Krassimir KANEV

The ·Attack” coalition’s penetration of the parliament

was, for Bulgarian political life, like a foul-smelling skel-

eton falling out of the closet, where it had remained

hidden for years. It came as a shock not only to politi-

cians, but also to political pundits; a shock which quite

understandably shook the approved interpretations of

the Bulgarian political process. But even before the elec-

tions, some of them made an attempt to force the ad-

vance made by ·Attack” into the channel of specula-

tive patterns regarding the Bulgarian transition, which

look a lot like the schemes of a ·transition from capital-

ism to socialism”, only turned inside-out. According to

them this group is, in the words of Ahmed Dogan, ·a

normal tumour”; something which, as Andrey Raychev

and Kuncho Stoychev are trying to convince them-

selves, exists in ·normal” democratic countries and is

the Bulgarian equivalent of the parties of Le Pen in

France, Haider in Austria, Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands

or Umberto Bossi in Italy. In other words - we’ve become

·normal” and now we’ve got a ·normal” far-right party.

It seems to me that this way of regarding ·Attack”

just as appropriate as if we were to think of Bulgaria as

being France or Austria; it is as far from reality as Bulgar-

ian political and social life are far from the standards of

such advanced democratic societies. In those societ-

ies, it would not be possible for a group using such forms

and degrees of expression of racism and xenophobia

to achieve parliamentary representation, nor even to

be present in the public sphere. It would be impossible

for such an aggressive Holocaust denier as Volen Siderov

to find any place for himself there, other than in the

dock in a court of justice. In this sense, if we are deter-

mined to find a political equivalent for him, we should

look towards Adolf Hitler and Radovan Karadzic, rather

than the European far right.

LET’S MAKE A FEW COMPARISONS

And let’s make them with regard the points on which

they are possible and appropriate. In an interview in Sep-

tember 1987, the leader of the French National Front,

Jean-Marie Le Pen, made the following statement re-

garding the existence of the Nazi gas chambers: ·I am

saying that there are historians who debate these is-

sues. I am not saying that the gas chambers did not

exist. I myself have not seen them. I have not studied

the matter specially. But I do think that this is a minor

detail from the history of the Second World War.” For this

·minor detail” (and please note, without having said that

the Holocaust had not existed!), Le Pen was ordered by

a French court to pay a fine of about 200,000 dollars for

disputing those crimes against humanity. While on a visit

to Munich some years later, in December 1997, he com-

mented on his 1987 ·minor detail” about the gas cham-

HOW SHOULD WE THINK OF ·ATTACK”?

bers as follows: ·If you take a book of a thousand pages

about the Second World War, in which 50 million people

died, the concentration camps would take up two

pages and the gas chambers 10 or 15 lines, and that is

what is called a detail.” Jean-Marie Le Pen was fined a

second time for these comments, and this time had to

pay about 50,000 dollars, in order for the court’s deci-

sion to be published in several French newspapers, as

well as a significant amount to compensate the

organisations that had filed the lawsuit. After this ruling

against him, he stopped making any public statements

on the matter. I am not sure that there is a Bulgarian

politician from any political power, much less a prosecu-

tor, who would, if he didn’t know that those statements

had been made by Le Pen, find them at all problematic,

much less deserving of such harsh penalties.

Let’s turn now to the book of the leader of ·Attack”

Volen Siderov, The Boomerang of Evil, whose first edition

was published in 2002. It is a third-rate piece of anti-

Semitic propaganda, which seeks to uncover the Jew-

ish ·worldwide conspiracy” using a collection of refer-

ences to proven falsehoods, simple-minded ideological

constructs and ·facts” pulled out of thin air. In it he calls

the Holocaust - the systematic extermination of the Jews

by the Nazis - ·the great swindle... the story that 6,000,000

Jews were murdered with gas and burnt up in the ov-

ens of Hitler’s concentration camps.” Further on he adds

that ·the lie of ‘the Holocaust’ is also very profitable”,

since it has earned Israel and ·the Zionist organisations”

over 85 billion marks. Straightforward, categorical, self-

assured. And with total impunity.

In eight member states of the European Union - Aus-

tria, Belgium, France, Germany, Latvia, Poland, Slovakia

and the Czech Republic - public denial of the Holocaust

is a crime. Clearly, even mild forms of public statements

to that effect, like those of Jean-Marie Le Pen, are in-

cluded in the interpretation of ·public denial”. In addi-

tion to these countries, public denial of the Holocaust is

also a crime in Switzerland and Israel. In several other

countries there is a general criminal liability for public

statements inciting racial and ethnic hatred and discrimi-

nation. Article 20 of the International Covenant on Civil

and Political Rights requires that states prohibit by law

and prosecute ·any advocacy of national, racial or re-

ligious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimina-

tion, hostility or violence.” All attempts by individuals

penalised for denying the Holocaust to turn to the Euro-

pean Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, demanding

the recognition of their right to freedom to express such

opinions have been dismissed, with the argument that

such limitations exist in pursuit of a legitimate goal - that

of preventing the possibility of using the notion of free-

dom of speech to harm the rights and freedoms of other

people.

For all of the statements made by him that were de-

termined to be xenophobic and anti-Semitic, and for

which he was isolated in French society, Jean-Marie Le

Pen never went half as far as Volen Siderov. I am certain

that Le Pen himself would be shocked, were he to read

The Boomerang of Evil. Not to mention the other repre-

sentatives of the European far right, who have never

made any statements resembling Le Pen’s. Regardless

of this, their statements about immigrants, which most

Bulgarian politicians would probably echo, were widely

declared to be ·xenophobic” and ·racist” throughout

those societies. They provoked mass protests and at-

tempts to isolate them politically and socially. Obviously

the notions of racism and xenophobia have different

meaning in different societies - there is xenophobia a la

Karadzic and Siderov and xenophobia a la Le Pen.

XENOPHOBIA, RACISM AND ANTI-SEMITISM

Volen Siderov’s books The Boomerang of Evil and

The Power of Mammon suggest a virulent form of anti-

Semitism. It has little in common with the more elegant

forms of historical revisionism of the Holocaust, such as

those of David Irving, Arthur Butz

and the Institute for Historical Re-

view. As a message and quality of

propaganda, these books are

rather more closely related to The

Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the

proven hoax by the imperial Rus-

sian secret police, The Worldwide

Conspiracy by Bulgarian author

Nikola Nikolov and the anti-Semitic

propaganda brochures found in

several countries in the Middle East.

In his books Siderov suggests that

almost all of the world’s evils - from

communism to capitalism - are

the result of a Jewish ·worldwide

conspiracy”. In The Boomerang of

Evil he denies the Nazi Holocaust,

but at the same time he

endeavours at length to provide

evidence of ·the genocide com-

mitted by a Jewish ruling class

against 66 million Russians, over 70

years of communism” in the former Soviet Union. One

of the book’s chapters is entitled ·Today Judea is called

the USA”. In it Siderov claims that the world’s Jews con-

trol America, in which ·Christianity is not only brought to

its knees, but is openly persecuted in the guise of ‘reli-

gious pluralism’.” It turns out that the Jews are to blame

for the slaughter of the Indians, as well as for supporting

dictatorial regimes all over the world - from Venezuela

to Indonesia. In some respects The Power of Mammon

goes even further. In it Siderov wants no more and no

less than to turn back the wheel of modernity, and all its

humanism and rationalism. He presents it as a process

of theomachy [battle of the gods], inspired by the Jews,

who are described as evil-doers who destroy everything

that even smells of Christianity. Here is a representative

citation: ·The genocide against the Russian, Bulgarian

and other Orthodox Christian peoples was conducted

under the direct leadership of Talmudist circles in the

West, led by the Rothschild family. This genocide in-

cluded not only physical destruction via wars, ‘revolu-

tions’ and terrorism (which has been Judaism’s hallmark

for centuries). This genocide was also applied via the

systematic and successive plunder of the money and

resources of these Christian peoples.” This was written in

2004!

However, the anti-Semitism in The Boomerang of Evil

and The Power of Mammon is just one, and from a

political standpoint perhaps not even fundamental, el-

ement of the ·Attack” leader’s xenophobic propa-

ganda. He goes much further in his stereotyping and

incitement of hatred towards Bulgaria’s Turks and espe-

cially the Roma. Long before the elections, his forum

was the private cable television channel SKAT, that true

equivalent of the Libre des Mille Collines radio and tele-

vision in Rwanda, from the time leading up to the geno-

cide. On his TV show, Siderov was harsh regarding the

Turks, but not particularly imaginative. He contented him-

self with simple reiteration of certain theses that had

been routine for anti-Turk nationalist propaganda in Bul-

garia since the early 1990s: the Movement for Rights

and Freedoms (MRF) is an unconstitutional party formed

on an ethnic basis; its leader Ahmed Dogan is a politi-

cian disloyal to Bulgarian national traditions; news broad-

casts on the national television network in the Turkish

language should be prohibited; certain regions of Bul-

garia are being overrun by mosques, etc. Nothing spec-

tacular - or rather, nothing that many Bulgarian politi-

cians on the left, as well as the right, hadn’t said more

than once before. Where Siderov outdid himself and

others was in his stereotyping and incitement of hatred

towards the Roma. During his pre-election campaign,

conducted under the motto ·No to Turkification! No to

Gypsification!”, he produced a series of seven

programmes on the theme of ·The Gypsy Terror” on

SKAT TV. In them he tried to suggest that Bulgarians were

the object of criminal ·Gypsy terror” - that they were

being murdered, robbed, beaten and raped daily by

an alien minority in their own country and were not get-

ting any protection from the law enforcement authori-

ties, who had united with the Roma against the Bulgar-

ians because they are the employees of a corrupt anti-

Bulgarian ruling class. He was very much helped in this

respect by the clash between a group of Roma and

Bulgarians in the Zaharna Fabrika district of Sofia, followed

by the death of Prof. Stanimir Kaloyanov, under still un-

explained circumstances. For the originator of the myth

of the ·Gypsy Terror”, however, the investigation ended

with the professor’s death and he immediately pro-

nounced his verdict: ·Murdered in a terrorist attack by a

Gypsy gang”.

There are no people in Bulgaria who as a group are

more rejected, isolated and discriminated against than

the Roma. Special proof of this is not necessary (al-

though there is a total overabundance of such evi-

dence), because it can be seen at a glance and makes

an impression on even the most disinterested outside

observer. They are the object of selective induction by

the criminal justice system, a state bureaucracy which

in Bulgaria, as well as everywhere else in the world, fol-

lows the path of least resistance. Because of this it fo-

cuses its repression with a priority not on organised crime

or the crime of the wealthy and powerful, but on those

who are defenceless - who have no money, connec-

tions or access to quality legal representation. In uncov-

ering the ·Gypsy terror”, however, Siderov took a

Goebbels-like approach and scope by reversing the

perspective. In his approach the Roma became the

masters of the lives and security of all Bulgarians, a crimi-

nal people, who sow terror against the Bulgarians, un-

hindered by the state. Thus, just as once upon a time

the Nazis reversed the perspective with regard to the

Jews, who at the beginning of the 20th century were a

strongly discriminated against minority. Hitler and

Goebbels described them as the masters of the world,

as the corrupters and destroyers of the ·Aryans”.

SOCIETAL ATTITUDES

In line with the theory of ·normalisation”, immedi-

ately after the election attempts were made to explain

the support received by ·Attack” as a vote by those

disappointed in the European perspective of Bulgaria,

of those ·discarded and crushed by the transition” (Yuriy

Aslanov). The same as in France and the Netherlands. It

became clear, however, that most of those who had

voted for this coalition were middle-aged men from the

cities, a significant portion of them having a university

education even. This is hardly the social group that was

the most adversely affected by the transition. Not that

there aren’t people in Bulgaria who were ·crushed by

the transition”. We can find them above all amongst

the Bulgarian Roma and Turks, but those are the exact

people against whom ·Attack” directed its vicious pro-

paganda.

It is true that in addition to its xenophobia, ·Attack”

also delivered several other messages: it denounced

the government for its failed healthcare reform and it

demanded the withdrawal of Bulgarian troops from Iraq,

the review of privatisation and restitution transactions,

renegotiation of the closure of the third and fourth re-

actors of the Kozloduy nuclear power plant, and the

prosecution of those who had become wealthy by crimi-

nal means. However, these messages were, in one form

or another, contained in the platforms of other parties,

as well as in the multitude of statements over the past

years from their political leaders, which had been able

to reach the voters much more easily. Therefore, this is

not what ·Attack” attracted its voters with. It attracted

them with its xenophobic cry of ·Bulgaria for the Bulgar-

ians”, with its incitement to ethnic hatred towards the

poor and the downtrodden of Bulgaria.

In Bulgarian society there is a serious potential of such

a message catching on. For 13 years now, I have been

engaged in studying interethnic attitudes in this country

and throughout the Balkans. A series of territorial emi-

grations since 1992, the likes of which are not seen in

advanced democratic countries, systematically show

the level of disenfranchisement of Bulgaria’s ethnic mi-

norities. Comparative studies show that such a level of

prejudice and social distancing is comparable to that of

white Americans in the southern USA towards black

people in the early 60s of the previous century.*

We could say that ·Attack” did not succeed in ab-

sorbing this high potential for xenophobia. It didn’t man-

age to reach ·its own” voters in the smaller villages,

where SKAT TV does not broadcast, and the short dura-

tion of the coalition’s existence was insufficient for them

to build up any structures. There is no doubt, however,

that these villages hold potential for ·Attack”.*

POLITICAL OPPORTUNISM AND DEMAGOGUERY

The thirst for power, which is one of the motivations

for the political behaviour of ·Attack” at least as domi-

nant as racism is, pushed the coalition to embrace politi-

cal ideas, the adherence to which might purely be an

attempt at political opportunism. Incidentally, it still re-

mains to gauge whether the ideological hodgepodge

that we find in the ·Programme Outline” and the 20

principles of ·Attack” constitute a well-thought out po-

litical platform that the coalition intends to uphold, popu-

list demagoguery or simply the prattle of incompetent

people, who don’t know what they’re talking about. Let’s

take a look at just a few examples:

• The return of the death penalty

This would mean Bulgaria breaking two ratified inter-

national treaties - the Second Optional Protocol to

the International Covenant on Civil and Political

Rights and Protocol No. 6 of the European Conven-

tion for the Protection of Human Rights and Funda-

mental Freedoms. Not only would such a step per-

manently obstruct the possibility of the country’s

membership in the European Union, but would pro-

voke its expulsion from the Council of Europe, thus

placing it behind such countries as Russia, Azerbaijan,

Moldova and Belarus.

• Legislative reinforcement of Orthodox Christianity

as the official religion of Bulgaria

Religious instruction in the primary schools. It is not

clear whether the religion would also have to be stud-

ied in the schools that have Muslim pupils. And how is

an ·official religion”, which is taught in the schools,

supposed to fit in with the constitutional principle of

the separation of church and state? But ·Attack”

goes even further: it wants all important social issues

and legislation to be agreed upon in co-ordination

with the Holy Synod of the Bulgarian Orthodox

Church. This is perhaps the most extreme of the

coalition’s ideas. This sort of practice doesn’t exist to-

day even in the Iran of the Ayatollahs.

• Taxation and pension policy

On this point, the left hand of ·Attack” obviously didn’t

know what the right one was doing. In the

·Programme Outline” we read of the “introduction

of a minimum monthly pension, adequate to the Eu-

ropean pension”. On the other hand, the 20 prin-

ciples demand the correspondence of the tax bur-

den with the “payment abilities and the needs of the

Bulgarian population”. The ability of the Bulgarian

population to pay taxes, however, is not large. In that

case, where is the money for European-size pensions

going to come from?

• Economic policy

In the 20 principles, the coalition wants “Bulgarian pro-

duction, commerce and banks to be in Bulgarian

hands”. This could hardly be read as signifying any-

thing other than the confiscation of the property of

the foreign companies in Bulgaria. And that would be

a sure way for Bulgaria to become the economic

pariah of Europe. It isn’t clear in this case how the high

pensions would be secured or how the requirement

in the ·Programme Outline” for the ·correspondence

of troop numbers and the defence budget with those

of neighbouring countries” would be met.

Incidentally, I came quite close to feeling enthusi-

asm for the ·Programme Outline” when I read that ·At-

tack” wants put an end to the prosecution of journalists

by legislative means. My enthusiasm quickly cooled,

however, when I read the demand in the 20 principles

for ·harsh penalties for abuse of revered Bulgarian na-

tional symbols and insults against Bulgaria”. So maybe

·Attack” intends to punish only neighbourhood drunks

for such offences, and of those, only the ones that aren’t

journalists?

I am not going to go into the prattle about the ·mono-

national and monolithic state”, about the ·self-detach-

ment” of the Bulgarian nation by those who place ·dif-

ferentiation by origin or faith” above ·national identity”;

the establishment of a criminal punishment structure

for ·national treachery” and the prosecution in court of

national traitors (it is unclear whether this would be for

deeds committed before or after the formation of that

body). These formulations were obviously intended to

serve the purpose of xenophobic propaganda, but it is

not clear whether the man who wrote them knows that

they mean.

THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THOSE

IN POWER AND THE POLITICIANS

The levels of prejudice and social distancing with re-

gard to minorities in Bulgarian society remain steadily high,

but they are not increasing. In this respect, the voters

who supported ·Attack” did not come out of the political

nothingness. They are the former voters for the main po-

litical forces in Bulgaria - and, as surveys show, mostly for

the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP). They recognised racist

tendencies in them. It’s no accident that a significant

number of ·Attack” politicians are familiar faces from the

Union of Democratic Forces (UDF), BSP and the National* For more on this see Emil Cohen, "The data indicate: Our soci-

ety is ill from racism", Obektiv, issue 123.

Movement of Simeon II (NMSS). Each of these parties in

turn had these foul-smelling skeletons in their closets, and

even tried to use them when nobody was looking in or-

der to gain votes. Out of fear of alienating the nationalist

vote, nobody ever discussed racism or the necessity of

integrating minorities, outside of protocol speeches for

consumption by the ·Europeans”. A special myth was

even created of the ·Bulgarian ethnic model” of suc-

cessful integration of minorities into the country’s political

and social life. This propaganda cliché served domestic

political goals, as well as foreign policy aims.

The police and the judiciary, following a steady line

since the Zhivkov days, enforced the provisions of the

Penal Code that penalise incitement to national and

racial hatred only with regard to people from ethnic

minorities when they tried to assert their identity a little bit

more aggressively. This was the case, for example, with

Ahmed Mussa, the Muslim who was convicted last year

in Pazardzhik of espousing racism and nationalism, as

well as religious enmity and hatred. The only political party

to have been banned by the Constitutional Court as

being unconstitutional, in contradiction to the facts and

common sense, was the minority United Macedonian

Organisation Ilinden-PIRIN. Nobody has ever sought any

liability on the part of the ·Attack” activists for their rac-

ism. In November 2003 the Council on Electronic Media

decided to enforce the provisions of the law that pro-

hibit the dissemination of ethnic and religious enmity,

when it banned the Den television network, not out of

concern but in fulfilment of a political favour. After it

failed in that effort, the CEM decided to leave the xeno-

phobic messages on SKAT television, which are incom-

parably more vulgar and more virulent than those of

Den TV’s Nick Stein, unpunished.

The Framework Programme for Equal Integration of

Roma in Bulgarian Society, adopted by the UDF govern-

ment in 1999, has to a large extent simply remained a

piece of paper, both during that government and that

of the NMSS/MRF coalition. It was also mostly utilised for

showing off to the ·Europeans”. Meanwhile, the isola-

tion of the Roma in Bulgarian society has deepened.

There are fewer and fewer points of communication

between Bulgarians and Roma, and along with this the

idea of belonging to the same society has lost more and

more of its meaning. In such a situation it was entirely

natural for attitudes of dehumanisation to appear. The

Roma were called ·cockroaches” on SKAT television,

which is precisely what the semi-official media had called

the Tutsis in Rwanda on the eve of the genocide.

·Attack” appeared on the scene when the BSP and

the other parties, which had each recently become

members of various ·internationales”, decided to clean

up their images, probably under the critical eye of their

international overseers. But they, as well as the Bulgar-

ian state institutions, continue to refuse to think, or to

develop a capacity for thinking, about the racism and

xenophobia in our society. Even after the skeleton has

fallen out of the closet. To call a pack of political oppor-

tunists, who engineered their penetration of the parlia-

ment in two anti-Semitic lampoons and seven television

shows about the ·Gypsy terror”, a ·normal tumour” -

isn’t that an attempt to wave a hand and once again

sweep the garbage under the rug?

This is not the first time that Bulgarian society has dis-

played a serious deficit of social control over propa-

ganda. It is not the first time that an organised propa-

ganda campaign has succeeded in driving a large num-

ber of Bulgarians to believe in absurd ideas, which a

healthy and educated human sensibility would never

arrive at on its own. Historical experience has shown that

under Bulgarian conditions, the road back to common

sense sometimes (although unfortunately not always)

may be relatively short. Everything depends upon how

seriously we take the challenge.�

WHAT IS THE DANGER OF “ATTACK” BEING IN PARLIAMENT?

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Ivan BEDROV, Journalist with bTV

The main danger is that the things ·Attack”

says, and with which it won over its voters - ·turn

the Gypsies into soap” and ·Bulgaria for the Bul-

garians” - do not constitute a programme, but

in parliament, concrete things happen. They

have no programme outline on judicial reform

and taxation laws, which is what lies ahead on

the agenda. They do not have a clear ideol-

ogy. And there is danger that corruption could rise. That they

could be sold cheaply to any given lobby, and they could

move themselves in any direction. They are not a well-struc-

tured organisation. The recent proposal should not be allowed

- that of having a vote on a government by secret ballot in

order to form one made up of only two parties and with sup-

port from some others - because those votes would come

from ·Attack”, there isn’t anywhere else for them to come

from.�