OBEKTIV RESPONDS
The murder of a Muslim youth provokes French president Yuliana METODIEVA You won’t find any information about this in the Bulgarian-language Google pages. It happened a year before Francois Mitterrand departed for the Elysian Fields. At the time the citizens of Paris had been aroused by a racist atrocity, and their socialist president stood at the forefront of their protest, facing off with the French extremists. The bloodied corpse of a Muslim child was shown on a poster upon which the world’s liberals affixed their slogan of ·NEVER AGAIN!” The Parisian protest was added to the thousands of actions in the defence of inter-ethnic tolerance from sinister attacks by fundamentalists, extremists, neoNazis, anti-Semites and their stormtroopers, the skinheads. I am not writing this because of the foreordained victory of Volen Siderov’s ·Attack” coalition in winning seats in the 40th Bulgarian parliament. Something else provoked me to write about this forgotten action of a French statesman at the dawning of a united Europe. In order to draw a comparison between the beauty of Mitterrand’s human rights-affirming gesture and the cruel blockage of our entire civil system in the face of domestic fascism. This is a blockage that has lasted over five years. Meanwhile in 2005, having become stronger and more attractive in the eyes of the nation’s masses with his demagogic slogans against American military basing in the country and our participation in the war in Iraq, the author of The Boomerang of Evil is on his way to the 40th National Assembly. One month before his (un)stoppable advance, a Roma youth was murdered in the Roma Fakulteta neighbourhood in Sofia. Another Roma child. From the moment when the sociological data began to publicize the swelling of the murky tide of the Siderov nationalists, I tried (and probably not just me) to stir up activism amongst various ·emblematic” figures from our elite. To supplement the figures provided by Zhivko Georgiev from Gallup and Mira Yanova from MBMD, I showed photos of skinhead atrocities and the slogans of the sup-
porters of Boyan Rasate from the Bulgarian National Union. To those who at the demonstration in the Zaharna Fabrika neighbourhood raised the cries of ·Send the Gypsies to Saturn!” and ·Bulgaria for the Bulgarians!” I reminded people how back in 2002, Nazi sites were weaving webs on the Internet. The number of hits received by the ·Blood and Horror” site and its Bulgarian version was disturbing. The Internet was inundated by a plague of postings by domestic and foreign racists, just as the open air book market on Slaveykov Square was buried in such wailing titles as The Lie of the Six Million, the speeches of Benito Mussolini, and the ‘Bible’ of the new-old Nazism, Mein Kampf. Finally, in order to break down the thick wall of the Bulgarian ·postmodernists”, I told the story of the French protest led by Francois Mitterrand. It shouldn’t take mass atrocities committed against dark-skinned little children, I said, in order for us to react. We’ve got to stop Volen, whom we know, from doing his harm. It’s not enough to stand at an ironic distance from him, that won’t work, it’s feeble, impotent - precisely because we know him so well, from the time when some of us had our doubts about his loyalty to the dissident movement. We know all too well his dark texts from the Monitor newspaper, which he pathologically wove together into his thick digest Bulgarophobia. So let’s do it... We need to study this phenomenon, was their answer to me. We need to study what the motives of his fans are, they added. We must not offend them! In order not to make their leader into a hero, they whispered to me on the square in front of the Alexander Nevski Cathedral at the demonstration on 22 June 2005. The patriots’ favourite songs, ·Shumi Maritsa” and ·Stani, Stani, Yunak Balkanski” blared from the speakers. The old familiar faces from the ·Nova Zora” [New Dawning] days called upon all their Bulgarian brothers to stand together. And for the first time, the savage slogans of the attacking ·citizens” rang out: ·Send the Gypsies to camps!”, ·Send the Turks to Anatolia!” and ·Jews - Out!” We didn’t stop Volen Siderov - the writer, the anti-Semite, the passionate Gypsy hater.