to leave these problems to nationalist parties and organizations. Whether it’s the new Left or the organized parties, someone has to address these concerns or these people will turn to rightwing parties. But I don’t see this happening.

Sofia, October 1, 2012

In the same way that curation sometimes aspires to the same level of art as the contents of the exhibition itself, some artists are becoming almost curatorial in their approach.

Luchezar Boyadjiev was trained as an art historian – in fact, in the same institute in Sofia that produced Bulgaria’s most famous artist, Christo. This course of study included training in all the traditional disciplines of drawing, painting, printmaking. He has also worked as a curator. So he is well positioned to create art that blurs the distinction between artist and curator.

Consider the piece he did for a show on contemporary art in the Balkans in 2003 in Kassel, Germany – and subsequently in several other places – that he called Schadenfreude Guided Tours. Rather than provide a static piece of art that could be enclosed in a space defined as “Balkan art,” Boyadjiev himself showed up in the gallery. In some sense, he refused to be curated, to be packaged.

“I insisted that I stay for seven weeks at the exhibition,” he told me one evening last September at a café in Sofia. “I did these tours for six or seven hours a day, as long as there were people there to listen to me. I was cross-referencing the works from different countries and artists, and there were nearly 120 artworks at this exhibition from all over the Balkans. I was drawing on everything from personal gossip to very complex issues related to the issue. That made it worth my while to be in that show.”

In other words, Boyadjiev was re-curating the show according to his own experience and his own judgments. “I called it Schadenfreude because I would take pleasure in the fact that the other artists were not there and I could say what I wanted about their art,” he told me. But that of course is what a curator does: they speak of the art in the absence of the artist.

We talked about the trajectory of his artistic career as well as his disenchantment with theory, the challenges of establishing an art culture in Bulgaria, and the failure of understanding the contributions of Muslims in Bulgaria.

How Many Nails in a Mouth? (1995) by Luchezar Boyadjiev

The Interview

Do you remember where you were and what you were thinking when the Berlin Wall fell?

Yes, I do remember. October and November 1989: it’s one big continuum of events that followed one after another. I particularly remember where I was on November 10, when Todor Zhivkov was kicked out of the Politburo. At that time I was fixing up our apartment. My young son and ex-wife and I were supposed to move to our new apartment, so I was fixing it up. I’d already installed the TV set, so I was following the news.

Obviously there was something in the air: it wasn’t a big surprise. The surprise was that it happened so radically and had a physical dimension, almost like a work of art. People physically destroyed the Berlin Wall, like a performance. It wasn’t planned, and it was probably going to get messy. Obviously there were things going on under the surface that we weren’t aware of. And those turned out to be the defining trends afterward.

At the same time, people had a lot of wrong ideas and misconceptions about what was to come. I’m not a very good example because I’d already lived in the United States in the 1980s. I pretty much knew that freedom is not what they tell you about in the movies. It’s more of a contract that is specific to each society, with a lot of philosophical and ethical aspects. I didn’t have great expectations. I knew that it would be very difficult because nobody had tried this path before: to transform a “real socialist” society into a capitalist society. There was no established routine. You could say, 20 years later, that many things were done in a premature way or too quickly or they could have been done differently. I’m not talking about things on the surface like names of streets or monuments. I’m talking about the public wealth and how it could have been transformed into something else.

Did you start out doing art here in Bulgaria before you went to the United States?

I was trained as an art historian in a very traditional art academy, the same art school that Christo Javasheff went to. My training, apart from extensive art history and philosophy and theory, also included life drawing and painting and printmaking and anatomy and perspective. So I had a very thorough artistic education by the time I went to the States in the early 1980s. I wasn’t showing anything then. In 1986, I started showing in New York City at a local gallery called Westbeth, a complex of studios that still exists in the West Village. Then I started showing in Bulgaria after 1989, after the Berlin Wall fell. The ironic thing is that the first Bulgarian exhibition that I ever participated in opened on November 11, 1989 in Blagoevgrad. At that time there was a very active group of artists in Blagoevgrad, where the American University is located: south of Sofia on the way to Thessaloniki. In Blagoevgrad, they had already done an exhibition entitled 11/11 in 1988, and we had already organized the exhibition to open on 11/11/89. Then all of a sudden that avalanche of things happened so fast.

What was the reaction to the exhibition?

It’s almost like the basis of a good mythology. In this exhibition in Blagoevgrad, my works were stolen. And I was so stupid that I wrote an open letter to the unknown collector of my art in the Kultura weekly and, among other things, I said, “Times are changing and I accept this act of appropriation as a legitimate act of collecting.” In the past, after all, colonial powers appropriated art from other places, and it’s still being exhibited in major museums around the world. Then I went on to say, “In the future anybody who wants to have a work of mine will have to steal it.” That of course jinxed me for a long time. I had great difficulty selling my works. And nobody has stolen any of my works until recently.

Did you ever hear from the person who stole your work?

No. I regret that I didn’t photograph the work. I didn’t have a camera at the time so I didn’t document the work. There is only one photo that has survived by chance. From today’s perspective, it could have been a major piece. I did it in 1987. It was a brochure of the seven monuments of national culture and nature in Bulgaria – a monastery, a mountain, and so on — that were under the protection of UNESCO. Using photo collage, I deconstructed a certain set of clichés about Bulgaria. Those same clichés appeared afterwards as well, especially after EU membership, in various political games around the national identity issue.

How would you say that 1989 affected the trajectory of your art?

It liberated me. At one level, I felt that all of this came a little late for me. But maybe it turns out that it was just about the right time.

Due to the lack of many infrastructural elements in the realm of culture in this country — not only in the visual arts but mostly the visual arts — young artists develop relatively later here compared to London, Berlin, or even Moscow. The pressures in those cities to mature are much greater, and the competition is much tougher. Here there is not so much pressure. You can take more time. It doesn’t mean that what you accomplish is contextually relevant outside of Bulgaria or even within Bulgaria. But when you reach 30 maybe you’re mature. I was 32 in 1989.

A year later, October 1990, I was appointed by Susan Buck-Morrs, who used to teach at Cornell, and Frederick Jameson and some Russian philosophers to be co-director of a course in postmodern philosophy in Dubrovnik. I was still doing a bit of theory at that time. The course was at the so-called Inter-University Center, sponsored by Soros, and they were doing two-week seminars and courses on various topics. In this particular two-week course, we had speeches by Slavoj Zizek, Boris Groys, and other important thinkers. I was honored to be part of it.

But I was also very disappointed because all these Western and American intellectuals, who were basically leftist critical thinkers, thought that me and my friends there were traitors to the leftist cause. What we had been through for them was completely different, and it was very difficult to synchronize a basic understanding as to what that society was. They had no idea about things that we grew up with, such as the writings of Lenin and Stalin and many other things.

I was deeply disappointed. I decided I’d had it with theory. It wasn’t going to get me anywhere. My friends already had their degrees in Bulgaria, but they went to universities in Germany, France, and the States and tried to integrate themselves into academic circles, with varying degrees of success. Some of them came back. I felt that I couldn’t wait anymore. This was a very conscious decision. I decided to make what I wanted to make, to use materials to visualize my ideas. Later on I would decide whether this was art or not and what kind of art.

This was the way it was at the end of 1990. I was also curating a lot. Because of my experiences in the States I knew a lot more about the international art world than anyone else in Bulgaria. I was working with other friends and curators and artists in the context of the Institute of Contemporary Art, which was set up later on in 1995. But even before that, beginning in 1987-88 up to 1992-2, we had already formed a core group of people that more or less had decided to disregard the fact that we weren’t in New York and to make it worth our whiles to prove that it’s possible to live and work in this country and exhibit here and internationally as well. In a certain way, it has worked. In other ways, it has failed. For instance, we have been totally unsuccessful in educating the political or business elite about the merits of supporting contemporary creative arts let alone influencing the establishment of functioning institutions – in this respect we have failed to contribute to the development of the local situation. We have succeeded in other ways – by being an example of how to survive, function, build bridges. We have a lot of younger colleagues with whom we collaborate or even fight, who follow our example. But all in all, we have had very little impact on society.

The failure is then at two levels — economic sustainability and impact. When you say impact, do you mean at the level of public opinion?

Yes, public opinion, but public opinion in terms of voices in the public space. Personally I look at public space as full of various voices including the voice of political power and the voice of the business community.

And this public space allows us to negotiate our differences with power and between ourselves. This public space has been quite active in terms of discussions. But these voices have concentrated more on the evolution of civil society and openness toward the rest of the world rather than on the “little issues” in this country. In this way, we have failed. And sustainability is on one level economic, but it’s also about making this country part of the whole world.

Ironically there was more talk of international, non-Bulgarian issues before January 2007. Once Bulgaria entered the EU, everyone felt that we’d solved this problem and could go back to talking about national identity and what it means to be Bulgarian. We could forget about the fact that there are other ethnicities and other religious communities in this country that have been here for centuries. Bulgaria is the only EU country with a more-or-less indigenous Muslim population. We could learn some lessons from the experience of people who have lived here for centuries.

I am often struck by the fact that commenters on the Muslim issue in Europe always forget to talk about the Muslim populations in Bulgaria and Albania. I want to come back to that. But first I want to ask specifically about how 1989 changed your art.

Up until 1995, there was a general interest in the art produced in what was considered Eastern Europe. In the second half of the 1990s, the idea of “East” shifted: to the Far East, then the Muslim East, then the Central Asian East. This is one thing to consider.

Also, the second half of the 1990s ushered in the digital era and new media art. There were a lot of expectations and investment in this field, and some people hoped that the Internet would solve all issues connected to separation and participation, which happened to a certain extent. We learned a lot, but we didn’t solve anything. Then came 9/11, and all of a sudden people realized that the divides are not what they used to be. Other divides exist, and the world is more complex and difficult to navigate.

My work has shifted from first dealing with science and recognizable iconological entities and codes of visual language taken from different cultures, such as astrology or religion or the newspaper. I would take these and invest them with something of where I come from. Ten years ago, I was more interested in interviewing people and making video portraits of them. Then from 2002-3 up until two or three years ago, my work consisted of two lines. One was a lot of photographs and texts related to the changing face of cities all over the world in the context of global capitalism — post-socialist, neocolonial, or desert capitalism like in Dubai — and comparing these developments in architecture, advertising, public monuments, the behavior of people on the streets.

The other trend was more performative. I started developing a work called Schadenfreude Guided Tours. I would stay after the opening of an exhibition for as long as possible giving guided tours to the show. It would be organized, with the agreement of the curators, and I would interact with the audience by animating the space. I called it Schadenfreude because I would take pleasure in the fact that the other artists were not there and I could say what I wanted about their art. I could put them down or whatever! I did this in Kassel in 2003 at a show on contemporary art in the Balkans, then in Sharjah in 2005 in the United Arab Emirates, then at the Biennale in Singapore in 2006 and 2008; as well as in Santa Fe, New Mexico in a completely different context. In 2008, I also did it in Jerusalem, which is obviously a very tough place to present anything – the place is already heavily loaded politically.

That was all until the financial crisis struck. I was in Singapore when Lehman Brothers collapsed. I was talking to people from hedge funds, sovereign investment funds. Once again the world changed at the end of 2008, beginning of 2009. All of a sudden a huge part of art-making and art exhibitions disappeared for a while. I now sell more, which is good, but I’m no longer an unknown quantity; people know that they won’t lose money if they invest in what I do. But it’s getting tougher and tougher for younger artists. Very often when they construct a budget for an institution or an exhibition, the last thing on their agenda is a small payment to the artists, who are workers just like anybody else. It’s almost taken for granted that artists are very vain and happy to show their works. Well, I don’t want to show my work any more just like that. I want to show my work to people who appreciate it, who are prepared to sacrifice something to see it just as I am sacrificing something, not much perhaps, to make it.

Here I am almost quoting literally the American artist Mark Rothko, a top abstract expressionist who committed suicide in the 1970s after creating his chapel in Houston. In the late 1960s, when he was at the top of his game and getting high prices for his paintings, a collector asked him, “Why do you charge me so much for this painting. It’s very minimal.” Rothko answered, “My friend, I have paid with my life and blood and everything for the whimsy to want to make it. Now you have to pay with your money for the whimsy to want to have it.”

There are some very good corporate collections made by curators who assist collecting in a responsible way. But that unfortunately is missing from this country. Business in Bulgaria is international. You can no longer say that this is only a Bulgarian corporation. But we have failed to educate them. The most powerful corporations and businessmen have developed tastes that range from total kitsch to just plain cheating. There was, for instance an exhibition of Salvador Dali at the National Gallery for Foreign Art two years ago without a single “work” by the artist that has his signature on it. It was just lithographic reproductions of his drawings…

This is a country without a history of collecting, except for the collection of Bulgarian art, which is original. There are some very nice pieces of foreign art at the museums, but there is nothing of masterpiece quality. It’s spotty, uneven.

In this way, we’re back to where we started in the 1970s and 1980s. In all these countries – here, Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union — you led a double life. You had an official life, like Ilya Kabakov, who was a graphic designer illustrating books for children, which were very didactic in the Soviet Union. And at the same time he was an avant-garde artist. Now it’s become divided spatially. I have one kind of existence here, where I am known by the media and colleagues but I am not established. There are hardly any public collections let alone private collections to guarantee some kind of continuity of practice. I matter only outside of Bulgaria, which is my other existence. When I go outside the country, I’m more respected.

You said that Bulgarian companies have become internationalized. I want to apply that to the art world. Do the intermediate terms between global and individual — East European, Balkan, Bulgarian — have any meaning today for artists today in Bulgaria?

Not really. You can look at the art in different ways: the specific artworks, the method. Once in a while, a person will package a group of artists and artworks in a particular way. Ten years ago it was a trend in Germany and Austria to have exhibitions of contemporary art from the Balkans. This was after the war in Yugoslavia, so there was a bit of interest and money in this post-traumatic situation. Curators who worked and knew us used the moment to do something they’d always wanted to do. Then everybody forgot about it, which was a good thing. Sometimes it’s a fashion, sometimes it’s an opportunity, and sometimes it’s an urgent need to look into certain contexts and package them. But I don’t think it matters, and I don’t think it matters for my friends.

About a year ago, in a place called ZKM, the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe in Germany, I was lucky to have a work in an exhibition curated by Peter Weibel, a legendary artist and curator and director of the center. Entitled Global Contemporary, it was based on the writings of Hans Belting, a German theoretician, and it looked at the globalization of art production. The conclusion of the exhibit was that this globalization was more a question of access and identifying issues that are valid for people than a question of the infrastructure of the art world, though that’s certainly part of it. Before the crisis of 2008, there was talk that biennales go where there is money. Only those cities with money have the resources to hold a biennale. We were very critical of that. But now it turns out that it’s not such a bad thing. If your city and the people in your city want a biennale, who am I to say you shouldn’t? Of course, it’s always a complex situation. But at the same time, this is a global trend that depends on local decisions. It’s the same with artists. We function in a globalized environment, but it comes down to a set of local decisions: what I want to do, whom I want to do it with, where I want to show it.

Yes, these exhibitions on “Balkan art” were opportunities for packaging, but they were also opportunities for the consumer to make an attempt to understand a set of issues, what “Balkan” means.

All right, but the consumer is in New York or London. That’s a very privileged position. If people in New York or somewhere else want to know what it means to be Balkan, they will have to work a lot harder than just go to an exhibition.

That’s a good point.

They’re going to have to read books, study up on history, see movies. An exhibition cannot solve all that. Otherwise you package an identity in a very superficial way. This is precisely why I was doing these Schadenfreude Guided Tours at the Balkan exhibition in Kassel, which every five years is the center of the contemporary world with Documenta. Rene Block was the curator of that show. I refused to show anything material. I didn’t want to be packaged in that way. But I could contribute in a different way, and this was my contribution.

The audience is very educated in Kassel, but they have no idea what “Balkans” means. I was reacting to this set of clichés people have about the Balkans. I mean, they don’t even know how to pronounce the names properly. Look, I can’t pronounce German names correctly, so it’s fair game. But if I want to show German artists here in Bulgaria, and I don’t know how to pronounce their names, I should think twice about doing it. That’s why I insisted that I stay for seven weeks at the exhibition. I did these tours for six or seven hours a day, as long as there were people there to listen to me. I was cross-referencing the works from different countries and artists, and there were nearly 120 artworks at this exhibition from all over the Balkans. I was drawing on everything from personal gossip to very complex issues related to the issue. That made it worth my while to be in that show.

You’re getting at the issue of power and balance, not only between nations but within nations, between those who have the opportunity and money to attend an exhibition and those who don’t.

The opportunity to organize an exhibit. To attend an exhibit is not so difficult any more. Anybody can go and see a major art show in Venice and Kassel and Istanbul. This generation of 30-something and under is extremely educated. They go to museums without anyone forcing them. They travel; they open their eyes. Unfortunately the elite, which is basically my generation in politics, doesn’t think this way.

I want to go back to your comments about Muslims and ethnic Turks here in Bulgaria. You said that you think that they have something to offer in the way of an example.

I’m not part of the community. I have a human understanding of the situation but no direct knowledge. You should talk to people from the community.

I have some friends in the community, including a wonderful artist who is 10 years younger than me, Ergin Cavusoglu, who lives in London. I’ve known him for many years, but we just had some time together at an exhibition in Kiev this spring. In the summer of 1989, he was in the army, in the barracks, and he didn’t even know that his family had been kicked out of the country. He has made some works about it. That is one kind of experience

Half of my family on my mother’s side emigrated after the Russian-Ottoman war of 1876-78 from what’s now the Greek part of Macedonia and settled in Sofia. Some of them did some really bad things. There was a first cousin of my grandmother, Kosta Yankov, who was a major in the Bulgarian army. He was also a leader of the military wing of the Bulgarian (at the time underground) Communist Party. In 1925, he organized the country’s first real terrorist act, blowing up the St. Nedelya cathedral in the middle of Sofia. But in 1880s, when they left northern Greece, they were running away not from the Turks but from the Greeks, who already had a tradition of ethnic cleansing that was much more radical and violent than the Ottoman practice. So, that’s another thing from the history of the region.

Or another example – a couple years ago there was a debate about mosques in Western Europe: in Germany, Austria, Switzerland. It was not about the temples. It was about the minarets, the visual signifier. Actually, in the history of the Ottoman Empire and more specifically the Bulgarian space, there was a legal precedent established at the time, and it had visual implications that were used by the Christians in order to have dignified temples within the law. They found a way to satisfy everybody, so why now can’t a solution be found?

And an auditory signifier as well.

Yes. In Ekaterinburg, a place in Russia which is undergoing big scandals involving the Russian Orthodox Church, I heard for the first time a prayer in an Orthodox church that was broadcast in a public space. It made me feel extremely uncomfortable because it is not part of this tradition. Not that I am religious.

But on the minaret question, in Doha there is a new cathedral, the first Catholic cathedral constructed not only in a Gulf State but in a Muslim state in recent times. It has a cross on top of a roof that’s shaped like a doughnut. You can see the cross from the point of view of heaven, but you can’t see it from the street. So everyone is happy.

In the 19^th century in this country, some city people became wealthy and could afford to build a new church. But this was during Ottoman rule and the law said that you couldn’t have a cross on the top of a church that was taller than a Muslim on a horseback so that the eyes of the true believer would be offended by this symbol. So, what was the solution of the people in small towns and even in Istanbul? They would buy a plot of land and construct walls that would obstruct the line of sight of the believer on horseback. They built high walls and inside the perimeter they dug into the ground. From the outside you couldn’t see anything accept a very small church. But once inside, which is what matters, it was huge. This was the rule all over the Ottoman Empire, which was in a way very tolerant to religious minorities, all things considered.

This is a cultural fact, and a legal precedent, that could be presented for consideration. But it’s not used. Here is another: Sofia is one of the few cities in Europe and perhaps the world where a mosque and a synagogue stand across from each other with a church nearby. Of course, there used to be many more mosques. Some of them suffered during the earthquake 100 years ago, while others were demolished because the minority was kicked out.

The experience of Muslims in Bulgaria between 1984 and 1989 was traumatic. It was also traumatic for the whole country. And it hasn’t been talked about sufficiently. We can still learn a lot of things about that period. I recently went to Istanbul and met with ethnic Turkish people who emigrated from Bulgaria at that time. They are already well established. They have businesses, Bulgarian passports. They were kicked out, that was bad. But they have settled in a new place. How did that evolve? And yet, on a visit to Istanbul over the last couple months, I heard friends referring to these migrants from 1989 as the “Bulgarians.” It’s really tragic and yet ironic – they were kicked out once from Bulgaria for being “Turks,” and now they are singled out in Istanbul for being “Bulgarians”.

But as I said: you should really talk to people from this community.

I will. For instance, I’ll be talking with folks from the Movement for Rights and Freedoms (MRF).

The current minister of culture, who used to be a friend and will be a friend again when he’s not in government, is a sculptor. He’s a good person, but it’s not his place. He’s made a lot of mistakes. Anyway, he’s ethnic Turkish. His mother was a famous folk singer in Kurdzhali. He won a parliamentary seat in a district that was dominated for years by the MRF. He ran against this movement. He’s a populist now, a minor copy of the prime minister in his macho appearance and rhetoric. But he overcame this monopoly in this region.

You told me that you’re relatively pessimistic about the near future.

I don’t see the political will here. Bulgaria is still undergoing a process of nation-state building. The country is still building the institutions of civil society. Of course a nation-state is not any more such a treasured thing. But at the same time, in terms of the rule of law and the judicial system, this is still a country that needs to be civilized, modernized, and, well, fixed.

In the last few years, things like this happen here only if there’s external pressure. Internal pressure is not enough. It always ends up as a partisan game for power. Once someone is in power, they begin reshuffling the field for their own benefit. If there is improvement in this respect, it comes from the outside. This happened with the IMF and the currency board back in 1997, which stabilized the general picture. I’m not saying it was good from the point of view of social security or social benefits, but it did stabilize life.

This government does get some things done, but at the same time it has created this kind of cloud to hide behind and not commit to anything, because internally they don’t know how far to go. In our country, power is business. You go into politics because it’s like a business, and you want to benefit from it. You don’t necessarily want to serve the society and the people.

These days there is less monitoring here in this country, and this makes me pessimistic. Once there is no monitoring, I don’t know what will happen to this country. No matter how many laws there are here or how many law enforcement agencies or how well trained the politicians or civil servants are, there is always this fear that the political class will revert to its old ways.

When Bulgaria and Romania were negotiating for membership in the EU, the two countries were often compared to Holland and Germany. This was a mistake. We should have been compared to Greece. My Greek friends are now saying, “We have to learn how to live like you did over the last 20 years: in a crisis with very little money.”

In 2006, about a year before membership I asked Meglena Kuneva, who was the minister negotiating for membership, “Will they accept us?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Why?” I asked. “It’s not realistic. This country has to be fixed first.”

And she said, “Because they are good people. They promised once and they don’t want to go back on their promise. That’s the only reason!”

When you look back to 1989 and everything that has happened here in this country, how would you evaluate that on a scale of one to 10, with 1 being most dissatisfied and 10 being most satisfied?

6

Same scale, same period of time, but your own personal life?

8

Looking into the near future, how would you evaluate the prospects for Bulgaria with 1 being most pessimistic and 10 most optimistic?

I think that it’s below average right now. So, that would be 4.

Sofia, September 27, 2012

Because we are inundated with stimuli every second, this accommodation of the senses plays a vital evolutionary function. We’d go crazy if we reacted to everything as if for the first time. Imagine being constantly aware of every piece of clothing we wore: we’d have no perceptual energy left to interact with the environment beyond the shirt on our back. We must be selective in what we pay attention to. We are attuned to changes in patterns, for these represent both risk and opportunity. Red apple, good, eat. Purple apple, hmmnn, interesting, take note, pause before biting into it, save the seeds in case it’s a fantastic new variety.

Art, in some sense, upends this relationship between the world and our perceptions of it. Artists provoke us into looking with fresh eyes at the things that we take for granted.

Andreja Kuluncic applies this principle to social issues. Her art often involves people on the margins, people who have lost the power to command the attention of the majority, people who have become invisible. She has worked with migrants, the jobless, pregnant teenagers, prisoners, stigmatized minorities. She has used her position as an artist as a kind of bullhorn: to grab the attention of passersby. One of her projects, for instance, used advertising posters to draw attention to the plight of workers at a state-owned store in Croatia that the government wanted to privatize. It was the early days of the transition to the market, and Kuluncic realized that billboards and bus shelter ads were novel enough to attract interest. She deployed this “shock of the new” to make people look again at something that had faded into the background of the “transition.”

A bullhorn can grab people’s attention – but if you keep using the bullhorn, eventually that tactic also becomes easily ignored. So Kuluncic is constantly seeking out different ways of making the invisible visible. “Today I’m using other media: mobile phones, direct sales, joint action with the community,” she says. “Because now we are just sick of advertisements: nobody’s looking at them anymore. So, I have to do something different to grab people’s attention, to get their eyes and thoughts, to get them to think about whether we are doing what we want to do or simply what everybody around us is doing.”

The range of her projects is extraordinary, from engaging pregnant teenagers in England to reimagining community development in the Hungarian countryside. Last October, I visited her studio in Zagreb where she showed me the documentation of several fascinating projects. We talked about a number of these projects as well as the rise of nationalism, the disappointments of European integration, and the challenges of censorsh

Andreja Kuluncic

The Interview

Tell me about your project “1 CHF =1 VOICE”.

The Swiss parliament was under construction at the time when we were doing the project. The idea was that we would give them a check and a plate as a gift from the illegalized people who lives and works in Swiss, and they would repair something inside the parliament with that money: they’d paint a wall or buy some physical thing for the building. We wanted to put on the plate that it’s a gift from “illegalized people” (Sans Papiers). They don’t allow these people to stay there, but at the same time they need them because such people do these, you know, shitty jobs. They get paid, but everything is illegal. So they can get deported. They don’t have any rights. And the Swiss always say that these people just want to take money from the Swiss government, that they just want to live on social welfare—which is not true. These “illegalized” people work hard! They want to pay taxes, and they want to have proper education and healthcare and everything you get by paying taxes. But they’re not allowed.

So that’s why we called the project, “One Franc, One Voice” (“1 CHF = 1 VOICE). Each of the undocumented immigrants who wanted to participate gave us one franc. In return they got a voice, a metaphoric voice, by buying a gift for the parliament.

The parliament first agreed to the donation, but then two hours before the meeting with us, canceled the donation! I wanted to confront them,  but my partners in the project said that’s not the way to do it. So after a long communication with the parliament we decided to wait until a government with more understanding toward foreigners came to power in Switzerland. Until then the donated money (now more then 2,000 Swiss francs) remains in the account of SPAZ (the center for illegalized persons in Zurich).

I’m sure you know about the racism and xenophobia in Switzerland. The most powerful party in Switzerland is an extreme right-wing party called the Swiss People’s Party (Schweizerische Volkspartei). When I was there in 2007, there were these billboards with these white sheep kicking a black sheep off the Swiss flag. I found it really racist. And there was the referendum against the construction of minarets, things like that. So that’s why I initiated this project. Because I find it important that people know about these things.

And the project on distributive justice?

I did the “Distributive Justice” piece in several different places: in Naples, at the Whitney in New York, at Documenta in Kassel, at the Istanbul Biennale, in South Korea, in Croatia, Austria, Slovenia. The idea is that, through this project, we talk about a “just society.” There are six points in this space, and there is an assistant in the installation – which is more like a “social laboratory” — to help you with these points. And when you finish the points you understand that it’s not that easy to create a just society. For example, if you are in the desert with nine other people and you find water and everybody is thirsty, what would you do? Would you share the water? Would you sell it, but then pay a tax and expect the government to take care of the others who are thirsty?

In the end, the idea is that you understand this issue a bit more and also see what other people think. We did this project in many different social contexts. So, for me, this was a really interesting way to see how people think about justice in different societies.

Your work often engages with people who are marginalized.

I’ve worked with people in a mental hospital, people in jail, pregnant teenagers, asylum seekers, Roma people: people who are vulnerable. When you and I talk, we’re careful with our words. We’re taking the measure of each other. But with people who are vulnerable, it’s so easy to slip and be really kind of patronizing. And there are a lot of laws that make these people’s lives even worse. It’s one thing if you personally don’t like someone, but it’s another thing if you have a law that allows you to make that person’s life really shitty. This is what I’m trying to do when I travel – in Switzerland, in Austria, in Germany, but in my own country as well. I try to find out about these laws: the legalized racism, the xenophobia, or, as you saw in Serbia, homophobia.

These projects in a way strip away the official version of what it means to be European or to be in a European space. In effect, they say, “This is what’s really going on.” Also, it’s fascinating that much of your work is in the form of advertising.

I used a lot of advertising before, but not that much today. Under socialism we had some advertising, but it was state-controlled. The advertising was a bit more ethical. So, for instance, you couldn’t advertise food for kids that was junk or things that would kill people. Well, that was the idea anyway. After the Berlin Wall fell, advertising was everywhere, and people believed in it. And they were buying like mad. They’re still buying! So that’s why I was using advertising in my work. I saw that this was the main thing that people watched and really cared about.

The first piece I did was about the workers at Nama, which is short for NArodni MAgazin, which means the “people’s store.” At the time, these workers were working in empty stores, but the stores next to them, which were from West Europe, were completely full of goods. This was our department store, built during socialism, and we really loved that they were all around Yugoslavia. And then the state wanted to bankrupt these stores because the buildings were worth a lot.

They wanted to privatize and sell them?

Yes, and there was a lot of stealing involved in this and other similar state-run stores, factories, hotels on the seaside, and so on. So, the people were working for six months in empty stores at the time. Some of my artist friends from West said to me, “Oh, this is a great performance!” I said, “No, no, no, this is real life, it’s not a performance! It’s not a piece of art! ” The workers were standing there for the entire eight hours, without selling anything, just keeping their jobs.

They were waiting to be paid. Everyday they were told, “Yeah, yeah, we will pay you.” But for six months nothing happened. Meanwhile some of the workers went on strike. They chained themselves to the bank and went on hunger strikes. But nobody was watching them. Nobody was really interested.

I talked with the labor union and the workers, offering them three different works about their situation. They chosen this one: a poster with one worker on it, the logo of the Nama, and a text “1,908 workers, 15 department stores.” Nothing else. I thought that people don’t look at a person in need but they do look at advertisements. When I put them on the posters, I wanted them to look nice, to look like the other advertisements — not to look sad and depressed, which they were. So I brought in my friends to do the makeup, to style the hair, to have professional studio photographs, everything.

We put the ads on billboards, and for three days nothing happened. I thought, “Okay, nobody saw them.” I didn’t want to make an issue of it. I didn’t want to say, “Okay, this is an art piece, what do you think?” But I wanted to see what would happen.

But then, after three days, people began going to the Nama stores, because they all thought that the stores had re-opened. But it was actually still the same thing: workers standing next to empty shelves and not getting paid. People called up the director of Nama and asked, “What the hell are you doing? Why are you paying for these really expensive advertisements? You’re not paying these people. You don’t have anything to sell. What’s wrong with you?” And he said, “I don’t know anything about it. It’s has nothing to do with me.”

And then the journalists found out. The story wasn’t in the culture pages. It was in the section about what was going on in the city of Zagreb. A whole debate started up about what we are selling. We are not selling products. We are not working. We are just selling our stores, and our people. We are just selling ourselves out. And that was my intention: to start a discussion about what we are selling, the visible and the invisible: the hotels, factories, islands, everything. We’re selling everything that’s possible to sell. We are becoming tourists in our own country. It’s a horrible way to run politics, you know? And that’s why I was using advertising.

But today I’m using other media: mobile phones, direct sales, joint action with the community. Because now we are just sick of advertisements: nobody’s looking at them anymore. So, I have to do something different to grab people’s attention, to get their eyes and thoughts, to get them to think about whether we are doing what we want to do or simply what everybody around us is doing. Is it something we need, something that helps us, something that makes us happy? If we are living in this greedy capitalism, at least we should make our own choices and think about our own choices.

What year did you do the Nama project?

In 2001. It was 11 years ago. The war really ended in 1995-96.  I say “really” in the sense of “okay, now we can breathe.” Then it took four or five years to ruin the country, and when it became visible what was going on. After the war, everybody was so happy to have Croatia. Yesterday a friend told me, “Now we have Croatia, but there are no Croatians.” She didn’t mean Croatian in the sense of nationalism but in terms of using our own resources to build a life for us rather than adopting this kind of capitalist standard of living that is not suitable for us. This ultimately is the problem. They destroy our agriculture and then they bring in organic food at triple the price. We have sped-up capitalism, something that took other countries 20-30 years. And we have all this bureaucracy and paperwork connected to the European Union, and a lot of our money goes to that. It’s really shitty. Everybody’s so frustrated about it. There are a lot of Euroskeptics.

For example, we used to have money here in Croatia to do cultural projects, even if it wasn’t always spent properly. Now we will have to give a lot of the money to Brussels, and we have to fill out this really complicated paperwork, which is not possible if you are a one-man show like a lot of visual artists are. Even if you have a small association, as I do with 10 people, it’s very hard  to handle all the bureaucratic stuff. A lot of other countries are really experienced in this application process because they’ve been doing it for 40 years. Plus, there’s the matching fund, which the country has to help finance, will “eat up” a lot of the remaining money. So in a way the EU will decide about the cultural production in visual art, which is politically really problematic .

For example, if we look at the application forms: they tell you with whom you have to work, the kind of partners to have, the subjects you should do, the way of spending the money — almost everything that is essential for the project. You’re not able to do what you want. At the end of the day, you have to do art. Come on! It’s not biology or agriculture, where maybe you’re dealing with the same topics. It’s art, and I would like to do something completely different from what someone in the EU thinks I should do in my art …

They insist that your work has to fit into certain categories?

Yes, you have to fit the categories. And this is cruel. Who gets to determine the categories? And who will say who fits in and who doesn’t? I don’t need a million Euro to do a piece. I need 10,000 Euro. And so far, I was getting my 10,000 euros. I was doing pieces and I was having success in that sense: getting to the people, showing the piece, speaking to them. It isn’t success in terms of an artistic career, but in the sense of doing what I want to do. Now it’s really questionable. I’m not complaining. I will see. There are a lot of strategies, and we will find a way. But they ended a system that was functioning and replaced it with a questionable system that’s 50 years old and doesn’t function.

And they’re sending us all these really old advisors from the EU with their old system of dealing with stuff. They’re exporting them to our countries where they sit in the ministry eating well, earning a big salary, spending our money. They treat us like we’re all stupid here, like we don’t know what we need and what we want. It’s very strange. One curator in Austria told me three years ago, “It’s so great you will get into the European Union. Now you will not kill each other anymore, we will take care of it.” What?! It sounds as if they are re-colonizing us, doesn’t it?

The last time we talked, you also said that you were not enthusiastic at all about membership in the EU. We talked about the possibility of the countries in the region working closer together, where there have been greater connections, both during Yugoslavia, but even before that in the 19th century. Have you seen any signs in the last four years that that might happen, even if Croatia becomes part of the EU?

When I was studying in Belgrade, Budapest, Novi Sad, I felt that we shared a common space, common ideas, and common history. This was Middle Europe: Hungary, Croatia, Poland, Austria, Slovenia, Serbia. Now we’re being pushed to work with Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, and countries further south. This is maybe nice, but it’s not natural or what the people want. Why not work with Poland, or the Czech Republic, or Latvia? Of course, I was in Tirana working and it’s great, and Bulgaria too. But it’s not natural to force us to work with such and such countries. It would be like saying to someone from the United States that they have to work with Canada but not with Mexico, or vice versa.

There’s some kind of agenda behind this. It’s like our art here isn’t interesting (or in proper translation “ethno”) enough. And one of the ways of making it bigger is to make these big shows about the Balkans: to try to shape something that is not there and has never been there in that sense.

Sometimes people say, “Okay, we are not active enough here.” But I’d like to see you after a war: how active would you be? This country was ruined, the people were completely depressed, the hotels were full of people without anything, just a bag. How enthusiastic could you be? Then capitalism just came in, and the people couldn’t even lift their heads.

A friend of mine from Split told me that, when the war ended, you could buy a really great house on the Croatian seaside for 20,000 Euro. And his friends from Germany was pushing him, “Why don’t you buy one?”

He said, “Because I don’t have fucking 200 Euro to live on!”

And now he says, “when I have 20,000 Euro, it’s 200,000 Euro to buy this great house on the seaside, and again I don’t have 200,000!”

So, you’re never really able to be one step ahead of what is going on in your own reality. You’re always just trying to survive in new ways in response to what’s happening in your own country. And this is what frustrates people.

I remember in 1990 I was on a flight from Hungary back to the United States. I was sitting next to a Hungarian. He was young, a student, maybe only 21 years old, and he was very upset that he was going to the United States. I said, “Why are you upset about going to the United States?” He said, “Because this is the time to become a millionaire.” He felt like he was missing his opportunity to be a millionaire in Hungary. Even in war there is opportunity – as you said, to buy a great house on the seaside for 20,000 Euros.

An opportunity for maybe 4% of people, 5% of people. But I’m talking about the other 95%.

Or 99%. The number of people that become millionaires is very small.

That’s true. That was the time when you were able to steal. We were always joking, “If you steal from the shop, they will catch you. But if steal the whole building with the shop inside, nobody will catch you.” And you’ll be a kind of…

A hero!

You will be a citizen of distinction. Yes, because you are rich. To be rich here was very important at that time. Which is really bad, damaging. There’s no responsibility towards society at all.

In America, our vision of Europe for so many years was of tolerance, social welfare, integration, inclusion. But in the last 10 years, Europe has become a very different place. A very intolerant place. As you said, Europeans are united in intolerance.

But America is not better at all.

No, it isn’t. That’s why we were always looking to Europe as being the better example in some ways. That’s why it is so disappointing.

Maybe that kind of Europe was never there. Maybe it was just the image on the surface. I don’t know. I was too young. But the hate spread so quickly and with so much power that it couldn’t have been created in one day. That’s why I think that it was always there.

I think you’re right.

I have a couple of friends, they’re really nice and not racist. But after the second bottle of wine, everything leaks out. And then I’m like, “What!?” I always think I should tape them and the next day show them what they said. They are good people, but you know…

That would be an interesting art project: you tape everybody, and then underneath their words you put, “One bottle. Two bottles. Three bottles.” To show the relationship between their alcohol consumption and the revealing of their intolerance. And then you go back and show it to them. And get their reactions.

So you see how hidden it is, and how really deeply rooted in the way they are brought up: what their parents or grandparents said or what their school taught them. All these different layers of intolerance. You can pretend that it’s not there. But when people open up their unconscious, everything comes out. Unfortunately.

Did you get, how can I put it, such “impolite” responses, to some of your work in Europe?

Oh yes, of course. Two were censored.  One was in Liverpool. The Anglo-Saxon culture is not really open to critique. You can only critique what they want you to critique and how they want you to critique. It was not really something personal. It was a clash of cultures, I think, over our understanding of what art can do and what socially engaged art means. It was the Liverpool Biennial and they invited artists to do socially engaged projects. But then during the course of the whole project, I understood that they really wanted me to praise Liverpool. But there was nothing to praise. I mean, I wanted to do something the way I saw it, not the way they wanted me to see it.

I chose to work with teenage pregnancy. There’s a lot of teenage pregnancy, and it’s really visible in Liverpool. I wanted to do something outside: to make some billboards with a pregnant teenage girl who looks like a Benetton advertisement. But then she talks about how difficult it is to have a baby at the age of 14. And the billboard would say that the teenage pregnancy rate in Britain is the highest in Europe. The Biennial people told me, “Okay, if you want to do it so much. But remove these statistics.” And I said, “But that doesn’t make any sense. Then it would only be about this girl Tracy, and everybody would blame her rather than the system that produces so many pregnant teenagers.”

So, in the end, the only thing they let me to do was something inside, not outside in the city, and in a really small gallery, not in the Tate Liverpool as we first agreed. They warned me that “this theme would not enter the Tate,” but I did not want to give up. I proposed a kind of questionnaire with the presentation of the campaign: the people were able to say whether they thought anything could help the situation. Because people from the Liverpool Biennial were telling me that it’s her fault, the young girl, if she gets pregnant, that it has nothing to do with society …and I said, “let’s ask the visitors what they think.” The Biennial people promised me that if the visitors said, “Yes, this is an issue that has to be tackled within society and not just individually with psychotherapy,” then they would do the whole project in the next Biennial. And the visitors to the gallery answered, “Yes, we think it should be tackled socially.” But the Biennial never did the project. I was quite disappointed.

The other was in Hungary. I did a project in Dunaujvaros called “A Republic of One’s Own.” I proposed an interactive game through which the inhabitants of Dunaujvaros created a plan for the future of the town. The local politicians thought I belonged to some political party and that I wanted to do something political. Three days before the opening of the project, when we had everything ready, they said that they would have to close the gallery if the project went forward. So I said, “No, it’s not worth closing the gallery because of one project.” The gallery showed it as a documentation, but in a kind of hidden way.

I was really puzzled by that sentiment, “we will close the gallery.” I mean it’s not something we do anymore. There are other ways to fight with the artist: you don’t give money for the project, you don’t let them into the Tate. But you don’t close the gallery. That’s really formal-socialist behavior.

Have you had that kind of response in Croatia?

No. For example, I thought I would have a lot of problems when we used the official logo of Nama, that they’d sue us…

Did they?

No, they could have, but they didn’t. We were ready to deal with that. But there were so many shady things taking place around Nama that I think they didn’t want any further publicity. They ended up closing a couple of shops, keeping a couple open with the workers still there. They found some middle way. I don’t think that was a result of my project, but I guess it helped raise the awareness of people a bit. But as I said, so many factories and hotels and so on were ruined that one shop doesn’t do too much difference. The point wasn’t that everybody should feel sorry for these workers, but that everybody should feel that they could be this person. If you don’t help the needy, then when you are in need, you can’t expect any help for yourself.

I hope that especially young people get this point, that society is real, that it’s not about just taking what you need from society and never giving back. I don’t mean charity. I saw a lot of charity work in the United States, and I don’t want to live in a charity society. I want to live in a society that provides equally for everyone, where you help people who are down not in order to be “nice” or to “feel good.”

A solidarity society instead of a charity society.

Exactly. It’s hard to live in society where people are dying of hunger, no? You can’t be happy in a society where some people are throwing away food and others are dying of hunger on the street.

Do you feel like there still is a strong sentiment of nationalist extremism here in Croatia?

For me it’s really hard to say, because my circle of friends is gay-friendly, people-friendly, friendly to all nations. I come from Vojvodina, which is now a part of Serbia, and this is just not an issue. For my friends, it’s not a question of what religion you have or what nation you belong to. But when you read stuff on the walls of buildings…Just today I saw a graffiti that said, “Kill the Serbs.” I was so shocked. Yesterday it was not there. And today there it was.

Why would they do that these days?

I don’t know. I don’t know why they write “kill the gays” or “kill the Roma.” I did a project about this called “On the State of the Nation.” Because I was puzzled about the same question. We measured social distance. We didn’t have enough money to do the questionnaire as we planned, so psychologists and students from the faculty of philosophy helped us out. The questionnaire included questions like “Would you accept a teacher of your child who is Chinese” or “Would you accept a Muslim person as a life partner, or as a friend?” or “Would you accept a neighbor who is gay?” It wasn’t: “Do you like them or not?” Rather it measured the distance between the person and members of various groups.

And it turned out that the people that were most distant were, of course, Serbs. But even the people who don’t like Serbs, they see them as equal— but as an enemy. With the Serbs it’s not about social distance, it’s about a completely different psychological state of mind. It’s the others who are furthest away: Roma, gay people, Chinese.

So then I started working with these three groups, particularly with how they are covered in the news. Because this is one way in which the image of a person is constructed, through news coverage. There are other ways, of course, such as education, the church, and the family, but these three reasons were just too big for me to capture in this small-scale project. So we focused on news analysis. We did a lot of workshops with students.

For instance, you can read in the newspaper that “a Gypsy person killed a Croatian guy.” But you’ll never see “a Croatian guy killed a Croatian guy.” Or you might read, “a Roma person finished secondary school.” What does this mean, that just one Roma finished secondary school? There’s the positive and the negative coverage, but both are really bad.

We tried to normalize the way these groups are covered in the mainstream media by together making what we called it “virus news.”

I was working a lot with journalism students and anthropology students. I think the way anthropologists treat people here, well, they often see the people as objects. So I was trying to invite Roma people and Chinese people to the workshops so the students don’t talk about “a Chinese person,” but they talk with the actual person who’s in front of them. One Chinese person told me she was a little bit offended because the students were talking about her like she was a frog! I said, “You know, I feel the same way when I’m around art theorists.” So we were laughing, but this is what the work was actually about: how to articulate the problem in such a way that everybody is equal in the dialogue. It is hard on many levels …

For me the most surprising thing was how closed the mainstream media was to this kind of news we were writing together. Take the example of Vox Populi, which is a short feature in the newspaper that asks people a question like “What do you think about this new building?” But the people they ask, it’s always Croatians! So, I wanted them to ask a Chinese person about their opinion of the new building, just one Chinese person out of five Croatians.

“No,” they said. “It’s impossible.”

I said, “Why not?”

And the journalist told me, “Okay, give me the phone numbers of your Chinese and Roma contacts.”

I said, “No, I don’t want to give that to you. You’ll just write the same things as before. You’ll write about the deprived area where the Roma are living. You’ll write about the Chinese shops or the Chinese food in this city. No, I want them to write the news and send it you. It’s not political. It’s just what this person thinks about this particular new building in the city, that’s all.”

“Oh, no!” they said.

The Internet was open to us: the newspapers on the Internet and, maybe you will be surprised, but also the women’s magazines. They said, “Sure, why not? Let’s do it. It will be fun.” But the mainstream media, no. It was completely closed.

I know some journalists working in the mainstream media. They said, “but I can lose my job for that. You don’t understand.”

I said, “No, I don’t. I really don’t. What’s wrong with you guys? It’s Vox Populi. It’s not about praising the Chinese or gay persons! It’s just Vox Populi!”

It’s the same the way the Muslims are presented in the United States. They’re never presented as just ordinary Americans. We had a reality television series called “All-American Muslim.” The right wing criticized it. Why? Because it did not have a Muslim terrorist on the show.

I can’t believe it!

Can you imagine someone insisting that a reality show that featured all white people should have a Ku Klux Klan member?

Exactly.

The show went of the air, basically because it was boring. In other words, it showed that Muslims were pretty much the same as everybody else, and their lives are neither more interesting nor less interesting. Finally a television show was treating Muslims the same as everybody else, but it could not succeed because of the logic of television.

And the logic of popular representations.

For all these projects, it’s about them, not about me. They have to be the main figures and subjects of the projects, not me. I really work a lot on these projects, like a year or years. And I learn a lot from them. For instance, the Chinese people said they also hate us. I said, “Why are you here?” They said to me, “This is just a step on the way to Western Europe.” I invited them to my house to have dinner. They said, “Really? We can come to your house and have dinner? That’s something new!” They were joking, but …

With Roma people, it’s another situation. It’s not as bad as in Hungary. I speak Hungarian, and I know what they do to Roma people in Hungary. It’s far better here. But still, there are problems. These people are completely underprivileged. If you live in a Roma area and you do stuff that Roma are “supposed to do,” then you can do it. But if you want to educate yourself, if you want to have a normal job, it’s another matter. You get on a train and everybody thinks you’re stealing. It’s really bad. The Roma feel it more acutely than the Chinese.

The Open Society Foundations has produced a couple of interesting projects, including one in Serbia in which Roma journalists write about Roma situations.

That was exactly what I wanted to do with my project: Roma writing about their situation and normalizing it. You know, writing it like, “We are one of you and this is the story” rather than “We are this ethnic minority and…”

Yes, it’s very difficult to get it into the mainstream press. You can get it on the Internet, because in some sense, the Internet is unbounded. There’s no limitation to space. Where there’s limitation to space, that’s where the battle takes place over every little inch.

Yes, even if it’s not important. There’s also another issue. There are a few Roma who have succeeded in society and don’t want to say they’re Roma. They change their names. Other Roma complain to me about that. They said, “This person is Roma but they never will come out and say it.”

We say in English, “They pass.” There was a very similar phenomenon in the United States with African Americans. I also interviewed a Roma journalist in Bulgaria. She was identifiably Roma, and she was successful. She was a television anchorwoman. It was one indication that Bulgarian society had changed enough that she could appear on television, but she still had to deal with lots of problems. She told me a powerful story about her brother. Her younger brother could pass. One day he saw a picture of her on the cover of a women’s magazine. And her brother was very proud of his sister’s success. But he was with his friends and he had to make a decision, “Do I say that that’s my sister, because if I say that’s my sister, they will know I’m Roma.”

And?

He decided not to say anything.

Oh! And he told her that? That’s even worse. Oh, that’s terrible.

So these are the terrible choices that people are making. Do you think that joining the EU will make any difference in terms of tolerance?

If you want to enter the EU, you somehow have to open your mind. When we enter the EU, a lot of different races and religions will come here. And this is the only part of the EU I really like. It’s so boring to live here. Everybody’s white. Even when you go to Vienna, which is three hours by car, you will see a big difference. Here, everybody’s Catholic and Croatian and white. The Chinese are the only non-white minority we have, and Croatians don’t like them, as our research showed.

What do the Chinese do here, for the most part?

There’s a big section of the city with a lot of Chinese shops. They do business. They live well, but they work really hard. They’re always working, like 20 hours out of 24. I don’t know how they can manage it. They send their money home; they send their kids home. It’s a tough life. Like the life the Yugoslavs lived in the 1960s and 1970s or the Turkish gastarbeiter in Germany. You come, you work, you send the money back home, you build a house back home, and when you’re old, you go back home to die.

The difference for the Chinese is that they say, “Croatia is just one step, and then we go further to the EU and further West where there is better money.” Here there’s no money. You can’t make a lot of money here. People here joke: “Money’s not a problem because we don’t have any.” So that’s one reason why we don’t have foreigners here.

There’s a lack of opportunity.

So far yes, but I am a little bit afraid that we won’t be particularly nice toward asylum seekers or with people who will come here to make a living.

One of the questions I ask everybody is whether they remember where they were when they heard the news about the fall of the Berlin Wall.

I probably was at home. I remember watching TV, I remember the images and being happy about it. The whole night was a show for us. For us, the Iron Curtain was not that strong. But I felt happy for my relatives in Hungary. They really had a bad history because of the Russians. We tried to help them however we could in the past when the border opened between Yugoslavia and Hungary.

I was born in the same place that my grandmother was born in the north of Vojvodina. But when she was born, it was Hungary and when I was born it was already Yugoslavia. So, half my family is Hungarian and ended up 10 kilometers from the border inside Hungary. For 10 or 15 years the borders were closed. There were these last trains, you know, after the Second World War, and people had to choose who will stay and who will go. But of course it opened in the 1960s. And by 1989, we were already going there a lot and they were coming to us. But I knew that they had a hard life because of the Russians. I was happier for them than for us when the Wall fell down. For us, everybody felt that something horrible would happen. We didn’t know that it would be a war, but we knew that it would be something horrible. Just not as horrible as what really happened.

You were in Hungary for most of that period?

When I finished the fifth year at the academy in Belgrade, that’s when everything really started. My professor said that it would be better if I go. He was a Serb, and he really liked me. He was a nice older guy who was doing big monuments of Partisans fighting the Germans. He was quite famous and he thought of these monuments as an abstract way of doing art. He was always joking that, at the end, you just put a red star on it and say to Tito, “This is for Communism and for the people,” and everything would be fine.

The monuments from that period are just amazing. They’re just complete abstractions.

That’s what I mean. He was bold in that way. He said, “Andreja, it’s better if you leave. You’re one of my best students. I will give you your mark, and you don’t have to come back for the final exhibition.” I thought, “Okay, I guess I really have to go.” So I went to Budapest. I was there for two years, and then I came to Zagreb. It was already more or less peaceful in Zagreb, which wasn’t the case everywhere in Croatia. So, I never was really in the war. But some friends of mine were, and family members also. It really depended on where you lived at that time, and if you were a man, and if you decided to go to war or not.

And why did you decide to go to Zagreb instead of returning to Subotica?

Subotica is a really small city. After the First World War, Subotica was the third biggest city in the region of ex-Yugoslavia, after Belgrade and Zagreb. But today it’s a really small, provincial city that’s completely ruined by politicians. The Partisans hated this city, because it was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and it was where three nations lived: Croatian, Hungarians, and Germans. So they did everything to ruin it. And now the Serbs politicians hate it, because the majority is still not Serbs. The city has such a bad history. It’s very deprived, and it’s a dying city, and there are a lot of suicides there. So, for me, the choice was between Budapest and Zagreb, because I like both cities. But I met my husband, and he’s also Croatian. It was easier for both of us to live here than for him to learn another language.

Hungarian is not an easy language to learn.

No, but it’s a nice language. And the Hungarians love their language. I sometimes joke, “I know two languages that are completely useless: Croatian and Hungarian!” There are 4 million here and 6 million there. But it’s nice, because even with these two languages you can see how differently the people think about history and language, and how differently they raise their kids.

From 1989 until today, on a scale from 1 to 10—1 being most dissatisfied, 10 being most satisfied—how would you evaluate everything that has happened here, from 1989 until today?

Oh, for us, the worst was the war. So, this is 0. It was so bloody stupid to kill each other, such a terrible mistake for everyone involved. But after that, I don’t know. We had a good chance, but we blew it. From 2001 to 2006, it was a nice period when people were able maybe to change something. But then we just sold everything. I really hope that entering the EU, even if it really seems bad for us, that we’ll be able to improve our laws, improve our human rights. And now there’s less money, so I hope that people won’t focus so much on this commercial way of life and instead focus more on the others around them, on society, on networking and solidarity.

Zagreb, October 15, 2012

Western Europe, meanwhile, has often presented itself as the land that has solved the history problem. The different factions in Northern Ireland submitted to protracted negotiations. France and West Germany settled their differences through economic and geopolitical cooperation. West Germany offered apologies and reparations to the victims of the Holocaust. History, in other words, has been tamed. It has been relegated to the safe confines of the textbook and the museum.

Only in the eastern stretches of Europe, according to this presumptuous interpretation, does history remain a problem. The countries to the East, accordingly, show an unhealthy fixation on the past, whether Serbia and the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 or Hungary and the resentments of the Trianon Treaty of 1920. Moreover, East-Central Europe faces the twin challenges of totalitarianism by failing to come to terms with either fascism or Communism.

There are plenty of people in East-Central Europe who would prefer the idealized American or the West European approach to the history of the last 100 years. They’d like to face forward and move on. Or they’d like to presume that their countries, too, have solved the history problem by drawing a thick line between themselves and the past by way of the ruptures of 1989.

But that’s not how Vasil Kadrinov feels. A former political prisoner in Bulgaria, he has worked tirelessly to engage the horrors of the past – in his own country as well as other countries in the region. He has worked to open the files of the Bulgarian secret service and to prevent former officers from participating in politics. He has lobbied to reduce the state pensions of Communist-era functionaries and intelligence officers. He is a founding member of the Platform of European Memory and Conscience.

What motivates him, in part, is not only his own experience as a political prisoner but the experiences of those who served much longer terms. When he was imprisoned in the 1980s, he met Lazar, an old man who was in his 17^th year as a political prisoner. Lazar formed a choir and kept up the spirits of his fellow inmates through music and humor.

“I keep coming back to these stories, especially with the memorial project that I’ve been doing over the last three or four years,” Vasil Kadrinov told me as we sat in an outdoor café in Bulgaria’s second largest city, Plovdiv, last September. “The problem is that such people like Lazar are dying. Our duty is to preserve the memory of them. But every year I grow more disappointed because so few people are active on this topic.”

Vasil Kadrinov is not selective in his approach to history. He doesn’t focus exclusively on the crimes of the Communist era. “One big problem we have with the past is the time before the Communists came to power,” he said. “What kind of society was there in Bulgaria? There is a myth that before the bad Communists came along with the bad Soviet army, it was the very good kingdom of Bulgaria.” For Kadrinov, in other words, the confrontation with Bulgarian history doesn’t just start in 1945.

In our conversation, which continued from an earlier interview about minority issues from five years earlier (reproduced below), we discussed the “history problems” that have plagued Bulgaria for the last century, problems that are not unique to East-Central Europe. Accountability with the past is a challenge for all of Europe and the United States as well.

The Interview

Do you remember where you were when you heard the news about the fall of the Berlin Wall and what were you thinking? And did you think about the impact and influence it would have on Bulgaria?

I remember very well. My mother died in 1984. My father, in 1989, was a doctor in a village about 20 kilometers away from Plovdiv. On that day in 1989, I went to visit him. We were listening to the radio. That was what I did in those days: listen to Radio Free Europe and Deutsche Welle. And that’s how we heard about the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was a very emotional moment for us. I felt that this would be the beginning of important changes in Europe. I’d been following the situation in Poland, the developments in the Soviet Union. This was possible because of these radio stations. It was clear that all these developments would have an impact on Bulgaria. And soon came the replacement of Todor Zhivkov at the top of the Bulgarian Communist Party.

After that I was very deep engaged in the establishing of the Union of Democratic Forces (UDF) here in Plovdiv. With my wife I participated in the great meeting of November 18 in Sofia. And the next two years I was very engaged in establishing the UDF, the organization of the first elections, demonstrations, and so on.

You were obviously very hopeful after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Was there a point when your hopes decreased and you became disappointed in what was happening?

Yes, I remember. There were two moments. One was during my participation as a representative of the Club for Democracy in Plovdiv, at the Coordination Council of the UDF. Our club was part of the UDF in Plovdiv, and this moment of disappointment came in the autumn of 1990, after the first elections. Until the elections I was very optimistic. So many people came to our UDF meetings and demonstrations. And we clearly won the first elections in Plovdiv with more than 60% of the votes.

But in the autumn a decision was made at the national level, in the parliament, that local elections would not be happening soon and instead there would be provisional local authorities. The composition of these local authorities would be proportional to the results of the parliamentary elections. That meant the Bulgarian Socialist Party (the former Communist Party), the UDF, and the other parties here that received significant results in the parliamentary elections. Because the UDF won more than 60%, we could have five or so members of this local provisional council. In the UDF, there was a discussion in the Coordination Council about how to elect people to run.

At that moment, I saw that some of the members of this Coordination Council are just careerists. They were not well educated. They were only thinking about the future and the possibilities of corruption. So, this was the first moment of disappointment. I followed their careers over the years and I see that I’d been quite realistic in my disappointment, because those people became more and more corrupt.

The second moment was around the discussion concerning what to do next. There was too much focus on replacing the bad communists and no serious plan for what kind of reforms had to be done. This was the problem at the national level with the UDF, and this was the reason why I left the UDF the following summer. The UDF split. One part was led by the former Social Democrats and Petar Dertliev. Another was the UDF liberals. My political orientation until now was centrist, and I decided to go with the UDF liberals. They included our democratic clubs, supported by the Bulgarian president at that time, Zheliu Zhelev. There was also the Green Party. With this small coalition we ran in the elections, and during the elections I was a candidate. My duty was to manage the election office of our coalition in Plovdiv.

That’s when my next moment of disappointment came. In the middle of the election campaign, I saw that the internal selection process for candidates was not democratic. It was all decided in Sofia by the heads of this coalition. At that time the election law was such that the government provided money for each party participating in election. It was a standard sum provided by the government for every candidate list. At the top of the list in Plovdiv was a woman candidate. The decision for this was taken in Sofia. She came here with her husband to participate in the election. As manager of the election office, I organized some people to work on the campaign. There were some expenses for cars, for gas. At one moment I asked for reimbursement. But she said to me, “You will not receive this money. This money is for us.” She meant her and her husband. I knew, and this was officially declared later, that her husband, as a journalist with the national radio station, was an officer of the Communist State Security. She, too, was a journalist with the national radio. I went to Sofia, to the central office of this coalition and I showed them the receipts for the expenses and said, “Please pay this, this, and this.” They paid everything. And I said goodbye. I left them totally.

Those are two important moments: your anticipation of corruption and the actual corruption itself.

Yes. And the role of the former state security.

I want to go back to the early 1980s. You’ve told me that you were quite young when you went to political prison: only 26 years old. How long were you in prison?

The sentence was prison for 18 months. And I was in prison for 13 months. For every day of work you did in prison, they took a day off your stay. This was for everybody, not special for me. So I spent 13 months in Stara Zagora prison.

What did they accuse you of doing?

It was in a court in Plovdiv. I was accused of disseminating “false” information about society — books critical of society — and providing “difficulties for the people’s republic”. For that people were sentenced to five years in prison. I’d been giving out the book of Aleksandar Solzhenitsen, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, to my college students.

A Bulgarian translation of it, or in Russian?

This translation was made at the beginning of the 1960s, and a friend of mine gave it to me. At this time the book was not in the library, but it had been printed in Bulgaria during the rule of Khrushchev in the Soviet Union.

It won an award in the Soviet Union when it was published. It was also published in a journal …

Novy Mir.

Right. But then of course Solzhenitsen fell out of favor.

Another problem was that I talked against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and I supported the Solidarnosc movement in Poland. The judges decided that I provided difficulties to another country of the workers, namely the Soviet Union.

So you provided difficulties to a lot of people.

Yes!

Do you remember a point when you were young when you began thinking of yourself as a dissident?

My parents didn’t speak with me about the Communist system. They were not Communists. They were not in favor of this system. My father had many difficulties, because his father was declared a kulak in the 1950s. But my parents decided not to talk about this until I went to the army. In the army, I was sent to the border guard military units. I was not exactly on the border, but I was in this unit. My duty was radio telegraphing. Hundreds of young men were brought there to maintain the border with Turkey. Our main aim was to prevent the escape of people from the country, whether Bulgarians or Germans or Poles. We were near the Black Sea coast and the mountain town of Malko Tarnovo. I stayed there two years. None of the political officers could explain why we were there, who were the enemies, who were these deserters who wanted to cross the border. The political education at that time consisted of only one question: who are the members of the Politburo of the Communist Party. This was, for me, quite profound.

Before going into the army, I was a candidate in sociology at the University of Sofia. I did my exams in Bulgarian literature and history, and I won a place at university. This was 1978. Returning to Sofia from the army in 1980, I remember that the Komsomol at the university made an appeal for donations to the people of Poland to send them food and so on. My father at that time was a doctor in Libya. It was very difficult for him to get approval to go there to earn more money, because doctors received poor salaries here in Bulgaria. He sent us money and we bought two good radios, one for me and one for my mother in Plovdiv. For the first time, I began to listen to Radio BBC, Radio Free Europe, Deutsche Welle, and so on. And I started to follow the developments in Poland. In the border guard forces I didn’t receive any information. But the moment I got back to Sofia, I began to understand that everything they were telling us was false. During those two or three months, I realized that everything was a great lie.

When was that?

In the late autumn of 1980.

Just after Solidarity began in August 1980.

Yes, in August. I came from the army in September and went to Sofia in October. The Komsomol was collecting these donations for Christmas or the new year. Around the same time, my mother, who was working in an agricultural high school near Plovdiv, brought home some students from Afghanistan. About 20 people from Afghanistan had come to Bulgaria to study agriculture. They were not that young, maybe from 20 to 30 years old. They were brought here as some kind of support to the “Communist revolution” in Afghanistan. But really, only a very small number of them believed in Communist ideology. They came to us very often, because my mother was appointed by the director to work with them. They became friends. They came to us and discussed what was happening in Afghanistan, with Nur Muhammed Taraki and so on. These stories brought our home much closer to the developments around the world, in the Soviet Union, in Poland.

Later, when you gave the copy of Solzenitsen’s book A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich to other students, did it occur to you that what you were doing was a political risk?

It was not so clear. I was not alone. We were a group of friends, one from Plovdiv, one from Varna, and it wasn’t only this book. The next book that we disseminated was Fascism by Zhelyu Zhelev. I bought Fascism at the bookshop. And my mother borrowed this book from the library of her school. I didn’t think about the risks. We were young. We didn’t think about it up until the day when the state security came to my home and arrested me. Later we supposed that there had been informants. But we were just doing this among friends. We hadn’t gone to the next stage, of organizing demonstrations and so on.

Did any of your other friends get arrested?

Yes, two others were arrested, and three were charged. In 1984, my mother died of cancer. One month before my mother’s death, I got married to my wife. And three months after that, I was arrested. So the state security investigated my wife too. She was very young, only 21 years old. They investigated the wives of my other two friends. But they decided only to charge the men since we formed one group of friends.

At the time, did you know very much about the political camp system?

No. I didn’t have relatives in my family who had been in prison or the camp system. Only my grandfather had been repressed as kulak. He was not so rich, but he had not supported the Communists. I didn’t have anyone from my family to tell me about the prison camps.

The first place I was taken after my arrest by the state security in Sofia was Razvigor 1. This was the name of the street where the main investigation unit of the Communist state security was located, and I was there for two months. After that I was in the Sofia central prison for two months. After I was sentenced, I was sent to Stara Zagora prison. There were many Turks there at that time, because our arrests coincided with a big repression campaign against the Bulgarian Turks. So I have many friends from this group until today who were together in Razvigor 1, the central prison, and the Stara Zagora prison. In Stara Zagora, there were other political prisoners, but there were many Turks.

Were there also common criminals there as well?

Yes. In Stara Zagora, they were mixed. And a great number of them were informants for the prison administration. Also at Stara Zagora was one of my friends from our original group. And another friend was in a different section of the prison. We developed a coded language to talk with one another. At that time the other big issue was the death of Konstantin Chernenko and the coming of Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union. And that began to influence the situation in Bulgaria. The repression at this time was not so hard. I also believe that some people in the regime were beginning to prepare to become the first capitalists, especially those in the state security. They were sending money to foreign bank accounts and preparing for the privatization process.

Before you went to prison, did you know anything about the situation of ethnic Turks in Bulgaria?

No. I never had contact with Turks, because I was living in Plovdiv. I never visited the Turkish areas. The Turks who were in the prison, especially in Sofia and in Stara Zagora, were from areas where there had been resistance. For example, I have many friends from Momchilgrad, where seven people were killed. The Turks who organized the demonstration against forced assimilation received nine, ten, twelve-year sentences. They were in prison until 1989. They spent four years there.

Before you met with ethnic Turks for the first time, did you have certain preconceptions of ethnic Turks?

I don’t think so. For example, my mother was a pedagogue, and at this school she was responsible for 90 young girls living in a building on campus. Some of them were Turks. And my father was a doctor mostly in villages, so he helped very different peoples: Gypsies, Turks. So there was a lot of tolerance in my family and no stereotypes. In my first contacts with Turks in the prison, I found them to be very friendly, intelligent, honest, and courageous. I was impressed at that time, and it really helped me in my own situation of being imprisoned. I became more courageous because of these people.

What did they tell you about the name-change campaign, and were you shocked?

It was difficult for Western radio stations to collect information about what actually happened in 1984. In August 1984, there was a bombing attempt at the railway station in Plovdiv, close to where we were living. At that time my mother was very ill from cancer, and my father had come home, and we all were at home. My father took a leave from the hospital to be with my mother. He told us one day that the central railway station was surrounded by the militia. So something had happened. But what had happened? This was the first information for me that something was happening with the Turks. Until now, it’s not clear who organized this attempt. Later, they charged three Turks and executed them. Interestingly, they’ve been identified as collaborationists with the state security. This remains a murky story until now. It’s not clear if the Communist state security organized this attempt in order to begin their campaign against the Turks or whether it was really organized by the Turks. I was not in contact with the organizers when I was in prison. They were charged later, in 1986 or 1987.

My Turkish friends told me different stories about their villages, about what happened in Momchilgrad, for instance. There was an elderly man from the village of Yablanovo. We were together in a cell in the Razvigor prison. He was very ill. He had high blood pressure and didn’t have his medicine, so he was not in good condition. He told me the story of the tanks that came to the Yablanovo. After that, I heard that they organized resistance in Yablanovo. It is near Sliven, in the Balkan Mountains. The Turks told us that everything happened very quickly. The Red Berets, the internal forces of the Ministry of Interior, arrived. The Turks were beaten. Some were killed. There were spontaneous demonstrations, and everything happened in two or three days: the arrival of state security, the counter-demonstration, the killings, the arrests. The machinery of the state was brought to bear on their village.

What was the actual condition of your life in Stara Zagora? How many people were in the cell?

We were four people in the cell. It was a small cell, the beds stacked on top of each other. Between the beds was about 70 centimeters so that we could stand. Every evening the guards came to check on us, and we stood in a line, four men one behind the other. The conditions in the central prison were very bad because it was an old prison. There was very little food. On the other side of the corridor were people who were sentenced to death. They were executing people, so some of them were crying. It was a very bad atmosphere.

Last year I went back for the first time, with a documentary film crew from the German television station RTL. I was researching stories of young people from the GDR who escaped to Turkey and Greece through Bulgaria. There were two editors on this documentary, and one of them, Freya Klier, had been a young girl who tried to escape the GDR to Sweden. We researched different stories about young people from the GDR who escaped, some of whom had been killed. In the documentary, we talked about two boys who were killed on the Greek border. Another one, Thomas Müller, had his foot amputated in the Burgas hospital. Other deserters such as a brother and sister from Dresden were brought to the central prison in Sofia.

We went with the film crew to the section I’d been in and took pictures. I didn’t find many changes. There was only a new primitive toilet in the cell. I looked into my neighbor’s cell, because at that time nobody was being held there. I said to the guard, “I was here about 25 years ago, and there aren’t many changes.” He said to me, “You were here for only a short time and you have forgotten what it was like here. And you are not doing enough to change these conditions.” And there was nothing I could say to this man in reply. In 2006, a delegation of members from the Green group of the European Parliament came to Bulgaria. I was an assistant to this group. This was before the accession of Bulgaria to the European Union in 2006. We had a meeting in the Ministry of Justice with the deputy minister responsible for prisons. He asked the Greens to lobby for money from the EU for new prisons in Bulgaria. Until now, there have been no new prisons.

In Stara Zagora, you said you did work to take time off your sentence. What kind of work was it?

In the prison was a factory for furniture. We made beds for small children, bureaus for writings, and so on. About 100 prisoners worked in this factory.

How was the work?

It wasn’t such hard work. I think it was similar to what workers were doing in regular factories. It was the prison that was the problem, not the work in this factory. Maybe it even helped make the time go more quickly. Because if you stay in a cell all day…

You go crazy.

Yes.

Did you have access to reading material?

There was a library with some books and newspapers like Rabotnichesko Delo and Narodna Mladej. On Sundays, we could watch Bulgarian national television in the afternoon. There was a show Vsiaka Nedelia (Every Sunday). On this show was a Pink Panther cartoon that I liked very much because it was humorous.

Did anything change very much for you, from the first day you were at Stara Zagora to the last day you were in prison? Or did you come into Stara Zagora the same person that you left Stara Zagora?

I think not. In our cells was an elderly man, Lazar, who was in this prison for the third time. It was his 17th year. He’d been in the Belene camp for six or seven years. He’d been charged under the same statute as me – creating difficulties for the People’s Republic. When I was in Stara Zagora, he was arrested for the third time. And there had been no sentence this time. He’d been let out in 1962 under an amnesty. But he continued to speak out against the Party, so they arrested him again and told him he had to finish his sentence from the 1950s. What I learned from Lazar was to have a sense of humor. He had a good sense of humor. He also organized a choir. He taught us to sing, and we all sang songs together. He kept up his spirit. I also learned from him that these Communists are small people, careerists, corrupt. They are liars. They were strong at that time, stronger than us, but we never lost our courage and spirit and humor.

Another moment was when I was in the central prison of Sofia. One of the prisoners had some magazines and newspapers. One of these magazines was a literary magazine with a short story by Heinrich Böll. In this story Böll wrote that he was a soldier in the Wehrmacht up to the end of the Second World War. He described a central order from the Nazi military that if one German soldier met another German soldier who was obviously deserting, the first soldier had to kill the second soldier. But if they were both in an area away from the battle, they were both deserting and they therefore had to kill each other! I remember this story because it showed how stupid the totalitarian societies are. And it gave me courage, this story.

I have such great respect for those people who spent more time in prison than I did.

Did Lazar ever make it out of prison?

Yes, he was released. I didn’t see him after that. I asked my friend from Varna some years later, and he told me, “Yes, Lazar is alive.” But later I heard that he died. I keep coming back to these stories, especially with the memorial project that I’ve been doing over the last three or four years. The problem is that such people like Lazar are dying. Our duty is to preserve the memory of them. But every year I grow more disappointed because so few people are active on this topic.

I am a founding member of the Platform of European Memory and Conscience. In the other countries, for example in the Czech Republic, there is an institute for the study of totalitarian regimes. There’s full access to the archives, and there are memorial places, such as former camps and prisons. In the former GDR, there are many such Gedenkstätten (memorial places, in German). I was just in Bucharest where there was a conference on the teaching of the history of communism as an opportunity to teach human rights. There were people from 13 countries. The situation today in Bulgaria is better than in Albania, but everywhere else is better than here. So it’s no wonder that in Bulgaria the communist oligarchy could again take power in recent years. Yesterday, Sergei Stanishev was elected to the chair of the party of the European Socialists. This man was Bulgaria’s prime minister in 2009. He has said, “What normal man could be interested in the archives?” So, obviously we are not normal!

In 2006, I organized with the Greens an effort to put pressure on the European Parliament to open the archives here. They’d been closed by the government of Tsar Simeon. The tsar, you see, was brought here by the Communists in 2001 to manage the country through him as prime minister. He became corrupt. He was interested again in acquiring the ownership of some forests, and they doubled his holdings. The Communists have in fact controlled the entire political spectrum. For example, there are seven social democratic parties and four Green parties. Three of the Green parties are managed by the former Communists, and there are no real Social Democratic parties in the country.

Even the one founded by Petar Dertliev?

We are in need of such a party. But the party of Dertliev is declining. It has no representation in parliament.

Is it still the case that you have no access to the archives?

We have access, but it will be last many years before full access will be possible. In other countries, like the Czech Republic, the archives were not moved to another building. It’s the same with the GDR. I was in Berlin last July when I worked for 20 days in the archives of the Stasi. It’s in the same building where it was. In Bulgaria, however, the law is to establish a new archive and construct a new building for this archive. But they haven’t organized the proper registration.

If you go to the archives today, there are only five places in the reading room, and the head of this archive is a former officer of the militia. In 2006, he was a member of the parliament representing the former Communist Party, and he proposed at that time that the archives should be closed for 120 years. So now he says, “We are following the law.” Until now they have published, I think, 7,000 names of people in public positions. And they usually publish the names of collaborators. But they haven’t published all the names of the officers, because usually the officers are not now in public positions. And, according to the propaganda slogan, these officers worked on behalf of national state security, just like in all other countries, and therefore they are patriots.

With a small group of people, we’ve undertaken a few actions including a campaign for a clean parliament in 2007. A “clean parliament” means that former agents cannot become members of parliament. We received some small funding from Romania of about $4,000 that I think originally came from the National Endowment for Democracy. With this $4,000, we made and disseminated posters. On these posters were pictures of candidates that had been agents, and we urged voters not to vote for these candidates.

In 2009, I worked with some former prisoners, the Anna Politkovskaya Association, and another center for the support of victims of torture, which is a group of psychologists. We organized a public pledge for parties entering the elections that they would not field any former agents on their lists. Thirteen parties signed. But GERB did not. Nor did BSP or the Movement for Rights and Freedoms, the Turkish party. Only the small parties signed.

In 2010, I went with GERB representatives to the European parliament. One member of this European parliament, Andrei Kovachev representing GERB, invited about 30 former prisoners, very elderly people. After that there was meeting with others from Stara Zagora. I heard that the goal was to get them to support GERB for the presidential and local elections. They got the support of a 90-year-old man, Dyanko Markov, who had been a pilot during World War II who fought against U.S. bombers over Sofia. After that, he spent many years in prison. He was this nationalistic officer. Now he made a speech saying, “GERB is our hope! They will dismiss every Communist!” I do not believe this. GERB is mostly former Communists and militiamen. The problem in Bulgaria is that there are no real democratic parties. The mainstream parties are created by the former Communists or security agents. To establish a new, real, democratic party is difficult because of the monopoly the former Communists have over the media and because of the four-percent barrier in the election law.

I spoke about three times at hearings in the European parliament, organized by mainly this EPP (European People’s Party) group. There’s also a group of members of the European parliament coming from the Baltics who are really anti-totalitarianism-oriented: Sandra Kalniete from Latvia (who was born in a concentration camp in Siberia), Vytautas Landsbergis (the former head of state of Lithuania), Tunne Kelam from Estonia, Laszlo Tokes from Romania, and a younger member from Slovenia, Milan Zver. They are lobbying in the European parliament for to memorialize the Communist crimes. But aside from them, there are not so many people who are against Communism in the West, who understand that this was the same as Nazism, that this legacy is a big problem for Europe.

What do I see now in Bulgaria? I see that one million active people have left Bulgaria, and many of the people who are still here voted for GERB. They continue to hope for a leader, a tsar, a cowboy, a sheriff who will solve anything. This is very close to totalitarian mass thinking. So, this totalitarianism not only comes from evil leaders—Hitler, Stalin, or Lenin—it also comes from the masses.

In 2010, I organized a petition to the parliament to reduce the pensions of the former communist functionaries and state security officers. But the problem was that it’s difficult to organize people to collect signatures on the street or organize demonstrations. Some of the former political prisoners are disappointed. Some have become apathetic. This petition on the pensions was discussed in the petition committee of the national parliament. The chairperson of this committee was from the UDF—Yordan Bakalov—and he said it is too late for this. Why too late? They are now receiving these pensions. And other people receive very low pensions. I collected 1100 signatures, mostly through the Internet. It was hard to ask our political prisoners, who are really ill people and quite old, to stand on the street. In the end, the petition was sent to the committee for social policy. After two years: nothing.

We’ve had some victories. We make protests at the embassies where the Bulgarian ambassadors are former state security: Netherlands, Greece, Serbia. And the government replaced these people – 35 in all – so that is some reform. Last year, the granddaughter of Todor Zhivkov decided to officially celebrate the 100th birthday of her grandfather in Pravets. The government of GERB decided to send the orchestra of the national Bulgarian army. With the Anna Politkovskaya Association along with three other groups, we quickly decided to send an open letter to Angela Merkel because she had met with Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borisov. And this is funny but after only three or four hours, they decided not to send the orchestra. So this too was actually a victory.

In the autumn of 2009, we protested the choice of Rumiana Zheleva as Bulgaria’s nominee to the European Commission. The interesting thing is that she was an owner of one of the firms of the former state security, and her husband is engaged in this business group from Varna that includes former officers of the military intelligence. He is one of the richest people in Bulgaria. Zheleva was forced to step down, and Kristalina Georgieva was appointed in her place. So this is some progress.

In Prague last year, we were discussing the statutes of our platform, the Platform of European Memory and Conscience (PEMC). Vytautas Landsbergis and I proposed that nobody involved with this platform should be an organization that have been headed by former members of the repressive forces. And in December 2012, a member of this panel seeking reelection, Ekaterina Boncheva, proposed the Bulgarian panel handling the secret service archive for membership in the PEMC. Evtim Konstantinov signed the statute and declared that nobody in this Bulgarian panel was a member of the repressive forces. Someone in Prague called me and asked, “Do you know that he was militiaman? How was it that he signed this?” And I said to them, “Please send a letter to the prime minister, to the Ministry of Interior, to Foreign Affairs, and to the chairwoman of the parliament.” This Boncheva and this Konstantinov started a propaganda campaign against me: that I wanted to be on this panel, that I was making difficulties for our country in Prague.

In 2007, the former Communists refused to elect to this panel Georgi Konstantinov, who was the nominee of the former president Petar Stoyanov. When Georgi was a young man, only 20 years old, he was an anarchist. He blew up the monument of Joseph Stalin in Sofia. This was about a week before the death of Stalin, so he was not sentenced to death. The sentence was 12 years in prison, so at the beginning of the 1960s he was released. He escaped to France, but now he’s living in Sofia. He was one of those who wanted at the beginning of the 1990s to take the state security to court. In 1992, the court declared him not guilty. But he is the only one who made such an appeal to the court.

All others, like me and other prisoners, we were rehabilitated in 1990 by a decision of the last Communist “parliament.” But now, according to the law, members of this panel must be never charged with a crime whether rehabilitated or not. So for all of us, this was forbidden.

We started a quick campaign, about 10-15 people, making a protest at the Ministry of Justice and in front of this panel building. But GERB decided to propose the former militiaman Evtim Konstantinov again and Boncheva again.

The president of our platform in Prague is Goran Lindbladt, from Sweden. He was rapporteur at the political committee of the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe. He is no longer a member of the Swedish parliament. He’s a dentist, and I find he’s an honest man. I invited him that to come to Sofia during our campaign against the reelection of the former militiaman Evtim Konstantinov to this panel and to participate in our campaign for the change of the rule that former prisoners could not be part of the commission. He participated in the press conference with former political prisoners.

We had a meeting with the Union of Democratic Forces and the co-chair at the that time of the Blue Coalition, Martin Dimitrov, and with him was Latchezar Toshev, a former Bulgarian representative at the Council of Europe parliamentary assembly, so a colleague of Lindbladt. And at that meeting, Toshev and Dimitrov said, “Okay, we will support everything. We will soon propose a lustration law.” For us, this was very important.

This lustration law was discussed in the first week of September 2012 in the plenary of the Bulgarian parliament. The vote was interesting. The Blue Coalition has 14 members, and only two voted for this proposal. And about eight so-called “independent” members supported the law, plus maybe two from the GERB and two from the Movement for Rights and Freedoms. So, overall, it received about 13 or 14 votes. But from the Blue Coalition, only two. So, the law failed.

I work with the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in Sofia along with a group of young historians. We are now preparing about 18 brochures, each one focused on some topic of the communist totalitarian regime: the economy, culture, everyday life, the Party, the propaganda related to minorities. Our circle of former prisoners also adopted here in Plovdiv a declaration on the 9th of June. One of the demands has been the transfer of the security archives to the national archive so that everybody has access and it would no longer be controlled by a panel appointed by the governing oligarchy. Another demand is to establish an Institute of National Memory.

But I’m pessimistic about the feasibility of such an institution in a country like Bulgaria, given the current political leadership. The director of the agency for the National Archives intends to make a museum, because the central office of the national archives is in the same building that the state security occupied in the 1950s. It’s very close to the Communist Party headquarters, the same building that was set on fire in the summer of 1990. He asked the Konrad Adenauer Foundation to finance this project. He didn’t ask the government. It is so stupid to ask someone from abroad. And the director of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation Sofia said that he can’t support the complete project. People could go to Germany to look at the experience of these institutions of memory. But the Foundation couldn’t invest all that money for this project.

In Latvia, in Riga, there is a memorial museum devoted to the occupation of Latvia – by both the Nazis and the Soviets. It’s an educational center, and they’re working with young people. It is not financed by the government but by Latvian émigrés. The government only provided the building, which is in the center of Riga, a former propaganda institution for the Pioneers and the Komsomol.

I think that here too an Institute for National Memory has to be established by civil society. I will try to convince the former prisoners to maintain our independence. But this is difficult, because I myself have to spend time organizing people, making phone calls, writing letters. When I was an assistant at the European parliament, I had some stability. I had an office and money for travel and for making phone calls. It’s more difficult now. Also, Bulgarian émigrés are divided: one’s a social democrat, another’s an agrarian, a third is a nationalist.

One big problem we have with the past is the time before the Communists came to power. What kind of society was there in Bulgaria? There is a myth that before the bad Communists came along with the bad Soviet army, it was the very good kingdom of Bulgaria. The Communists destroyed everything. But after the First World War, the big problem in Bulgaria was extreme nationalism. These nationalists said: the people in Macedonia are really Bulgarian, and so are the people in Eastern Thrace, and so are the people in Kavala in northern Greece. But there were not only Bulgarians living in these places. There were very mixed populations: Turks, Pomaks, Greeks, Serbians, Albanians. This dream of a “Great Bulgaria” was the biggest problem for Bulgaria in the 20th century, because it brought genocide and other crimes. When Bulgaria entered the First World War with Germany, the result was hundreds of thousands of deaths and Bulgaria ended up ceding eastern Thrace. And in the Second World War, Bulgaria entered a pact with Hitler, occupied Greece and Macedonia, and sent the Jews of Macedonia and Greece to their deaths in the concentration camps. Until now, our history textbooks said that it was not possible for Bulgaria to save the Jews. But then why was Bulgaria in this pact with Hitler?

After the Soviet army arrived in Bulgaria after the Second World War, the Communists started to kill many people. But there was terror before this. And this is not discussed in Bulgaria until now. In Hungary, there is a museum of terror. But it deals not only with the terror of the Communists but of the previous regime.

The “white terror” of Admiral Horthy.

Yes. So, such a museum about totalitarian terror must include the resistance to the previous terror as well.

But how can we achieve this? It’s difficult because a million people have left the country. There is apathy. It’s difficult to engage young people. The former prisoners are very old people. I’m trying to collaborate with international friends, like this group in the European parliament and so on.

What do you think about the level of extreme nationalism in Bulgaria today on the one hand and level of pro-environmentalism on the other hand? Is there any relationship between the two?

First about the nationalism. It seems that nationalism is cultivated by forces that want to control Bulgaria. This Ataka Party, the main spokesperson of Bulgarian nationalism, is financed probably by Russia. It was established in Burgas as a powerful TV program and station. Their first members in parliament was a group of former state security officers, and they never said anything against Russia. They prefer to speak against the U.S. ambassador, against U.S. imperialism. They like to speak against Turkey, against the Roma population, against the Jews. But if you do a content analysis, they never speak about the human rights situation in Russia, or about Russian politics in the Balkans, in Europe, in the rest of the world. I think that Bulgarian nationalism is an ideological tool of the oligarchy to maintain influence over society. By having enemies like the Turks, the Jews, the Roma, it’s easier to control society through hate speech.

In terms of environmentalism, I know some very good environmental protection groups. Some of them are branches of international organizations, like the World Wildlife Fund, Friends of the Earth, Bank Watch. But this kind of NGO is financed by the European Commission, so I don’t believe that they can really be called NGOs. Other NGOs receive funding from the present Bulgarian government, so I would say that they are paid by and depend on the government. The Bulgarian government is engaged in several corruption cases concerning environmental issues, like the designation of Nature 2000 areas in the Rila Mountains. I am very engaged in this. For six years, there has been no decision about the buffer zone in the Rila Mountains. There is strong interest in constructing ski runs and ski resorts there, similar to the construction interests along the Black Sea coast. Some small environmental groups not financed by the European Commission or by the government defended these areas. To protect the Rila Mountains, Citizens for Rila gathered 140,000 signatures. I am also a member of this group.

There are also some cases related to underground resources. In Bulgaria, there are several underground resources like gold and copper. But the policy of the governments since the middle of the 1990s has been to provide these resources as concessions at a low tax rate. There’s a Canadian-based company connected with former Communist state security agents exploring the gold mine in Chelopech and polluting the Topolnitsa River with arsenic. The government tolerates this. They have a plan for a second mine in Krumovgrad. They brought a smelter from Namibia, and it’s forbidden to operate such a smelter that is polluting with arsenic here in the European Union. Yet the government approves this and the taxes are very low, and this means the government is corrupt. And not only this government but every government from Ivan Kostov to Tsar Simeon to Sergei Stanishev. A small group of environmental activists are saying that this ore and these underground resources are our national resources, and we should not give them to mafias. We have to use them for our country in a way that protects the environment and the public health.

But I would not call this extreme nationalism. Ataka has exploited this topic. Also, a former member of Ataka who is now in the European parliament – Slavi Binev – has said, “They are now our national resources.” But I cannot say that the environmentalists have anything to do with Slavi Binev or with Ataka. Sometimes they are saying similar things about the preservation of national resources, that it’s not in the national interest to give away resources to international mafia companies.

I’d like to end with three brief quantitative questions. The first is, when you think about all that has changed here in Bulgaria from 1989 until today, how would you evaluate that change on a scale from 1 to 10, with 1 being most disappointed and 10 being most satisfied?

Three.

The same spectrum, 1 being most dissatisfied, 10 being most satisfied: how do you feel about what has changed in your own personal life, between 1989 until today?

So, I like everything in my life, and I think it’s 10.

And then when you look into the near future, the next 1 or 2 years here in Bulgaria, how do you feel about what will happen here on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 bing most pessimistic and 10 being most optimistic?

Again, 3.

Plovdiv, September 30, 2012

The Interview (2007)

On the Roma

The Roma first came to Europe in the 9th century and not much later to Bulgaria. This place is a crossroads of cultures and peoples.

There’s not been serious historical research on the Roma during Turkish rule. But after liberation from 500 years of Turkish occupation at end of 19th century, Bulgaria was a capitalist state with a king and a democratic constitution. For 60 years, Roma were able to say that they were Roma – there was no problem with their identity. The majority, the Bulgarians, perceived them as the people with whom they’d been living for centuries. This was the perception of the majority of Turks, too. There were no conflicts between Bulgarians and Turks. Then came the Russian soldiers. They came to liberate, according to Stalin, but it’s not true: they came to occupy. They promoted a communist totalitarian regime. At first, during this period, there was Roma theater, Turkish newspapers. After that, for the next 40 years, the Roma minority disappeared from the totalitarian public media, from TV, from newspapers. The communist government focused on heavy industry, and they needed people to work in those factories. Some of the Roma worked in agriculture, which was collectivized under communism. Some of the Roma worked in the factories. At that time, instead of putting Roma into the army, the communists put young Roma men into a kind of labor army that made some of the biggest things in Bulgaria at that time – plants, railways, etc.

So that was the position of the Roma minority under communism. They had to work, they had to stay silent. They could not move around as they did before. They had to have some basic education. And they had to remain absent from public life. The communist policy on housing in the bigger cities was to construct blocks where Roma had to live like Bulgarians. But the Roma have a lot of children. They want more space. In the 1970s and the beginning of 1980s, the communists decided to stimulate the growth of the population because they needed cheap labor. The Roma community, too, received pretty good per-child payments. Some Roma families became quite big.

There is no police presence in the ghetto – only when there was a big problem. In this ghetto, during the dictatorship, there was some order. And, at that time, more in the Roma community had some work. It might not have been good work, but at least it was work. But after 1990 and the start of the changes, more of these plants were closed. At the beginning of the 1990s, many of the Roma became jobless. They started to travel to Macedonia, Serbia, and Turkey to do some small trading, import-export. They did some work in illegal construction. At this peak of unemployment, they started to travel. With the father and mother gone, the children stopped going to school. This new generation of Roma grew up on the streets. This new generation is now 18 and 19 years old. In the middle of the 1990s, social protection payments began. So even if you don’t work, you can still get some money. It was chaotic. The money often did not go to jobless people. Also, in some Roma quarters, they stopped electricity. Some political parties, for instance the Union of Democratic Forces (UDF) the party of the mayor in my city), told the Roma that they didn’t have to pay electricity bills. This became the tradition, and other parties started to pay for votes. Many Bulgarians say, “The Roma don’t pay for electricity, why do we have to pay? They get social payments, why do we have to pay taxes to support them?”

Right now, unemployment is not so high. The economy is better. There is a lot of construction in Sofia and along the Black Sea. Some of the money is recycled from communist times, from state security. Some of it is from drugs. But there are more jobs now. Still, many Roma go to other countries to work – to Spain, to Greece. They send home money. Many times, the European Union insisted that Bulgaria improve education and the overall situation of the Roma. During the negotiation process on accession to the EU, they made recommendations every three months. But there were no results. Another factor was George Soros. He came at the beginning of the 1990s. He established the Roma Rights Center. For more than 15 years, he has spent money on this issue. But really, he just picked out nomenklatura, Roma apparatchiks who like to represent the community. They go to conferences, endless seminars. There are books and studies, But there is no political struggle. These representatives are not elected. Where is the democracy in the Roma community?

The president of Finland proposed to the Council of Europe to construct something like a European Roma parliament. Finally, elections were going to take place in the Roma community. The parliament consists of 150 members, who are Roma from different countries. But the Bulgarian Roma did not hold elections. They wrote protocols. They chose the ones who were ‘elected’ and gave the protocols to the Council of Europe.

There are six or seven Roma parties. One of these is in the coalition of Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP). There is one parliamentary member from the Roma community. Other parties were formed in the middle of the 1990s. There are educated Roma who are not so dependent on Soros money or the BSP or the Roma or non-Roma mafias. One of them, Vasil Choprasov, publishes a newspaper every two weeks – with money from Soros and others.

There is a new player that arrived on the scene at the beginning of the century. This is the old oligarchy, mostly from former state security. They supported the king when his party took power. But then they produced a new party, the Ataka Party. In spring 2005, this party owned a television network. Party members participated in elections with strong anti-Roma and anti-Turkish slogans. They are anti-Semitic. Their leader, Volen Siderov, likes Hitler. In addition to their TV station, they also own a newspaper. In their media, you hear that there are Roma criminals and nothing is done. You hear that the Turks are bad because they have been in government. The next enemy is America, who is seen as the aggressor. They received 7% of the vote in 2005 and formed a parliamentary faction. They have three members in the European Parliament.

On Ethnic Turks

Numbering 800,000, the ethnic Turks are the largest minority. Before the Word War II, there were no conflicts with the Turks in Bulgaria. At the beginning of communist rule, the government closed the borders. The Turkish minority could emigrate to Turkey. Most did not leave. Next, the government prohibited the Turkish newspaper. The Turks didn’t have a party before World War II. It wasn’t forbidden but the Turks didn’t feel any pressure to create a party. During the communist period, Turks remained in their villages working. They could practice Islam. But at the beginning of the 1980s, because of the new policies of Reagan, Thatcher, and John Paul II, and because of the opposition movements in Russia, Poland, and Hungary, the Bulgarian dictator Todor Zhivkov decided that this Turkish minority was a danger because it was independent and because it was connected to a different mother state. The Bulgarian government began to force ethnic Turks to change their names. If they spoke Turkish on the street, they were fined. It was a campaign of terror. The government used tanks and state security forces to operate this terror. They killed people. They opened a concentration camp on an island in the Danube and filled it with Turks. They received sentences of 10-15 years. Many stayed in prison for six years. This government policy started in 1984 and peaked in 1985.

After the death of Andropov and the coming of Gorbachev in the Soviet Union, the Bulgarian government decided in 1989 to launch a different campaign. It opened the border with Turkey. About 300,000 Turks left the country. Some of them stayed in Turkey. Many of them decided to return to Bulgaria. The state security people were interested in constructing a party that could speak in the name of the Turkish minority. This party, The Movement for Rights and Freedom (MRF), is led by Ahmed Dogan. It has consistently won seats in the parliament. There is no other Turkish party. And the other Bulgarian parties generally don’t have Turks as members. So the MRF has achieved monopoly position. If you are Turkish, you vote for the Turkish party. Now, some of the Roma are Muslims. The MRF does not want these Roma to have their own party and take away votes. This is one barrier for the development of a Roma party. But there remains the question: what will be better for the Roma – to have a strong Roma party or to promote polices aimed to improve the situation of the Roma through the other, non-ethnically-based parties?

So, for instance, observers describe North Koreans as “childlike” and their leader as a “spoiled child.” Chinese leaders, according to Wikileaks, have viewed North Korean behavior as an attempt to get the attention of the “adult.” Even top U.S. politicians fall prey to these stereotypes. In 2009, Secretary of State Hilary Clinton accused North Korea of “acting out” like an unruly child. And President Barack Obama said during the latest crisis, “You don’t get to bang … your spoon on the table and somehow you get your way.”

As we slowly step back from the edge of the current conflict, it’s important to revisit these characterizations of North Korea as a fundamentally immature creature. There are many problems with U.S. policy toward the country, including lack of information, a limited number of policy options, and a preference to ignore the situation in favor of other hotspots around the world.

But we also have a metaphor problem with North Korea. We commonly treat the country as if it were a donkey that responds only to carrots or sticks and doesn’t have an independent thought inside its equine head (not even horse sense). Or we view North Korea as a criminal that breaks every agreement it signs and whose recidivism rate is off the charts.

But the metaphor that dominates our thinking about North Korea is even more insulting. Donkeys and criminals at least make calculations based on costs and benefits. Infants are nothing but unbridled ids whose pre-lingual motivations are largely opaque to the adult world. They go on crying jags and knock cereal bowls off trays for no apparently good reason. That North Korea is often cast as the “younger brother” in its relationships with both South Korea and China means that Pyongyang is acutely sensitive to any such infantilizing metaphors.

The metaphor extends, of course, to the “parents” who are tasked with dealing with the problem child. Western governments quarrel among themselves over the best approach. Should they offer the candy of inducement or the spank of sanctions? Although corporal punishment is no longer in vogue for the most part in Western countries, physically (and preemptively) punishing North Korea is still a third option on the table, as unpersuasively argued by Jeremy Suri in The New York Times.

During the most recent escalation in tensions, the Obama administration chose to treat North Korea’s actions as an inexplicable temper tantrum that required a firm parental response. It sent over B-2 and B-52 bombers to conduct mock attacks. It ramped up missile defense (actually an offensive maneuver designed to disable an adversary’s deterrent capability). It indulged in some harsh rhetoric of its own.

This show of force did not cow North Korea. It merely ramped up its already over-the-top rhetoric, told the diplomatic community to leave Pyongyang and foreigners to depart Seoul, and shuttered the jointly administered Kaesong industrial complex. Only when the United States moderated its approach – for instance, cancelling a planned missile launch – did North Korea tone down its own threats and hyperbole.

North Korea’s actions were neither admirable nor defensible. But they were also not infantile. Pyongyang wants to be acknowledged as a member of the adults-only nuclear club. It bridles at any attempt to restrict its sovereign desire to test its missile program. And it takes exception to both economic sanctions and joint U.S.-ROK military maneuvers near its borders. The response to all this was decidedly intemperate. But it was neither irrational nor inexplicable. It should also be noted that babies don’t build nuclear programs or engage in large-scale human rights violations.

Herein lies the real problem with the North-Korea-as-baby metaphor. By treating North Korea as a largely irrational force, pundits fall into the mistake of portraying the “parental units” (United States, South Korea, China) as overly permissive. When the Obama administration was considering a modest food aid package for North Korea, five Republican senators were quick to trot out the standard line that Obama was the appeaser-in-chief (to use Rick Santorum’s line). Any hint of diplomacy produces charges of coddling. An entire class of pundit has staked out its place in the policy world by, in essence, accusing not only Obama but various other governments of sparing the rod and spoiling the child.

One of the more intriguing – and misguided – contributions to this literature is Reagan-era militarist Edward Luttwak’s recent post in Foreign Policy. South Korea is the enabler, he argues, and that’s why all the adult supervision offered by other governments has failed. “The price of continued U.S. protection should be the adoption of a serious defense policy, the closure of the Kaesong racket, and a complete end to cash transfers to the North, whatever the excuse,” he concludes.

This analysis is inaccurate on so many levels. South Korea hasn’t offered cash handouts to North Korea for more than five years. It embarked on a major military modernization even during its era of greatest engagement with Pyongyang. And the Kaesong Industrial Complex, rather than being a racket, has been the only mechanism of bringing North Korea into the global economy and, at the same time, raising the standard of living of more than 50,000 North Koreans and their families. If Luttwak had published this piece during the Kim Dae Jung era, it arguably would have been somewhere in the ballpark but still seriously off-base. These days, after five years of the Lee Myung Bak administration, South Korea has been in serious non-enabling mode.

The third in the supposed trio of appeasers is China, portrayed as an indulgent authority figure who sneaks treats to little North Korea on the side. Target China, many have urged, and even Secretary of State John Kerry has visited Beijing on this mission. But here too the metaphor doesn’t work. North Korea is not subordinate to China (though it is dependent on Chinese energy and food). North Korea rejects Chinese influence out of pride and a fear of greater dependency. And China has its own reasons for providing this assistance – ensuring stability on its border, for instance – which have nothing to do with having a sweet spot for North Korea’s system.

Engaging North Korea – economically, politically, culturally – emerges from this metaphoric understanding of North Korea-as-infant as something between ignorance of the world’s realities and an almost criminal lack of discipline. If North Korea is still banging its spoon on the table, there’s no point in treating it like an equal – in other words, as a state with its own national interests and sovereign concerns. Worse, engagement comes across as endorsing, perhaps even encouraging bad behavior. But negotiating with North Korean in no way implies agreement with its system, its actions, or its rhetoric. And the evidence of negotiations past suggests that North Korea generally acts more peaceably when it’s engaged in these diplomatic endeavors rather than consigned to the “time-out” corner.

Metaphors serve as convenient shorthand to condense and enliven our language. But when metaphors get in the way of developing reasonable policies, they should be abandoned. Treating North Korea as a spoiled child is not an accurate description of Pyongyang’s behavior. It prevents us from understanding how our own actions contribute to the crisis, when we are for instance as stubborn as donkeys, as rule-breaking as scofflaws, and as inscrutable as infants. And it generates a false dichotomy – sweets versus sanctions – in terms of policy options. It’s time for us to grow up in our assessments of North Korea. Belittling North Korea, literally and figuratively, ultimately prevents us from developing our own mature alternatives.

Hankyoreh, May 7, 2013

Today, the media environment looks more or less like it does elsewhere in Europe, with a few serious publications and a lot of tabloid journalism. Scandals and celebrities dominate the news. Infotainment has become ubiquitous. Political figures set up their own TV channels to promote their careers. In short, the world of mass media has arrived, and with it another trend that scholars have called the “Italianization” of journalism in East-Central Europe. In other words, as in Italy of the 1990s, the state has continued to interfere in the media realm, and media outlets have become highly partisan.

Irina Nedeva does a morning show for public radio in Bulgaria, edits the news programming, and does documentaries for Bulgarian national television. She is a serious reporter who tackles serious topics. She’s never been interested in beat reporting in the sense of covering the ministry of foreign affairs or the president’s office. She views her microphone as an instrument that is capable of leveling the playing field in a game dominated by the powerful.

“I don’t feel like the microphone empowers me,” she told me in an interview that took place half in Washington, DC over the summer of 2012 and half in Sofia later the following October. “But even now, because I’m the one with a microphone, I feel that I’m obliged to tell the story of people from vulnerable communities. These people are struggling without any kind of voice, so it’s my obligation to give them a voice. I’m not breaking and entering into their places because of my microphone. I think it’s the opposite. I’m not interested in covering the prime minister, for instance, because he is very wealthy and already has a very strong voice, a very macho type of high-volume voice. He doesn’t need my microphone at all. But there are quiet voices in our society that are never heard, and I feel that it’s my duty to help them with my microphone.”

So, while other reporters in Bulgaria are following the latest twists in the wiretapping scandal involving former primer minister Boyko Borisov, Nedeva is interested in looking at society from a multiplicity of different angles. She has interviewed ethnic Turks expelled from Bulgaria in the 1980s, the man who introduced Coca-Cola to the country under Communism, skinheads who espouse racist philosophies, environmentalists who embrace a new politics, academic experts, foreign observers of Bulgaria, and many, many more. Several of these interviews have ended up in documentary films.

With so many interesting people to interview, Nedeva doesn’t need to chase after the prime minister. “I think that this obsession with the prime minister is pretty unhealthy,” she told me. “I don’t like to even talk about him. We should talk about the policies of government not his personality. I don’t care about his personality.”

She remains, however, passionately concerned about the policies of government and their impact on people. We talked about her early days as a student activist, her continuing enthusiasm for democracy, and her expectations concerning the upcoming elections.

The Interview

I’d like to begin with 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall and your thoughts about that period, when you were quite young.

I was not so young. I was in my second year of university. I was born in 1968, so I have a very clear memory of that time. The fall of the Berlin Wall was quite special for me and my family. It was probably the most significant event when I was young. When I compare myself with my friends who are younger than me, sometimes I feel like a very politically old-fashioned woman, because I have this reference in my mind to the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was much more significant than the fall of Todor Zhivkov. My parents and my parents’ friends considered the fall of Todor Zhivkov an attempt by the Communist Party and the Communist government to adjust to the reality in Eastern Europe. So we didn’t care a lot. It was going to be either Todor Zhivkov or somebody else inside the Party. But we very much enjoyed the overall crash of the system.

Do you remember where you were on November 10, 1989?

Yes, I remember. I was a second-year student in philosophy at Sofia University, and we were just in the middle of an action. There were 40 of us in this class as regular students in philosophy. Usually the classes were much bigger, like 60 or even 80 people. But the year we applied in 1989, I don’t know why but probably they decided they don’t need such a huge number of students in philosophy. Anyway, we were one of the smallest classes there. The fall of 1989 was a very hard academic year for us, because our curriculum was full of stupid classes like military education and the history of the Bulgarian Communist Party. They were obligatory for all the students at Sofia University, no matter whether you were studying natural sciences or political science. These were the “ideological fields,” classes in Marxist-Leninist ideology. When we started in the fall of 1989, we soon realized that our program was so completely full of these classes that we didn’t have time for reading or attending the classes we wanted like the philosophy of Ancient Greece, the philosophy of the Middle Ages, or contemporary philosophy. It was an absolutely spontaneous decision to revolt against this stupidity. We decided that we would go on strike.

When you are in Bulgaria, probably I can open up my archives and show you those first pamphlets and our attempt to help change the curriculum. I still remember how afraid we were, because it was September-October of 1989, that somebody could interpret our attempt to change the curriculum as a political protest. We were still thinking that it was pretty dangerous. We were saying to all our professors, “We don’t have any kind of political demands. The only thing we want is to have time to be read quality philosophical literature and not to bother with all these stupid classes.” During this first attempt to organize a strike—and it was only our class that did it, by the way – we decided to stay at the university. We simply blocked one of the floors of the building, in the department of humanities. We started the strike in October and then in November came the fall of the Wall and the resignation of Todor Zhivkov.

The philosophy department was the place where all the dissidents were already meeting, where there was this Group for Glasnost and Perestroika for the Gorbachev type of dissidents. They were mainly professors in philosophy. When we started the strike, the university management tried to make a connection between us and this club. I still remember that some of our professors who were very much involved in the dissident group were telling us, “Don’t come to our meetings, because it could be dangerous.”

Finally, by the way, we succeeded — after the fall of the Wall and the fall of Todor Zhivkov. We managed to change the curriculum, so that all those ideological classes were no longer obligatory.

How did you parents feel about this?

About the strike? They were very supportive.

They weren’t scared?

They were scared, but they were supportive because they liked the idea. They were scared that it could affect my future and I remember my mother saying, “Listen, it’s very important to say all the time that it is not political.” I did it because we just didn’t need these classes. We wanted to study the history of all thinking, so why should we focus especially on the history of Marxism/Leninism? It was not even a pure history, just the ideology. It’s strange: I even can’t remember what we called this class. I think it was DiaMat: Dialectical Materialism. This was a Stalinist formulation, I think.

Were you concerned about penalties from the university or about the state stepping in?

I think I was just reflecting my parents’ fears. I don’t know which penalty I was most scared of. But fear was not the main feeling. The dominant feeling was enthusiasm, the feeling that we were doing something great, that we were not alone. We also had some professors on our side. It was more important for us to feel brave and cool than to feel scared of what we were doing.

What did the occupation look like?

Have you been to Sofia University? It’s a very old, very beautiful building, with a big entrance on every floor. So, it was really difficult to occupy, and we were a relatively small group of people that particular year, just 40 students. And out of these 40 students, 15 or more were foreigners. For instance, there were some Greek students, whose parents were connected with the Greek Communist Party, and some students from South America, and a Kurdish student who came from Frankfurt but was not interested in the Frankfurt school of Marxism but the genuine Soviet-style. The foreign students, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, were mainly coming to Bulgaria to study Marxism and Leninism. It was really funny because at the time that we were revolting against these ideological classes, our foreign co-students were saying, “Oh no! Why are you doing this? Everything is so great with the communist system, with the free education—”.

And they went there precisely for the classes you wanted to get rid of!

Yes, exactly! And we couldn’t believe it. “No, no, no,” we said. “We don’t like this. It’s an awful nomenklatura-bureaucratic type of society. We don’t like it at all.” So we were arguing over these issues with our foreign colleagues. It means that during the actual occupation, we were not more than 15-20 people. We also realized that a strike is very serious, which you can’t do without good preparation and dedication. It was sometimes very difficult because some people from our group didn’t show up. Others, as I told you, were foreigners who were not involved in these actions. We were also collecting signatures from all the other students, because these ideological classes were obligatory for the whole university. When we succeeded at the end of the fall, we stopped doing this. We didn’t create any kind of movement or organization. We were just happy that we no longer had to take those obligatory classes.

Later on, after the first elections, the students started a big general strike against the electoral results, because the former Communist Party won those first elections and people generally believed that the results had been falsified. In this general strike, the whole university was involved. Many of us were somehow connected with the strikers as well, but we created our own organization.

When you occupied the university, was it just during the day or did you also sleep there at night?

No, only the day.

And do you remember specifically the night when the Berlin Wall fell?

I think I remember, although I’m not sure how much is a genuine memory and how much is a reconstruction. But I remember that someone told me. The Wall fell on November 9 and Todor Zhivkov stepped down on the 10^th. During these three days, there was a conference in contemporary philosophy organized by the Institute of Philosophy in the main building of the Bulgarian Academy of Science. Some students and friends of mine were trying to plan how to go to this conference and also manage the strike. If there was nobody at the table during the occupation, it would look as though we’d given up. So, some people stayed at the university and some people went to this philosophical conference. On the way to the main building of the Bulgarian Academy of Science, somebody told us, “There’s a meeting at the Party headquarters, and Zhivkov stepped down. He’ll no longer be leader, so very big changes are expected.” It was a rumor, but a rumor that turned out to be true.

Do you remember seeing the Wall fall on television or…?

I remember seeing it on television, but I’m not sure if it was on Bulgarian television. In my family we were listening to Radio Free Europe, Voice of America, Deutsche Welle. I really don’t remember exactly the first time I saw the images of the wall. I’m not sure that it was on the same day or a later reconstruction.

Do you remember the night when the Party headquarters was set on fire? It was in August 1990.

Probably I was there, but not until dark. I remember that me and all my friends and relatives, we were very much concerned that what we called at the time “provocateurs” would behave violently, and that it would provoke the authorities to use force and stop the demonstrations. During the burning of the Party headquarters, and the days after, I was really angry that the people who were there allowed this to happen. I still think—I know that this is somehow a conspiracy theory–but I still think that the former Communist Party stood the most to profit from this fire. Later on they pretended that they didn’t keep certain archival materials. The fire at the Party headquarters was a perfect opportunity for the former Communists to get rid of those files.

I was sitting in my room that night listening to BBC when it reported from Sofia that the Party building was burning. So I went outside and I got a taxi. It was probably about 11 o’clock at night, and the taxi driver didn’t want to go there.

He didn’t want to go?

He said, “I’ll drop you off maybe a half a mile away.” So I had to walk the rest of the way.” That was the only time when, during my whole travels, that I was in a kind of a newsworthy situation. I called my friends in the States. I remember waiting at the major hotel off the square. And there was a bank of telephones, and I was waiting there for National Public Radio to call. They ended up not calling. I suppose they were really not that interested. But everybody was trying to make calls from the few phones that were there. There was a representative from the King saying that maybe this was a good time to coming back to Bulgaria. And there was a journalist who was making things up. He was listening to other people filing reports, and then he filed a report based on the information he heard from these other people.

I remember being just right off the square. But I might have reconstructed the memory.

So there was great enthusiasm. Todor Zhivkov was gone. The Berlin Wall has fallen. How long do you think you were in a state of great enthusiasm? I mean, did it last a week? Did it last 6 months? Did it last 5 years? Are you still in a state of great enthusiasm?

Maybe I’m stupid, but I’m still in a state of great enthusiasm. I really am still happy that Bulgaria is a democracy, a multi-party system with separation of powers. Maybe not everything is working perfectly, but I do like democracy more than the previous regime. So, yes, I still feel an enthusiasm for democracy. Many people are critical of democracy, blaming democracy for poverty and all that stuff. They think that the post-Communists are basically ruining the Bulgarian economy. But what I remember of the previous regime was not so brilliant in terms of economic achievements. I remember that Bulgaria was a poor country. I remember that all the social protections were of poor quality, and everyone dreamed of the so-called Western “problems.”

And there were big deficits. These deficits during the so-called socialist period created such a great desire for consumerism. After the changes, people started to consume like crazy. They started to think only about money and only about buying and consuming. It became pretty disgusting. But I do not blame democracy for this. Rather I blame the deficits during socialism.

Also, during socialism, there was no normal public life. People used to live secretly, to have a double layer to their life. They would say things publically that they didn’t believe and maintain their own secret private lives.

You finished your philosophy degree, and you decided not to become a philosopher. Why is that? You won this important battle, you didn’t have to take those obligatory DiaMat classes!

No. I didn’t. I wanted to continue studying. It was 1994 when I graduated, and I still remember that after my graduation, there was only one open position for a Ph.D., and it was not exactly what I wanted to do. It was for the history of philosophy.

There was only one position to start a Ph.D. in philosophy in the country?!

Only one. In Sofia, there was only one university, the state university, Sofia University. Maybe there was also something similar in Veliko Tarnovo, where there was another university, but I was not considering this as an option at all. So I simply stayed without a job for about six months. I was getting more and more depressed. I was reading at the national library all the time. I didn’t have money because I wasn’t working, so I was mainly counting on some money from my parents. I started to apply for Ph.Ds outside of Bulgaria. I applied for an MA in the philosophy of art at the Central European University, which still had some facilities in Prague.

While I was waiting, I heard on the public radio that they were opening a position for a staff editor and reporter, so I decided to apply for a job there. I applied and I was successful. And I was successful exactly on the day that I received information from Prague that I was also accepted into the CEU program. So I had a dilemma about what to choose. Finally, I decided to stay in Sofia, because it was exciting to start to work and I was maybe even a little flattered because the radio station received approximately 200 applications. Out of 200, they chose five people to start working, and I was the first one. Many of the applicants were connected to journalism, but I wasn’t. So I was flattered. Probably if I was selected in the second position, probably I would not be so flattered. And I thought, “Wow, it’s so exciting! I will have a salary for the first time in my life.” It seemed like a stable position. It wasn’t freelancing. For me, it was totally new field, and I was really excited to try it out. Maybe the most important thing was that if I stayed in Bulgaria, I would be with my boyfriend.

All of our friends were also applying to study abroad and I think I was the first one of my fellow students that started to work. Most of them were somehow successful with their applications to graduate programs outside Bulgaria. After 10 years, I realized that my life was very much directed toward working in public radio. I was working all the time. But when my friends came back with MA or Ph.D. degrees from Western universities, it was very difficult for them to find jobs. This was absolutely not fair. But it was part of the reality here.

And it was difficult for them simply because there just were no job openings.

No job openings. There was a lot of competition between these new graduates and the old professors.

You gave me a very good list of reasons for why you decided to stay in Bulgaria and not go to Central European University. The one thing you didn’t mention, and it’s possible because it wasn’t a factor, was the fact that Bulgaria had changed. Did that play any role at all in this decision?

I should admit that, yes, if I stayed here, it was obviously because I believed that Bulgaria had changed. The philosophy department at Sofia University was not completely connected with the old regime, because before the fall of the Wall, it was maybe the most important place for dissident thinking and reading and analysis and talk. The department was an agent for change, and I was happy and proud that I’d studied philosophy, and I was proud that we’d fought to change the curriculum. But why did I believe so easily that the change in Bulgaria was genuine from the very beginning? I have no explanation. But I did believe that change was inevitable, and that it would be cool to live in such times. I liked the demonstrations. I liked the spirit of the so-called City of Truth when, after the first elections, intellectuals occupied the garden in front of the Bulgarian national bank. Their protest wasn’t connected with the bank but rather the presidency and the Communist Party. They supported the hunger strike of some parliamentary members of the opposition, the Union of Democratic Forces. It was an occupation made by very famous Bulgarian intellectuals: musicians, writers, actors. There were tents of the Union of the Bulgarian Filmmakers, the Union of Bulgarian Musicians, lots of new groups. It was really an enthusiastic time.

When you became a reporter, what was the most traumatic thing that you learned? I mean, you’d been living in Bulgaria for a long time, obviously, but certainly you were in a very different position, talking, presumably, with different people. Do you remember using your microphone to gain access to new or unusual places?

That’s possible more in the United States than in Bulgaria.

How is it different than Bulgaria?

In Bulgaria, a microphone doesn’t give you better access, not at least in my case. First of all, I was not interested in being just reporter covering big political parties or big political institutions. I have always been a little bit on my own, discovering my own issues, mainly social issues or political issues, but not exactly the official point of view. Bulgarian radio assigned somebody to cover the council of ministers. They sent the author’s name to the council of ministers, the council of minsters approved these names, and then this particular reporter had access to the council of ministers meetings.

We call that a “beat.”

I have never been this kind of reporter. And I don’t feel like the microphone empowers me. But even now, because I’m the one with a microphone, I feel that I’m obliged to tell the story of people from vulnerable communities. These people are struggling without any kind of voice, so it’s my obligation to give them a voice. I’m not breaking and entering into their places because of my microphone. I think it’s the opposite. I’m not interested in covering the prime minister, for instance, because he is very wealthy and already has a very strong voice, a very macho type of high-volume voice. He doesn’t need my microphone at all. But there are quiet voices in our society that are never heard and I feel that it’s my duty to help them with my microphone.

And was there a particular story early on when you started out that helped you understand this role of yours?

I remember that when I started with radio, they had to find me a place in the system.

The chief editor asked me, “What do you want to do?”

I said, “I don’t know, because my background is not journalism.”

“Yes, I know,” he said. “But we decided that you could be very good at this. Do you want to cover, for instance, education?”

“What does it mean to cover education?”

He said, “It means that you stay at the ministry of education and to go to their press conferences.”

And I said, “No, it doesn’t seem very interesting for me.”

“Well, what about culture?”

I said, “Culture, yes. I’m much more interested in culture.”

“Well, but culture is not exciting. Who cares about culture at all?”

“But I’d like to cover art,” I said.

“No, no,” he said, “we don’t have this kind of arts reporter. The strong fields are council of ministers, different departments in the government, different ministries, parliamentary groups. Coming with your background in philosophy and political science, it’s better to use you in this hard journalism, not art. If you’re serious about being an arts reporter, go to a theatre play, then make an interview about it.”

So I was not able to become an art reporter at the time. But finally one of the public radio programs declared that they wanted me and they didn’t care whether I wanted to cover the prime minister or not. They were willing to train me and use me. This was the best program, the coolest program.

What was the name of it?

Twelve Plus Three. Very famous journalists were working there at the time. It was the freest program. It was three hours everyday, and I became a reporter attached to the show. One of my specialties was conducting interviews with foreigners. For me it was interesting to look at Bulgarian society through the point of view of people who were coming from abroad. I started to do such kinds of interviews in different areas, with people who had different points of view, including academics and people working with Turks in Bulgaria.

When we were talking before about the ethnic minority situation, you mentioned that a year ago, a representative from the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (VMRO) said that they would redefine ethnicity in the governmental statistic office.

It was in 2010. In the official census, there’s a certain pattern for dealing with ethnic minorities. The terminology has always been a very sensitive political issue — national minorities versus ethnic minorities, which groups would be represented, and so on. That’s why Bulgaria didn’t ratify the charter on minority languages but did ratify the convention on ethnic minorities. The youth section of VMRO, which is an old traditional party that claims that Macedonia is part of Bulgaria, said that they didn’t agree with the terminology used in the questionnaire and would start a campaign to change the questions. The official institutions, especially the National Institute of Statistics, claimed in the media that nobody could influence them, that they were very professional and worked at the highest standard. I invited someone from VMRO on my radio program and he said, “No, you will see, we will succeed!” Finally, they did succeed in reframing the question.

They reframed the question only around who is Macedonian?

No, the big battle was how many different ethnic groups would be involved in the questionnaire. According to VMRO, there are ethnic Bulgarians, ethnic Turks, and Roma and all the others are Others. And they made that change.

How do you think the minority question influence the next elections? Will it play a critical determining role or only a minor role?

This is a key question for Bulgaria’s politic development. Even if the Roma vote doesn’t seem to be playing a role in the vote, it will be significant for understanding the direction of the political establishment. I think that there are two options for the new majority. I doubt it will not be an absolute majority. The winning party will need someone in a coalition — and the interesting question is what partner they will choose. It will either be something like a nationalist-patriotic front based on conservative national identity or a more liberal one. It might depend on the EU and whether the EU is moving toward greater isolation. If so, the new Bulgarian majority might adopt the same frame.

I think the coalition between Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP) and Citizens for a European Bulgaria (GERB) will not be possible because of GERB’s whole rhetoric that its main opponent is the Socialist party. Although there are common points — such as the adoration of Todor Zhivkov, the emphasis on security, and the conservative values held by the Socialist party, which is really a party of rich, well-established red businessmen — I don’t think at a public level this coalition will be a reality.

Concerning the Movement for Rights and Freedoms (MRF), it’s almost the same. GERB started with very anti-MRF rhetoric. They’re not much interested in talking with Ahmed Dogan. There is, however, a public difference between the prime minister Boyko Borisov and the vice prime minister Tsvetan Tsvetanov. The anti-Islamic actions of the Ministry of internal Affairs are much more associated with Tsvetanov than Borisov. The question is, is GERB Borisov or Borisov GERB? People on the street, when they are protesting some policy measures, they somehow feel that Borisov is part of the protest movement, which is quite strange since he’s the prime minister. Even the ecological movement says, “Borisov is on our side against the bad guys.”

A hidden coalition between GERB and the MRF has more possibility of becoming public than a hidden coalition between GERB and BSP becoming public. That’s why I think that GERB will need another coalition partner. Who? A united nationalist movement or something like a liberal perspective with Kuneva, who could be simultaneously anti-communist and pro-EU.

Some people I’ve talked to about Borisov say that he gets things done. There’s construction on the street and people are working. There’s the new metro.

And this year they will finish the highway to connect Burgas and Sofia.

Ah, finally!

I think that this obsession with the prime minister is pretty unhealthy. I don’t like to even talk about him. We should talk about the policies of government not his personality. I don’t care about his personality.

Then how do you feel about GERB? What if people said, “GERB gets things done!”

I feel better. Even when I’m talking with people who criticize the prime minister or adore him, they don’t say “the prime minister.” They say “Boyko.” I say,” Bokyo who? What is his family name, what is his position?” It’s important to distinguish between political parties and the spontaneous manifestation of subjective will. I want to know where does this political reality come from? If it’s the position of the political party that’s one thing, but I’m uncomfortable if it’s only the subjective will of one person.

Many people of your generation left Bulgaria. But you are still here.

I stayed probably because I was relatively lucky to work in something that I like and to feel a certain level of independence, although with very limited benefits and resources. Also I have my family here: my mother, father, daughter. And there is something to lose if I emigrate. I would lose a certain status. It’s not just financial security. I work with public media, so my salary is probably five times less than if I worked in private media. It’s not a very secure type of living. At the same time, I’m not ready to lose the luxury to do what I love to do and what I think do well. If I emigrate, I’ll have to totally change my work. I’ll have to start at the beginning. I have travelled a lot, so I know. I’ll always be in a position in which I’m overqualified and less experienced, because I will not be able to do what my employers will expect from me, being a poor immigrant, but at the same time I will be overqualified at the position.

What is your feeling about the prospects of the new left here in Bulgaria?

I think the biggest obstacle for the new left will be the lack of authentic reasons to be there. For me it’s an academic project, like the theoretical construction of people who are happy to read some leftist theoreticians but still have no will to be involved with poor illiterate people, for instance. I think this will be the next elitist project for Bulgaria. I’m not against an elite that adores knowledge. But the problem is that you can’t make a good society only out of such people. Not everyone is obliged to read John Locke or Noam Chomsky or Roland Barthes or Jacques Derrida.

Especially Jacques Derrida! Some people have told me that 15-20 percent of the population supports Ataka policies even if its vote count fluctuates. There’s an even larger number that supports a softer extreme nationalism. What do you think?

I’m very much concerned about this. I think this is a threat to many people here. It doesn’t matter whether the nationalist parties have bigger numbers in the next election or not. On an everyday level, these hostile feelings and hate threats are increasing.

Washington, DC, June 25, 2012 and Sofia, October 1, 2012