The issue:
Legislation against discrimination is on Bulgaria’s statute books.

Successive post-communist governments have come up with policies against various forms of discrimination, including ethnic discrimination. In 2005, Bulgaria became a signatory to an international pledge towards a programme to integrate the Roma minority into society.

Even before these stated intentions were issued in the past decade, it was common practice to speak of Bulgaria’s “model of ethnic tolerance”. Ironically, while some analysts and historians may differ on this point, it appears that the very roots of this model of ethnic tolerance lie in the same era so often invoked by those who stir up the poisonous wells of ethnic hatred - to wit, the time during which Bulgaria was under Ottoman rule. While this is a vexed point among historians, especially those with strongly nationalistic leanings, the Ottoman empire practiced some form of tolerance, even though it was far from the liberal paradigm of tolerance that arose in the latter half of the 20th century, by which time the world had at least partly absorbed some lessons about the consequences of ethnic intolerance, racism, and xenophobia. However, it must be pointed out that the same Ottoman empire practiced discrimination on the basis of religious affiliation, with non-Muslims having lesser rights. It is a matter of historical record that in the dying decades of the empire, atrocities were committed. It is these bitter memories that are invoked by Bulgaria’s latter-day ultra-nationalists, such as Ataka.

It was at the 2001 United Nations conference on racism and other forms of intolerance that Bulgaria’s representative proudly held up the country’s ethnic model as a form for others to emulate. Yet, even then, human rights groups were expressing concern about ethnic tolerance in Bulgaria. While the racial divisions in Bulgaria are not held in place by statutory provisions (as used to be the case, notably, in America’s Deep South and in apartheid-era South Africa), the forms of negative discrimination in Bulgaria have tended to be informal. The case of the Roma minority in Bulgaria is of particular relevance. As in other countries in which there is a Roma minority, the community tends to have the lowest level of education, seldom completing school, and certainly is strongly under-represented among the country’s tertiary education graduates. Perhaps as a function of the last point, Roma are scarcely to be seen employed in white-collar jobs in the formal economy and there are none to be found among top executives in the formal economy’s corporates. In counterpoint to this, it is often said that the exclusion of Roma in Bulgaria is a two-way process, that they keep themselves apart from the formal private sector and political power elite in Bulgaria, moving instead within the grey economy, with some even becoming wealthy and powerful within this context. As to the Turkish minority, the case is different, because the party that traditionally perceived as representing this minority’s interest has for some time had a significant share of power at national level.

In recent years, the concerns expressed by foreign and multi-national government and private human rights watchdogs about ethnic intolerance in Bulgaria drew little reaction, and that tended to be denial and public re-affirmation that ethnic tolerance was the norm in Bulgaria. It took the meteoric rise of Ataka and the hatred spouted by its acolytes to put the question of ethnic intolerance firmly on the national agenda, drawing public reactions from President Georgi Purvanov and Prime Minister Sergei Stanishev, among others. Perhaps Ataka and similar ultra-nationalist groups that have arisen recently have done nothing more than provide a lightning conductor for an inter-racial tautness that always was in the air in Bulgaria, expressed in private conversations littered with racial epithets, exchanged only in bars and chatrooms; but perhaps the public displays by Ataka have served to legitimise, in some quarters, the expression of such views.

Certainly, the fact that the question is now on the national agenda has led to some extraordinary manifestations, such as the March 28 unprecedented meeting at the Bulgarian Orthodox Church holy synod headquarters in Sofia of Orthodox Christian, Roman Catholic, Evangelical, Muslim and Jewish leaders to express their rejection of ethnic and religious intolerance. Equally, some have expressed concern about the public spectacle of the spouting of hate speech prejudicing Bulgaria’s prospects of joining the European Union. And certainly, it has brought a new dimension to Bulgaria’s politics, with two new poles, one being those who advocate tolerance, and others who do not.