Democratic stirrings in Bulgaria
Haskell, Gordon
Bands of roughly dressed country folk were marching—or sliding—along the icy streets of Sofia with the Bulgarian tricolor in their hands. Their placards denounced the "decision of December...
...The local BCP cadres have not reconciled themselves to the "new thinking...
...On Sunday the 14th a hundred and fifty thousand people crowded onto Sofia's old Cathedral Square, in the biggest voluntary demonstration in Bulgarian history...
...A delegation which had just returned from the "Turkish" section of Bulgaria said the nationalist movement was being financed and incited by local BCP cadres as a way to lash back at their masters in Sofia whose "democratization" policies were placing in jeopardy their undisputed rule—in a word, their position as the ruling class of Bulgaria...
...It is happening before our very eyes in 1990...
...they justify the attacks on Grenada and Panama—in short, they have swallowed the Republican line entirely...
...On January 6, the "Committee for Reconciliation" gathered about a hundred people to decide their policies...
...Their placards denounced the "decision of December 29," called for a general strike, and demanded a referendum on "the national question...
...Leftand right-wing factions have formed in the BCP...
...The official line of the nationalists was that they were outraged, not by the decision itself but by the undemocratic way it had been reached...
...Most of the leaders of the United Democratic Forces (UDF), the oppositional alliance, were there...
...The UDF program: land to the tillers, a mixed, market-oriented economy, ecological protection of natural resources, and a "civilized, lawful, democratic, free, multiparty, pluralistic, ecologically sound society...
...My street buddies' high opinion of Reagan is shared by every opposition leader I interviewed...
...to do a dozen other things which seemed impossible, given their meager resources...
...Don't I think that Reagan's hardnosed policies are really what forced Gorbachev to institute glasnost and perestroika...
...They believed Turkey had incited three hundred thousand Bulgarian Muslims to cross the border last summer "for a vacation" because they intended to return on Turkish tanks and roll the Bulgarians back to the Balkan Mountains...
...1:3 SPRING • 1990 • 157 Reports from Abroad Demonstrators in Prague showed support for Chinese students Henrik SaxgreiVIMPACT VISUALS 158 • DISSENT...
...I was confused...
...Every Saturday the "Southern Park" is the opposition's forum...
...No one says...
...The "national question" was not the only thing at stake...
...For three hours they stamped their feet in the freezing cold, listened to speeches denouncing forty-five years of totalitarian communist rule, thundered "Down With the BCP," "Resign, resign" (to their rump parliament), and "Pod-Kre-Pa, Pod-Kre-Pa" (their version of Poland's Solidarnosc...
...Their dream...
...They know absolutely nothing about the domestic consequences of Reaganism...
...Their convention in late January was so stormy that the whole cabinet resigned, announcing that only a broader government (including the opposition) can govern Bulgaria...
...Everyone knows the basic problem is how to disestablish the BCP's power in all spheres of society, abolishing much of it as socially harmful, and distributing the rest through a democratic process...
...About three hundred people gather to discuss, plan, and organize...
...The opposition and the BCP leadership had found one issue on which they agreed...
...But their arguments and placards made it clear that they hadn't gone on strike in their home towns just to make a procedural point...
...In the park, placards identify each group: Social Democrats, Radical Democrats, nonparty democrats, Republicans, Greens, EkoGlasnost (environmentalists), Peasant Union, Independent Association for Human Rights, and biggest of all, Podkrepa, the independent federation of trade unions...
...They would call their own demonstration for Sunday, the 14th...
...Isn't it true that in the United States people have to adopt English names as a condition of naturalization...
...It will be a miracle if the opposition—emerging from five decades of repression, its leaders coming out of prison or exile, a whole younger generation with no experience in politics, groups, and movements with little opportunity to work together—can remain united...
...But people are growing impatient as the other East European countries make dramatic changes...
...They continue to treat the local government, economy, and police as personal property...
...Instead, thousands were demonstrating against the Bulgarian Communist party (BCP), not to demand more rapid democratization, but to denounce its central committee for reversing the 1984 policy requiring Muslim Turkish-speaking Bulgarians to Bulgarize their names, close their schools, and stop speaking Turkish in public...
...I quickly discovered my "street buddies" in the forum...
...I had flown into Sofia January 5 expecting to find the country gripped in a struggle to democratize the forty-five-year-old Stalinist dictatorship...
...Two months after the BCP ousted Todor Zhivkov, its leader for thirty-five years, the opposition still had no hall, no offices, no newspaper...
...They sounded pretty desperate...
...Their leaders flailed the nationalist demonstrations as inspired by die-hards in the BCP, and called for equal rights for all Bulgarians...
...At first frustrated by their ignorance, I gradually realized that three factors have been at work: they have learned to reject everything they read or hear in the communist-controlled media...
...In Govedartsi, a little village high in the Rila mountains, I attend a meeting at which a hundred and fifty local folks hoot down a retired major general of the National Security, a personal friend of both the fallen dictator and the new premier...
...The tensions of the struggle are mounting...
...In the provinces, people are still half paralyzed by fear...
...The nationalist tide had perhaps been turned...
...As soon as they identified me as the "Amerikanski Korrespondent" I became a center of attention...
...they are inclined to believe everything they hear on the BBC or Voice of America...
...The group decided to demand television time to tell their story...
...But as the great Bulgarian writer Ivan Vazov wrote of his country when it was emerging in the middle of the nineteenth century from five hundred years under the Ottoman yoke: "In just a few days—covertly, in stages—the nation matured— by several ages...
...to petition the parliament for an 156 • DISSENT Reports from Abroad investigation of what public resources were being used to support the nationalists...
...Each party and organization within the UDF emphasizes its preferred aspects of the common program, and all recognize that once they have established their rights as an opposition, differences among them will come to the fore...
...Unity, unity," the crowd responded...
...But they are accustomed to working with little...
...they are, and always have been (since I was a boy there) inclined to believe that most people in America live the American Dream every day...
...The UDF was united against entering a coalition government, but I wouldn't care to predict how long all its groups will stand firm...
...That their one and a half million "Turkish" fellow-citizens just vanish...
...Only the insistence of the chairman (victim of a ten-year sentence for membership in a human rights organization) that they must act democratically makes it possible for the general to have his say...
...Bulgaria, like most other countries, will have to live with a diverse population...
...Everyone tells me that I shouldn't mistake Sofia's "beltway politics" as representative of the whole country...
...But I gather this isn't yet typical...
Vol. 37 • April 1990 • No. 2
