BULGARIA
Three faces
of the
Bulgarian
opposition
Continued from previous page state-controlled agency to supervise privatization and workers' share-ownership schemes. It also stresses the need for an action plan to create new employment for those rendered jobless by the restructuring of the economy and the closure of dangerous industries.
For Krustyo Petkov, the biggest immediate risks facing Bulgaria as it ventures into the world of free enterprise are the nomenklatura and the black market dealers who are already cashing in on the privatization of state property. Petkov adds: "We fear the economic colonization of the economy. Foreign investment will be welcome, but it, for example, multinational corporations and rich citizens start to buy their way in, it will be a very wrong step and against the interests of the country."
Significantly, Petkov is also talking about the Confederation being prepared to break the present political stalemate between the BSP and UDF by setting up a social democratic "Labour" party - perhaps along British lines. He undoubtedly commands the political authority in the country to carry off such a move. And if it materialized, a party of this kind could have a powerful popular appeal at this
Horrendous prospects
Although socialist forces exist in both the BSP and opposition camps, no current or organization has yet come to light which might be able to offer a lead to the Bulgarian left and argue for a socialized economy, centrally planned, under the democratic control of the workers themselves. Thus Bulgaria faces the prospect, whoever is in government, of horrendous austerity and unemployment. Even civil strife followed by military intervention to end "chaos" cannot be ruled out in the future.
Whatever happens, however, strong and tested opposition looks likely to come from three main quarters. 16 Bulgaria's million-strong Turkish minority has formed its own party, the
Movement for Rights and Freedom, which emerged as a significant force in the June elections with 23 seats in the National Assembly. The movement is not demanding autonomy for the two regions in the North East and South East of the country where the majority of Turkish Bulgarians live, but is opposing Bulgarian nationalism and fighting for the full restoration of its cultural and religious
Zhivkov in his time played the nationalist card first by his persecution of the 200,000 ethnic Bulgarians who practise the Muslim religion (the Pomaks). Then
"Bulgarization" campaign of 1985 aimed at the whole Turkish community. Many suffered acts of violence and some were killed. Such was the persecution that in June of that year, 300,000 fled Bulgarian for Turkey.
Turkish names permitted
After the liberalization, demonstrations and hunger strikes by Turkish human rights activists intensified until in March 1990 the National Assembly passed a law allowing Turks to re-adopt the Turkish names they had been forced to relinquish. However the community has yet to regain other major rights it lost — its schools and a university faculty among them -and remains bitterly resentful of continuing discrimination.
Many Turkish workers are members of the Bulgarian trade unions, especially of Podkrepa which is active in areas where a lot of Pomaks live. But Turkish leaders at local level say the Bulgarian unions are very much "on trial" as far as they are concerned. They are considering setting up their own union if Turkish workers' interests are not adequately represented.
Another formidable opposition group enjoying country-wide support (67% of the population according to a recent opinion poll) is the Ecoglasnost environmenmembers in Sofia alone, Ecoglasnost has focussed world attention on the catastrophic environmental destruction and hazardous industrial production that will
P ETAR SLABAKOV, Bulgar-
Cia's best-known theatre and film actor is leader of the popular Ecoglasnost environment movement and one of the movement's 18 members in parliament. He was among the Ecoglasnost demonstrators who were savagely beaten and arrested in a now famous incident in October 1989, just before the fall of the Zhivkov regime. "FROM 15.00 hours to midnight most days I'm in Parliament. But when I'm needed I immediately leave for Cherni Ossam where for five months we have been making a human chain to stop the dam project there... have to be tackled as part of any genuine restructuring of the Bulgarian economy.
Uranium mining has polluted parts of the water table. Giant petro-chemical plants have poisoned a number of workers and contaminated farm produce. Some 24 million square metres of forest have been cut down. The Black Sea is dead below 50 metres. No general warning or protection was given by the authorities as fall-out from the Chernobyl catastrophe began to reach Bulgaria. These are just a few of the problems that have turned the country into one of the worst damaged regions of East-
Direct action is the Ecoglasnost trademark — human chains, parliamentary lobbies, pickets and demonstrations. Since the elections, the organization has found a powerful voice in the National Assembly as well. Some 18 of the new opposition members of parliament belong to Ecoglasnost, including the movement's leader, Petar Slabakov, a well-known Bulgarian
Ecoglasnost has consistently condemned the system under which workers doing dangerous jobs receive a wage bonus while no action is taken about the dangers themselves. In talks with the government and the trade unions, the movement's supporters have demanded that hazardous industries be shut down if they cannot be made safe, that schemes be set up to redeploy workers and that Western petro-chemical firms be stopped from establishing production plants in Bulgaria. Says Petar Slabakov: "Now Bulgaria has opened its borders, many foreign companies are going to come here. There is a danger that we will be forced to make concessions to them — that Bulgaria will become one big chemical factory!"
The most important body of opposition, the Bulgarian workers, are combative after decades of bureaucratic rule, with high expectations and organized in (so far) democratically run trade unions. There is good reason to hope, therefore, that they will be in a good position to defend themselves and fight back when the "red capitalists" at home and the free marketeers from abroad try to do their worst. *
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Photo: Zhivko Angelov
"In a huge petro-chemical plant at Burgas on the Black Sea, 20 workers have been poisoned and died. Others have been injured and we don't know if they will be
"We stopped a nuclear power plant in Prvomay from being built. Not only was it going to cost 44 billion levas, but the site was also in an earthquake zone, where the houses have been constructed with poor
"At the beginning of this year supplies ran out of powdered baby milk. Mothers were coming to us for help from all over the country. So we took immediate action. We gave the Ministry of Health an ultimatum that if they did not get hold of the baby food, we were going to call for a national strike. They managed to find the
"All kinds of industries are dangerous here because of the lack of safety installations. People working in these industries know their jobs are dangerous. If they accept higher wages as compensation it is only because they don't see any alternative sources of work...
"We have many supporters, all volunteers. They include doctors, philosophers and sociologists — we are a real "academy of sciences" in Ecoglasnost!
"We have declared our programme and we will fight for it no matter what kind of government we have in the future in this country."* P ETAR BERON, Bulgaria's leading zoologist and founder member of Ecoglasnost, became President of the Union of Democratic Forces in August 1990. "A MINORITY of the UDF, including myself, was inclined to support the proposal of forming a government (with the BSP), that would act along definite lines, within a definite framework, for a specific time to fulfill specific tasks. But the majority was against this joint venture with the Communists...
"The 36% we got in the (June) election is OK. We think we shall do better now in the local government polls in November. If we win, maybe the next parliamentary elections will not be very far off...
"We are doing our best to keep all the parties in the UDF together and I think that we shall manage this for some time to come. All of them are well aware that they can't count on any success against the Communists on their own. They have to stay together...
controlled by the nomenklatura and now these same people, these red capitalists, want to get their hands on the private property. We are trying to prevent this...
"We shall try to establish a sort of safety net for the poorest, most deprived strata of society, though whether it will be successful or not I can't say. We have
"Privatization should not be allowed, in my opinion, to permit the big capitalists and the monopolies to take the lion's share of everything. We would prefer to have small shareholding firms...'
K RUSTYO PETKOV, a sociol-
ogy professor, leads the three million members of the Confederation of Independent trade Unions in Bulgaria -founded in February this year in an attempt to transform the decaying official trade unions. He has supervized a drastic overhaul of the old state-dominated union structures and could soon be instrumental in up a social democratic 'Labour' party along British lines if the present political stalemate in Bulgaria continues. "UNLESS our trade unions independent there is no point in us going on with our Confederation. Especially during this economic and political crisis, which I believe is going to continue, people need strong unions...
BULGARIA BULGARIA
"We have had to set up a system of social partnership and to educate our members that the best instrument for defending their interests is collective bargaining; strikes too, though only in the future, I would say...
"We lost some support from traditional party cadres who had infiltrated the trade unions, not because of our orientation, but because we removed the old union structures and reorganized on the trades and branch principle. Most of these people were old cadres from the partycontrolled) regional and municipal coun cils so when you touch their interests they begin to act against you...
"We have heard that some in the Bulgarian Socialist Party are suggesting that the BSP needs its own unions in order to have an influence on the workplace. We decided to send a letter to the BSP congress in September arguing that this would indeed be a wrong step — that it would divide the trade unions and backfire on their party. I can't guarantee whether they will react positively to our letter. But we've decided that if the BSP does try to split off some of our union branches, we shall counter-attack straight away. And I believe we would take at least half of them back with uS...
"The Confederation thinks that privatization must be done with the participation of the workers. They can buy or be given shares in certain industries. In the modern industrial world you see a lot of examples...
"I believe it is our role in the trade unions to push for a national jobs' creation programme. This was done for example in the Western world in the 1930s. It is not just an economic question, but a very important political question. If unemployed people here get no support, this will provide fertile ground for populist and 17 extremist movements." *
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Photo: Georgey Kazakov