If there is a subject that both politicians and the media like to endlessly discuss in Bulgaria, it is the subject of the dossiers of State Security, the former communist secret police and their impact on Bulgaria nowadays. The reason is simple. Unlike most of the former communist states in Eastern Europe, Bulgaria has lacked the political will to once and for all take a decision on the dossiers. They have neither been destroyed nor fully opened and only a few people have had legal access to them, usually from the respective ruling party, which has turned the dossiers issue in a strong tool in the game called Bulgarian politics.

Having all this in mind, the year 2007 could be described as the turning point. For the first time in the past 15 years, the ruling majority gathered courage and in February passed a law on the dossiers. It provided for the forming of a nine-member committee that would have the power and duty to open the archives of the communist-era State Security and the former Bulgarian People’s Army. The committee was set up to investigate the involvement of Bulgarian citizens in State Security and military intelligence.

This was the committee that was suppose to stop all speculation about people having or not having had connections to the former communist services. Highly welcomed on a parliamentary level, the committee’s members had to face the resistance of ministries, agencies and other bureaucrats. The committee’s biggest problem suddenly became the lack of its own building. This is why the committee’s first meeting in April was held in the Parliament building.

The tight deadlines it had to meet were also a challenge. On May 20, Bulgaria had its first elections for Bulgarian members of European Parliament and the law said that all candidates had to be checked by the committee. Without a building or its own administration, the nine members of the committee had little reason to be satisfied.

Another problem was that most of the archives were still in possession of the Interior Ministry, the National Intelligence Service and the Defence Ministry, which used the lack of a designated meeting place for the committee as an excuse not to provide them with the dossiers.

In this situation, it was something of a miracle when the committee met its deadline and published the results of the checks on MEP candidates on time. The first six “victims” of the committee were announced. Only one of the exposed six candidates quit the race. Strangely enough he was part of an opposition party. The rest remained on the tickets of their parties, reasoning that they had no choice but to work for Bulgaria’s national security no matter the nature of the regime prior to 1989.

This revealed the full extent the of nature of the law on the dossiers. It had the power to announce publicly the names of those connected to the former communist services but lacked the power to prevent them from standing for a public post.

In July, the committee finally got its own building and moved in. In return it published a list with three former constitutional judges “revealed” to have been former agents.
Next on the agenda for the committee were the candidates for mayor and municipal councillors in the October 28 municipal elections.

And just when everything seemed to have been running smoothly, the dossiers issue took another turn. In July, President Georgi Purvanov’s communist-era State Security dossier resurfaced to show that dossier fever was still far from over.

That Purvanov had a State Security dossier, under the codename “Agent Gotse”, was by no means news since in 2006 Purvanov himself had admitted to having one.
Purvanov, a historian, was being deployed in Bulgaria’s grappling against “pro-Skopje” historians. One of the last documents in the Gotse dossier was a proposal to archive the file because of termination of service.

Crime and how to fight it was the other highly debated issue in Parliament in 2007. The year saw less public murders than in previous ones but still organised crime remained one of the major criticisms aimed at Bulgaria by the European Commission and the US.

The case against the brothers Krassimir Marinov and Nikolai Marinov, nicknamed the Big and the Small Margins, became a synonym of how ineffective the Bulgarian judiciary has been. Starting in 2006 the case was postponed so many times that people almost lost interest in it. In December 2007 it was put on hold on the grounds of the poor health condition of one of the defendants. The brothers – charged with plotting the murder of three people, drug trafficking and money laundering – were sent home to remain under house arrest despite the efforts of Prosecutor-General Boris Velchev. This all led to Velchev asking for more rights for prosecutors, a call supported by Interior Minister Roumen Petkov.

Responding to public expectations, Prime Minister Sergei Stanishev suggested in June the creation of a State Agency for National Security (SANS) to fight against top-level corruption, money laundering, drug trafficking and organised crime. After months of discussion, on December 4, MPs adopted the draft bill on the SANS, creating what the Bulgarian-language media has called “the Bulgarian FBI”.

The draft bill was highly criticised by opposition leaders, who said that SANS would serve the interest of President Purvanov more than the interests of society because the bill provided for the president to appoint SANS’ leadership. The dossier issue surfaced again, as the bill required 10 years of experience in service for anyone who wants to work at SANS. The opposition claimed that this provision narrowed the choice to people who had spent most of their careers working for the services of communist Bulgaria, since just 18 years had passed since the fall of communism. The bill came into force on January 1 2008.