Organised crime and domestic policy

Organised crime, people trafficking, weapons, drugs, are fundamentally awkward problems. Going by media reports, there seems to be some progress, the occasional bust, not only in Bulgaria but also elsewhere in the region, although I’m a bit cynical and wonder sometimes if it’s pr. How do you assess the level of co-operation, is some genuine progress being made on a regional basis but, of course, specifically in Bulgaria?

I’ll give you a qualified ‘yes’. And here are some of the qualifications. Bulgaria in particular and the Balkans in general are a major transit route by virtue of their geography and bodies of water that they intersect. This region has traditionally been a route of passage for some good things and a number of bad things, and that includes human trafficking, narco trafficking, grey arms, basically bad things that people wanted to get from one place to another, they could use this region. That difficulty has been compounded by the presence in this country and in the other countries of the region by deeply entrenched organised crime networks that benefit, either directly or indirectly, from this kind of bad transit and trade.

We have worked intensively with the Bulgarian law enforcement authorities to try to combat this, and the complexity of the problem requires that you have to look at each specific issue area. We have, for example, worked very intensively with the Ministry of Interior, and the customs authority to shut down narcotics trafficking. It’s a key problem. Afghan heroin is a very significant problem that relates not only to Bulgaria but also to Afghanistan and to the rest of the world and we want very much to do everything possible to shut that down.

There have been some very important seizures but seizures only tell you what the dimension of the problem is. When you seize the material but you don’t break the network, you haven’t solved the problem. Either the production network, the transit network or the marketing on the other side. So seizures are good and we are very happy about them and we want to continue that, but we recognise that there is a deeper problem.

Human trafficking is another issue of tremendous concern and there have been good things that have happened here. There have been some more arrests, there has been more public education, regional centres have been set up, there’s been a victims rescue centre that’s been set up, so there have been some positive things. But the trafficking continues, we haven’t broken up the networks inside this country or inside the region that we need to in order to really shut down. And so, a qualified yes, we are doing some good things but are we fundamentally solving the problem? The answer is, not yet.

I find two things interesting, a, the point that has been made that if you want to look for a model of excellent regional co-operation, look at the mutri, because they are better at regional co-operation than anyone else, and, b, in the Ceku case, there was an Interpol arrest warrant, a red warrant, and he was picked up in Bulgaria but he transited Macedonia – and if that can happen that with him…

I have been dealing with controversies related to red warrants for a long time, you know Turkey has a number of issues with this process as well. It’s an interesting observation and we’ll see how this process, particularly his case, you saw the news as of yesterday that he’s been released.

Overall, what are Washington’s expectations of Bulgaria in key areas of foreign policy as envisaged by the US?

The one thing that I would phrase a little differently, but when you say ‘expectations of’ it’s almost as if there’s a laundry list of chores to be done, and having been married for 20 years, I know how my husband reacts to that. But that’s really not how we do business. But I will say that as friends and partners, as treaty allies and people who talk on a daily basis about the things that matter to us, to both of our sides, we do have a busy agenda of things that we’re working on.

It relates to everything, from Somali pirates, to stability of the Black Sea region, to how we as an alliance in the Euro Atlantic community are going to deal with the Taliban in Afghanistan, how we are going to create stability throughout south Asia, to what’s happening across the European continent, and that’s everything from the energy issues that we talked about previously, Russia and the rest of the former Soviet Union, and creating stability and fostering democracy there, to dealing with the problems of continued transition in Central and Eastern Europe and the problems of the economic crisis on the globe overall.

That is a kind of a summary, if you asked me my day, my week, that’s it. We look at Bulgaria as a country that is responsible, that is dependable, that has genuinely partnered with us. And that is, for my money, a pretty important thing. You can look back at prior examples, whether it was troop deployments in Iraq, recognition of Kosovo or how we dealt with the Russian war in Georgia or the gas cutoff, where we talked about these issues, we figured out what mattered to us most at that moment and then developed a common and coherent way forward. And that’s what we look for, we look for that kind of partnership, that kind of openness and we do look to Bulgaria to be a force for stability, a force for responsibility, throughout this region.

The US has a global foreign policy and we don’t expect all of our partners to share our global view, although we have found – you and I are of both of a certain age, so we can relate to this, but I remember when in the course in my career, when we talked about Nato’s ‘out of area’ debates, how do you define what is ‘out of area’ today? I don’t know how you do that. I don’t know how you draw that line. So we don’t necessarily expect all of our allies to share all of our concerns around the world, whether it be Africa or Asia or Latin America, but I do think that the nature of today’s world and today’s problems means that you can’t draw arbitrary lines about what’s a European issue and what’s a global issue.

You are, so to speak, my fourth US ambassador – Mr Miles, Mr Pardew, Mr Beyrle…

At least you got a woman!

For which we are grateful. We have heard similar messages time and again, organised crime, corruption…

Sadly so.

In very direct Anglo-Saxon, are you frustrated?

Yes. The word that I’ll use more than frustrated, although I’ll answer your question is, yes I am frustrated, I am impatient. I believe that anybody who really cares about this country is impatient for more progress on corruption and on organised crime. How can you not be? How can you care about Bulgaria and not advocate for faster and more effective action on this issue?

And of course there is no, what we say, silver bullet. You cannot solve these problems overnight. I recognise that. Anyone who has experience in these issues recognises it will take time. But you also, all of us, have to be honest and say that you start a long process, at the beginning, you take concrete steps, to achieve progress as quickly and as demonstrably as you can, and you protect the good that has been achieved and ensure that there is no backsliding and you try to go forward.

I believe that the government that will emerge from the elections on July 5 has both an opportunity but also a very serious responsibility to move forward on corruption and on organised crime in substantial and concrete ways. I hope that the government will come forward both with a strategic plan for what it will do to address what it will do, with specific milestones and by milestones, I mean goals and timelines within which they plan to meet those goals and will make those public so that both the government and the people and civil society can have a dialogue about it.

I have said repeatedly that a fine place to begin such a strategic plan is EU monies and that would be specifically instituting oversight and monitoring mechanisms for the EU monies. That is something that is quite achievable and it may require some changes based on how things are done now but that is something that could be done, and go along with that, the government could also make it a priority to address and resolve the cases that are still outstanding of those individuals and those organisations that have been accused of mismanaging or embezzling EU money. They should resolve those cases.

If the government is successful in doing those two things, it would then provide a lovely template on which to broaden procedures for public procurement more generally and given the significant role that public procurement plays in this economy both in terms of revenue stream and job creation in terms of the development of small and medium enterprises, greater rigour and greater transparency in the oversight and operation of public procurement tenders would have a very positive impact here.

You left one out that you have mentioned before, which I would regard as an even more fundamental step, which is to have relatively clean politicians, which would tend to imply sorting something out about the somewhat opaque nature of political party funding, and who is actually bankrolling these guys.

Of course. It’s one of my favourite issues. One tends not to get these issues addressed immediately prior to an election. There was an effort that was made and there was new legislation that came out that was a step forward in terms of transparency and rigour in political party financing that I think, unless and until there is true, and I mean genuine, transparency, genuine rigour in discerning the sources and the flow of money that goes into and out of political parties, there will never be a break between the parties and vested interests, and shady business. So it’s an absolute crucial issue.

I identified the EU monies because that is, I think, something that can be achieved in a relatively shorter period of time. Political party financing is something that will have to be done in phases. The first phase will have to saying, this is the template, this is the rigour with which all the parties must report their financial data, and I called on all the parties earlier to do that – put all of their financial data online, real time. But there also have to be other changes.

At the moment, the Government provides a certain amount of money to the parties to fund their campaigns. That amount needs to be higher. There’s a limit to how much the parties can spend on advertising, in terms of media. That is unrealistically low and needs to be raised. So these are core, crucial, fundamentally important issues. They will take more time to address, but yes of course, they must be addressed.

And probably civil society too. In the US, civil society tracks campaign financing. It would be nice if someone in Bulgaria started doing that as well.

Political party financing is an issue that I think will always be difficult. It’s difficult in the US and there are still instances, and we saw with a number of candidates during our campaign where it was only after the fact that certain things were discovered and money was returned. But that’s the goal that you have to strive for, where you have constant rigour and where people are constantly saying, how can we make the process not just more transparent, but more integral.

It’s interesting, and for Americans who are here in Bulgaria, also quite compelling that our Fourth of July and the Bulgarian national election comes on the fifth of July are happening more or less simultaneously. We use our Fourth of July as an opportunity to recall and remember the principles on which our country was founded. These are often lofty-sounding things, like liberty and equality and rule of law, but it is a moment for us to think about what really matters, what we really care about, what are we prepared to make a stand for. I know that many Bulgarians are thinking the same thing as they approach their national elections.