IT is expected that Parliament will hold a debate between April 10 and 15 on whether to continue the deployment of Bulgarian soldiers in Iraq.
This emerged at an impromptu news conference by the Speaker of Parliament, Borislav Velikov, on March 23.
Earlier, Defence Minister Nikolai Svinarov said he believed that Bulgaria should not recall the next, fifth, contingent from Iraq until the end of its term at the end of 2005.
“Whether it will be the last one, or whether it will be replaced by a sixth contingent, is a matter to be decided by the next defence minister and the next Parliament,” he said. Parliamentary elections are scheduled to be held in late June.
“The fifth contingent, which is to be deployed in the middle of 2005, should be pulled out in the space of two weeks or a month, according to the plan,” Svinarov said at a joint news conference with Romanian defence minister Teodor Atanasiu in Sofia.
Atanasiu said Romania would keep its own contingent in Iraq until the local security services were ready to take over the tasks currently performed by the Romanians.
Svinarov and Atanasiu discussed their countries’ participation in NATO and the EU, their preparations for contributing to the future EU military forces, and security tasks in the Black Sea region.
Meanwhile, French news agency AFP reported that the Supreme Administrative Court (SAC) in Sofia had on March 22 begun hearings in a court action against Foreign Minister Solomon Passi for allegedly hiding information during the hostage crisis when two Bulgarian truck drivers were kidnapped and murdered in Iraq in the summer of 2004.
Anti-war activist Peter Penchev, who lodged the court action, said that the hostage-takers had called for a high-ranking Bulgarian representative to state on television that Bulgaria would withdraw its troops from Iraq.
“The demand was aired on TV channel CNN and in my view that is enough proof of its existence,” Penchev was quoted as saying by AFP.
During the crisis, official statements in Bulgaria were that the kidnappers, allegedly linked to Al-Qaeda operative Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, only had demanded that US troops free Iraqi prisoners within 24 hours.
At the time, Passi said Bulgaria would not give in to blackmail, with his deputy Gergana Grancharova adding that “the kidnappers’ demands cannot be met, as they concern a third country”.
“The Bulgarian authorities acted in a perfectly transparent way,” Gruncharova said on March 22 in response to the court action.
“There was no contact between us and the kidnappers and no demands were posed (directly) to Bulgaria.”
Penchev said: “If Bulgarian society had known that the release of the hostages depended not on a third country, as was said, but solely on Bulgaria’s foreign ministry I am sure that people would have taken massively to the streets, and that might have helped.
“At least we would not have given the impression of being totally unconcerned about the fate of our hostages in Iraq.”
Penchev and his committee, Civilians Against War, have asked the Foreign Ministry whether they knew about the demand to withdraw from Iraq, but Passi said that “no official information about such a demand” had been presented to the Foreign Ministry.
“We want to prove that the Foreign Ministry knew about the demands but censored the information and manipulated the public,” Penchev said.
The SAC is expected to announce a decision within 30 days.