Q: The US and Bulgaria appear to share foreign policy priorities in developing the Euro-Atlantic prospects of the Western Balkans. How are the two countries co-operating in developing these goals?

A: I think that you are absolutely right to identify the Western Balkans, the Balkans, the peninsula as an area of attention and continuing concern, and that’s kind of a facile statement but it is a true one. We have seen over the course of history and over the course of the last several years the continuing truth that the problems of the Balkans, if left unchecked, become the problem of the continent and of the Atlantic community, and so we are very focused on this region and trying to get it right.

You saw that vice president Biden made a very early trip into the region because he wanted to underscore the importance that the Obama administration places on the region and what I think we can all agree is the still unfinished work to be done in this region. We have found our partnership with Bulgaria in this regard to be extremely helpful and extremely productive for both of us. Bulgaria is a country that is in the Balkans and of the Balkans but yet doesn’t suffer in the way that many of the countries do, from more existential problems.

The countries of the former Yugoslav republics have gone through incredible suffering over the past many years, and I during the course of my own career have been a part of the decisions, and in particular our decisions to intervene militarily, first in Bosnia and then in Kosovo, where there were decisions that we took after great deliberation and some very serious debate. But in terms of what we the United States and Bulgaria do together to try to deal with this region and with the issues of the region, there are lots of examples to point to. We have worked, in the first instance, to try to solve some of the problems whether that was deploying together as Nato allies, and Bulgaria still has troops in Bosnia and in Kosovo, to do the peacekeeping mission once we have finished with the other kind of conflict that we were involved in there. Bulgaria is also participating in the EU mission EULEX.

So we do lots of practical things in terms of problem solving and try to build better institutions. But we are also committed to the longer-term process of repairing, and that’s both facilitating the integration of the countries of the Balkans into the institutions that would help that long-term stability, whether that’s the Nato alliance or the EU, the OSCE and the Council of Europe, but it’s also, and this is the intangible one that is harder for a lot of people to wrap their heads around, the process of political dialogue and the sharing of a strategic vision that allows both politicians and average citizens to conceive of how to get from their current difficulty circumstance to a future posture and reality that is better and more meaningful and addresses their problems in important ways. We do a lot of that, and we co-operate on a regular basis on all of those issues.

For example, then, the Macedonia name dispute, and Serbia Kosovo, so there would be co-ordination, ‘you try to talk to Skopje, you try to talk to Athens’?

Absolutely. We co-ordinate together on a bilateral basis our policy throughout the region.

Energy diversity. We’ve been hearing that the US is very interested in coming to help, encouraging Bulgaria to get serious about energy diversity. My impression is that Sofia is going about it in a way that will compound problems, not solve them. How optimistic are you that we will see genuine progress?

The question of energy is a key one for our bilateral relationship with Bulgaria because we’re interested in Bulgaria’s best interests. But we also look at energy security and diversity as an issue that’s relevant to the entire continent, and so we proceed on our individual bilateral relationships and dialogues on this issue in that broader context. The January cutoff was a real wakeup call here. We have proceeded since that time on a number of tracks that I think are very promising.

The first track that we have dialogued with the Bulgarian Government on is the need to address domestic usage, storage and access, and that relates to everything to expanding domestic storage, capacity, to exploring indigenous resources, and there is an American company that is working to access some natural reserves here in this country, and also we are looking at the very unglamorous, very practical sides of interconnectors and reverse flow and all of that stuff that people immediately tune out because it gets too technical, but in fact are the pieces of the puzzle that when you put it together, represents a solution.

We have also been very supportive of Bulgaria’s efforts to transform certain aspects of how energy is dealt with here. One is the Bulgarian Government’s desire to do away with the "intermediary companies" that are registered offshore, often impenetrable, difficult to deal with. We believe that if Lukoil, Gazprom, any other company is going to do business here, they should do it in a straightforward and forthright manner that has both clarity and accountability associated with it. And then, of course, we have talked about the need for diversity, not just of routes but also of supply, because Bulgaria is in a situation now where it receives 70 per cent of its total energy supplies and more than 90 per cent of its natural gas supplies from a single monopoly supplier.

You don’t have to be a genius or a rocket scientist to understand that creates vulnerabilities. People often ask me, am I pro-Nabucco and anti-South Stream, and the answer that I give publicly and privately is that I am pro Bulgarian interests and what Bulgaria needs to do is figure out where is the most reliable, the most transparent, the most commercially viable course and to combine those three factors in evaluating different projects. But one thing I would mention here before going to renewables: we have worked together with the Bulgarian Government especially on the area of transparency.

We hope to soon be in a position to launch an initiative on transparency in energy transit. We have worked with an organisation called EITI, which is Extracted Industries Transparency Initiative. It is set up and run by the same individual who founded Transparency International, Dr Peter Eigen, who travelled here to Sofia to talk with us about this initiative and actually attended the Energy Forum that was hosted by President Purvanov, and talked about what we might be able to do in energy transit.

We would like to see Bulgaria position itself as a leader in the region by stepping forward and saying, ‘we have taken the steps necessary to create greater transparency in this key part of the energy equation, the transit of energy,’ to publish agreements, to publish revenue streams, and to invite civil society into a dialogue about this.

The final part of the equation is, of course, renewables. Here in Sofia, the embassy hosted along with AmCham a conference dedicated to the issue of alternative, efficient and clean energy, because it is a key part of the picture, and Deputy Prime Minister (Ivailo) Kalfin honoured us by coming to make some remarks at the beginning, and then we had both policy experts from the department of energy, people from American NGOs, like Save the Planet, as well as American companies that sell these kinds of things, and we spent the day talking about the fact that Bulgaria is the EU’s most energy-inefficient country.

In addition to having no energy resources of its own, so it must import almost all of them, it wastes more of what it does import than any other country in the EU. That’s got to change. Not simply because there are these EU criteria that have to be met, and it will be a very hard slog for Bulgaria to meet these, because they are pretty dramatic numbers, but also look at the environmental impact of wasting, and the financial impact. It’s significant. We are looking hard at that, and the advocacy point that I have made specifically on alternative and renewable energies and energy efficiency relates to the economic crisis underway now.

One of my favourite sayings is, ‘a crisis is a terrible thing to waste’ – it’s a principle that president Obama that proceeded on with our stimulus package, to say, we’re not going to just deal with the economic crisis, we’re also going to solve some long-standing problems in the context of this crisis. I believe that Bulgaria has got an opportunity to do that. It can leapfrog over some of these long-standing problems and some of the stalled post-communist development if it will be very ambitious and very creative and try to push – and it can do that in alternative energy, it can do that by attracting foreign investment, it can do that by trying to drive forward in the IT field which is another of my favourite subjects.

This country has some important advantages and some crucial resources and what it needs to do now is pull itself forward…you can solve problems sequentially, or you can just jump over all of them by being very smart and sometimes, I don’t want to say breaking rules, by being innovative.

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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.

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Strong voice
The generally high opinion of the US in this country reinforces your voice.

And we try to use that voice in constructive ways. I have often said that being a friend doesn’t always mean saying what people want to hear, it means saying what needs to be said. I believe that quite fervently. We have often been in a situation where we have had to point to areas where more needs to be done, and try to partner together to help that happen. And in the context of the election, we were very sorry to see the reports of vote-buying in the European Parliament election, and I will tell you and will tell others quite candidly that we think that there is no place for that. It really is quite deplorable. There is no place for that in Bulgaria, there is no place for that in a democracy.

The attitude of the US business community, which translates as, is the rate of whingeing going up or going down, constant?

(Laughs) That’s a technical term, whingeing? The American community finds Bulgaria pretty attractive. The 10 per cent corporate and personal tax rate is quite an asset, this is quite a well-educated labour force and this is also an attractive geographic location. So it is no accident that an American company, the energy firm AES, is the largest single foreign investor in Bulgaria, but it also explains why we are in the top 10 overall list of foreign investors. People are here because they want to be here and they see it in their interests to be here.

That said, there are difficulties to doing business and the global economic crisis, in my judgment, makes it even more imperative that the Bulgarian authorities take steps to make this country the absolute most attractive place to do business that it possibly can. There are a couple of steps to that. I think that the Bulgarian authorities need to, in the first instance, take very good care of the companies already here. I am not talking about serving them coffee, I am talking about resolving the problems that the companies that are facing, whether simply unnecessary bureaucratic delays or whether it is illegitimate attempts to drive them in one direction or another.

The Government needs to resolve the problems that American companies have been facing so that these companies then become Bulgaria’s ambassadors to the rest of the economy community and can tell what a great story has been underway here. But I think that Bulgaria needs to do even more than that. What I have advocated is for the economic strategists, and it will now fall to the next government to do this, is to say, how we can make ourselves a magnet? How can we make Bulgaria – they refer to themselves as a little country but this actually isn’t a little country, it is a medium-sized country – more dynamic, more exciting, an economic engine, a magnet. It can be done.

This is not something that is impossible to achieve. In addition to the very attractive tax rates, there are packages of incentives that the government could put forward, from procedural to financial incentives, that would draw foreign investors, that would create jobs, but there are also things that could be done, to return to the IT field as one example, where Bulgaria could set itself up as a place where people with new ideas who want to start a new business, a new life, could say, hey, they’re trying to draw talent, to create innovation there – let’s go there.

I know that you’ve seen the coverage but we started a public-private partnership here at the embassy with some government monies that we had, and have drawn in what I think will end up being considerable corporate support, to launch IT startups, IT incubators. We were quite excited and very happy that we got the founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, to come here and help us launch that. We did it because we thought it was a way to spur economic activity, to do what I talked about, leapfrog over some of the old problems and some of the developments that people think are standing in their way, but we also did it because we believed that greater use of the internet, greater penetration of computer use and computer ownership would also drive not just dynamism but transparency. So it is a double-triple-quadruple run, if we’re able to pull it off and make it successful.

Another issue that I know is important to you is people with disabilities.

I believe in this issue very much in terms of providing access and I use the term access quite broadly, it means physical access, it means access to services, access to rights and freedoms, and access to the ability to make contribution. I think that’s a really, really key point, not just for the – we’re all a bit uncomfortable with the term ‘disabled community’ because I think it’s bit of a misnomer – but it’s important for all society because people always think it’s an issue of compassion, and I do think it’s important to be compassionate, but I think that as a government official and as a citizen, when you look at how you’re going to best meet the needs of your society and call out the talents of your population, you have to look everywhere, whether it is someone who is sitting in a wheelchair or someone who was raised in an orphanage, who happens to be of Roma ethnicity or Turkish ethnicity, whatever your background is, government and society needs to maximise what it gets from every quarter and to bring out the best of the talent.

What is actually like, as an individual to be an American in Bulgaria?

I don’t want to be facetious but I’ll you, it’s great. It’s great to be an American in Bulgaria. It is great because this is a country and these are people who are very open, and very welcoming of Americans, of American culture, and so it is a place that has a positive and warm approach to both official Americans and private Americans but it is also great because it is a place that needs and wants American assistance, American advice, American co-operation and support.

So when you look at what makes work meaningful, what makes life meaningful, is doing important things, making a positive contribution, helping make a place on this planet of ours better for the people who inhabit it, I know that, and I can share with you, it’s not just American embassy does a lot of things that are intended to be good, and there are some things that the US government has done here that I am very proud of, that have touched people’s lives in real ways.

I would mention institutions like the American University in Bulgaria in Blagoevgrad, the American College of Sofia, as well as the Anglo-American School which is slightly different but I would still put it in that category; these are institutions that are the premier educational institutions in this country, that we set up to help Bulgaria and help Bulgarians, and really is touching their lives. We also have the Peace Corps, which does incredibly important things.

But also, the Americans who are here, whether as diplomats or businessmen or NGOs, bring with them an American mindset and outlook that has touched the people in their personal lives, and whether it is Americans playing American football, or doing volunteer projects like cleaning up garbage in South Park – you know, the American Chamber of Commerce partnered with us, we did a Volunteer Day, got over 1000 people all across the country, doing all kinds of things, painting park benches, repairing senior citizens’ homes. We have here, this is just a very informal, very private thing, this embassy supports an orphanage; and we don’t do it as an embassy, we do it as people.

It’s Americans, it’s Bulgarians. It’s an hour and half away. They go on a regular basis. We’re raised thousands of dollars. It’s not the money that’s the most important thing, it’s the time. These are people who volunteer and go out there, and it’s the most simple thing, they play with the kids, they hug them. They change their lives forever. And those are the things that we individuals will remember. There is a very large institutional legacy that a lot of people can be proud of but there is also a very important personal one.

…I had not lived in this country before. I spent a lot of time reading about the history of this country. When I first arrived, spent a lot of time travelling around, to learn and to listen and to see what made the people tick. I do believe that different people think in different ways and look at the world in different ways, and until you’ve walked in their shoes and tried to look out through their eyes, you can’t really understand how a place works.

I won’t say there were a things that surprised me but there were lots of things that delighted me, and there were a lot of things that I enjoyed doing – I really, really loved the hiking. We were just last weekend up in the Rila lakes, which is stunning. The principal thing that I come back are the people. What I have found striking and wonderful is the extent to which the Bulgarian people, and I use this word intentionally, have experienced great difficulty, suffered through a lot over many decades and maintained an incredibly wry and warm sense of humour and a sense of perspective.

…It’s a been great year. It’s been a fun and fascinating and rewarding year for me. And as I leave, and I told you I was frustrated and impatient about corruption, and I’m impatient for all the right reasons, in wanting good progress, but I don’t leave pessimistic. I leave confident that the right things can and will happen here, but there is a great deal of hard work to be done.