In the Town of the Apostle of Liberty Valko STANEV “About the Bulgarians” is the title of a website on the hit.bg server. The site features a collage of a Nazi eagle stepping on the Bulgarian coat-of-arms. A swastika is painted on our national flag. The biographies of Hitler and his Third Reich collaborators are published on the site, which is abundant with praise of the white race and quotes from Hitler’s infamous book, My Fight. The site also shows pictures on which neo-Nazis are beating gypsies. On other pictures, skinheads in military uniforms are raising hands in a Nazi salute in front of Vasil Levski’s monument. The two cyber skinheads are activists of Ataka’s Karlovo structure. One of them, Svetozar Yankov, 21, is a member of the parliamentary represented party Ataka. His father, Argir Yankov, formerly an officer at the Ministry of the Interior, is currently employed by the Scorpio security company. During the presidential elections last year, Svetozar Yankov was a member of an electoral committee. Computer systems, CDs and numerous volumes of Nazi literature were found during the search of his home. The two Nazi website creators were arrested in a special raid of the Fight Against Organized Crime Chief Directorate and the National Police Service in Karlovo. The operation was supervised by the Plovdiv Regional Prosecutor’s Office. The policemen targeted the two computer-literate skinheads in early December last year. The website was closed after the raid and an investigation was initiated. “If the arrested neo-Nazis have no prior convictions, they may get away with a fine that would not exceed 1,000 lv.,” said the Plovdiv Regional prosecutor, Andrey Atanasov. The second person, Ivailo M., a 19-year-old student at the Hristo Prodanov Secondary School, is known as a very good student and, apart from his support for Ataka, has no record of anti-social offences. On Wednesday, January 31, 2007, the local Ataka structures will defend their members and activists in paid messages to the media. The Plovdiv Regional Investigation Office has launched an investigation. Charges were brought against the two detainees under Art. 108 and Art. 162 of the Penal Code.
> she was transferred to a psychiatric dispensary. There, she was prescribed treatment without being examined by a specialist and despite her entreaties that she was allergic. Several hours later, she was transferred to a psychiatric hospital, where she was treated for a week without her consent, under the compulsion that she would never be released if she did not take her medication. For a while, the staff met her stories about her trips abroad, her professional competence and workplace with irony. Fortunately, at the end of this period, one of the doctors decided to verify her words and was amazed to find out that everything was true. |This, however, did not stop the filing of an involuntary commitment lawsuit against Mrs. B. The case was dismissed. Even the prosecution called the trial “a farce” and withdrew the case. Mrs. B.’s physical traumas healed shortly after her release from the psychiatric hospital. The effects of the humiliation and abuse, the rage and helplessness, the mistrust in the police and the inability to find a mechanism to seek liability, however, will remain with her for an indefinite period of time.
These stories did not occur outside our usual everyday life. They happened on workdays, in front of passing citizens. No one recognized a problem. How then, could we expect justice in places that are completely outside the public eye, in the social care homes and psychiatric clinics where, at least on paper, errors do not occur? The death cases are inevitably attributed to the victims. And the relatives remain with their grief in neverending uncertainty... But these are other stories that have a different ending. OBEKTIV 5