--- Muhammad Abu Nasr, Editorial Board of the Free
Arab Voice

www.freearabvoice.org  

Bulgaria votes to let US set up bases on its territory

The vote to open US military bases in Bulgaria, former
member of the socialist Warsaw Treaty Organization and
now NATO member provided a clear and very interesting
illustration of how the political forces in the world
are realigning themselves - and therefor how we must
try to realign ourselves accordingly.

On Friday, 26 May the Bulgarian parliament voted to
allow the US to set up bases in their country.  The US
and the Bulgarian regime already agreed on this some
months ago, so this was a matter of the parliament
ratifying the agreement.

The political alignment of forces in Bulgaria are
reflected in the Bulgarian parliament as follows:

First, the Bulgarian government and the parliament
are dominated by the Socialist Party, which is the
descendant of the Soviet-era Communist Party of Georgi
Dimitrov and Todor Zhivkov.

Like most CPs it has become basically a liberal social
democratic party - in this case overtly and avowedly
so.

This governing party and its various allies cast 150
votes in favor of allowing the US to open bases in
their country.

There were 20 votes against the bases, and two
abstentions.

News reports (like the following:
http://www.azstarnet.com/dailystar/news/131015.php)

suggest that the overwhelming support for the bases
among the elected officials is in contrast to very
limited support among the masses.  (This is one of the
examples of modern liberal democracy at work - where
the masses dutifully elect officials who do not
represent them.)

The 20 opposition votes broke down as follows,
apparently: 8 from the nationalist Ataka Party, 7 from
"independents" and 5 from maverick Socialists.

The Ataka Party, the only political force to organize
demonstrations and protest actions against the US
bases, is led by Volen Siderov, a news comentator who
has, among other things, written books about how the
Jews have plundered the world for centuries.  He is
known for his opposition to Gypsies and the Turkish
minority and attended a conference on Globalism put on
by the historical revisionist Barnes Review in Moscow
in 2002 (see: http://www.abbc2.com/conferences/#volen)

You can get a bit more information on Siderov and his
Ataka party on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Union_Attack

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volen_Siderov

Particularly interesting is the issue of Siderov's
hostility to the Turkish minority is particularly
interesting.  Siderov is anti-Communist, as the speech
he gave in the Moscow Conference reveals.  At the same
time he's a kind of Orthodox Church "nationalist" or
advocate of the countries that are part of the
Orthodox Christian heritage and he favors closer
alignment of Bulgaria with Russia today.

So one might think that this hostility to the Turkish
minority is some kind of post-Communist right-wing
aberation.

But in fact it can be traced back to the campaigns
waged by the Communist-led government during the
mid-1980s, when the government carried out a
strong anti-Turkic campaign.  The government
denied that there were any Turks in Bulgaria, claiming
that all of them were really Bulgarians who had
converted to Islam.  As such, the Communist regime
said, they should not mind changing their "Turkish"
names to "Bulgarian" ones - which to some extent meant
changing Muslim names to Christian ones.

But meanwhile at that time, during the Reagan
Administration, there was a strong political drive
emanating from Turkey of trying to assert Turkish
and/or Islamic identities of Bulgarian Muslims/Turks.
So the Bulgarian government's cultural unity campaign
wasn't just an accident, it was a response to the Cold
War attempt of Turkey and the West to manipulate Islam
against the socialist countries.

Today, after the fall of the USSR, Bulgaria's Turks
have all "come out of the closet" and have formed
their own political party just to serve their own
minority interests in Bulgaria. And the Turkish party
is aligned with the Socialist party and for the bases
- not surprisingly, since the Turks in Bulgaria have
links to the Turks in Turkey whose alignment with NATO
is well established.

It's also handy for Washington to have a sizable
minority in Bulgaria operating its own political
party, since dividing countries on ethnic lines is
America's specialty these days.

Thus we have a couple very interesting angles here:

1. The Bulgarian ruling party that is opening the
country to US occupation is a socialst party - in fact
a former Communist Party.

2. The opposition to the building of US bases (which
everybody knows would likely be used to strike Islamic
countries) came most strongly from a "racist"
nationalist party that is particularly hostile to the
Turkish minority (but that doesn't prompt them to
support anti-Islamic American bases on Bulgarian
soil).

So it's another example where the rightwing, despite
being supposedly racist, and despite having a possibly
anti-Islamic tinge, is actually objectively our
closest ally, while the left, for the most part, has
largely gone over to dependency on the USA.

Once again, this makes for a difficult period of
transition as we find racist rightists closer to us
than secular, humanitarian leftists.  But once again
it's important to see who is actually saying what,
rather than clinging to old worn-out labels. 

Before closing, here's another article on the Ataka
nationalists in Bulgaria and a look at the 'right' and
'left'

The article is from March this year (2006) and it
gives yet another glimpse of what that party is
calling for.

http://www.sofiaecho.com/article/nationalist-movement-rallies-on-bulgarias-national-holiday/id_13979/catid_5


In this case the "anti-Communist" Ataka is calling for
re-nationalisation of all the privatization done in
the last 15 years.

And at the Bulgarian nationalist rally, the article
says, they play music of Richard Wagner, the
19th-Century German nationalist composer, who was not
Bulgarian, or Slavic, or Orthodox - but who definitely
didn't like Jews).

Oonce again even on domestic matters like
private-public ownership, "left" and "right" are very
slippery labels.

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http://www.sofiaecho.com/article/nationalist-movement-rallies-on-bulgarias-national-holiday/id_13979/catid_5


Nationalist movement rallies on Bulgaria’s national
holiday
09:00 Mon 13 Mar 2006 - Petar Kostadinov


Ataka organised a rally in Sofia on the day of
Bulgaria’s national holiday.

“We are taking a new course towards special elections
and a march to power,” Siderov told party supporters
who had gathered in the square around St Alexander
Nevsky Cathedral.

Siderov said that he would seek personal
accountability from every national “traitor”.

To the music of Wagner, Siderov said that Bulgaria was
not governed by Bulgarians and it was the destiny of
Ataka to return it to the Bulgarians.

“Those who govern now are afraid of their people and
they do not deserve power,” he said. He said that on
Thursday, MPs for Ataka had submitted a draft bill to
the secretariat of Parliament calling for the
re-nationalisation of everything privatised to date.

“Bulgarians today live 50 times more poorly than the
average European living standard and this cannot be
called progress,” Siderov said during his nearly
40-minute speech. “We should be ready with live chains
and civil protests from here on.”

The rally was preceded by a march, which included
Ataka supporters brought to Sofia with buses from
various parts of the country, as well as supporters
from the Bulgarian minority in Bosilegrad (Serbia).

“Those who govern now are afraid of their people and
they do not deserve power. That is why we have to
drive them out of Parliament,” Siderov said.

According to Ataka, the closely guarded rally was
attended by 50 000 people. According to the police,
however, they numbered no more than 8000.

Deputy Interior Minister Kamen Penkov and General
Roumen Stoyanov, head of the Sofia Interior Ministry
Directorate, attended the rally because of concern
that there would be provocations and clashes. No
incidents were reported.

Ataka party is a relatively new political formation,
dating to spring 2005, described by analysts as
radical and nationalistic.

In the June 25 2005 Parliamentarian elections, Ataka
won 8.14 per cent of the vote, and became the
fourth-largest group in Parliament.

The party often speaks against the participation of
the Movement for Rights and Freedoms (MRF) in the
Government. The MRF mostly represents the Turkish
minority in Bulgaria who, together with the Roma
minority, are often the subject of racial slurs from
Siderov.

The MRF is part of a tripartite Government coalition
with the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP) and National
Movement Simeon II (NMSII), with BSP leader Sergei
Stanishev as Prime Minister.

In the days before the rally, Prime Minister Stanishev
had expressed discontent with the decision by Sofia
Mayor Boiko Borissov to permit Ataka to hold its rally
close to the venue and the hour of the official state
ceremony scheduled for the same day.

The whole week the prime minister, President Georgi
Purvanov, the Speaker of Parliament and MPs voiced
warnings and fanned expectations of provocations and
clashes.
On March 4, Yunal Lyutfi, deputy leader of the MRF and
Deputy Speaker of Parliament, told a news conference
that Ataka lacked the potential to precipitate early
elections.

Ataka was merely “a bubble that will burst within a
few weeks,” Lyutfi said.

“Bulgarians’ living standards are improving slowly but
steadily. Every Bulgarian will feel the change within
a year at most,” Lyutfi said.

The same day, Ivelin Nikolov, deputy chair of the BSP
Supreme Council, said in the city of Silistra that
Ataka’s ideas and intentions had copied Hitler’s
national socialism.

Nikolov said that the state should find out who was
behind Ataka, suggesting that it was backed by
companies from within the grey economy trying to block
Bulgaria’s EU accession.

“I am convinced that Ataka, its leader and its
parliamentary group have no financial, professional or
ideological resources to organise on their own the
things they have been doing,” Nikolov said.

On March 6, Milen Velchev, an NMSII MP and former
finance minister, said in an interview with the
Bulgarian-language press that the danger arising from
Ataka should not be underestimated.
“We are very worried that society might be directed on
to the wrong path and everything accomplished over the
past 15 years might be demolished,” Velchev said.