Many Turkish workers are members of the Bulgarian trade unions, especially of Podkrepa which is active in areas where a lot of Pomaks live. But Turkish leaders at local level say the Bulgarian unions are very much "on trial" as far as they are concerned. They are considering setting up their own union if Turkish workers' interests are not adequately represented.
Another formidable opposition group enjoying country-wide support (67% of the population according to a recent opinion poll) is the Ecoglasnost environmental movement. With 10,000 active members in Sofia alone, Ecoglasnost has focussed world attention on the catastrophic environmental destruction and hazardous industrial production that will
International Viewpoint #193 • October 29, 1990
P ETAR SLABAKOV, Bulgar-
Cia's best-known theatre and film actor is leader of the popular Ecoglasnost environment movement and one of the movement's 18 members in parliament. He was among the Ecoglasnost demonstrators who were savagely beaten and arrested in a now famous incident in October 1989, just before the fall of the Zhivkov regime. "FROM 15.00 hours to midnight most days I'm in Parliament. But when I'm needed I immediately leave for Cheri Ossam where for five months we have been making a human chain to stop the dam project there... have to be tackled as part of any genuine restructuring of the Bulgarian economy.
Uranium mining has polluted parts of the water table. Giant petro-chemical plants have poisoned a number of workers and contaminated farm produce. Some 24 million square metres of forest have been cut down. The Black Sea is dead below 50 metres. No general warning or protection was given by the authorities as fall-out from the Chernobyl catastrophe began to reach Bulgaria. These are just a few of the problems that have turned the country into one of the worst damaged regions of Eastern Europe.
Direct action is the Ecoglasnost trademark — human chains, parliamentary lobbies, pickets and demonstrations. Since the elections, the organization has found a powerful voice in the National Assembly as well. Some 18 of the new opposition members of parliament belong to Ecoglasnost, including the movement's leader, Petar Slabakov, a well-known Bulgarian actor.
Ecoglasnost has consistently condemned the system under which workers doing dangerous jobs receive a wage bonus while no action is taken about the dangers themselves. In talks with the government and the trade unions, the movement's supporters have demanded that hazardous industries be shut down if they cannot be made safe, that schemes be set up to redeploy workers and that Western petro-chemical firms be stopped from establishing production plants in Bulgaria. Says Petar Slabakov: "Now Bulgaria has opened its borders, many foreign companies are going to come here. There is a danger that we will be forced to make concessions to them - that Bulgaria will become one big chemical factory!"
The most important body of opposition, the Bulgarian workers, are combative after decades of bureaucratic rule, with high expectations and organized in (so far) democratically run trade unions. There is good reason to hope, therefore, that they will be in a good position to defend themselves and fight back when the "red capitalists" at home and the free marketeers from abroad try to do their worst. *
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Photo: Zhivko Angelov
"In a huge petro-chemical plant at Burgas on the Black Sea, 20 workers have been poisoned and died. Others have been injured and we don't know if they will be saved...
"We stopped a nuclear power plant in Prvomay from being built. Not only was it going to cost 44 billion levas, but the site was also in an earthquake zone, where the houses have been constructed with poor material to save money...
"At the beginning of this year supplies ran out of powdered baby milk. Mothers were coming to us for help from all over the country. So we took immediate action. We gave the Ministry of Health an ultimatum that if they did not get hold of the baby food, we were going to call for a national strike. They managed to find the hard currency...
"All kinds of industries are dangerous here because of the lack of safety installations. People working in these industries know their jobs are dangerous. If they accept higher wages as compensation it is only because they don't see any alternative sources of work...
"We have many supporters, all volunteers. They include doctors, biologists, philosophers and sociologists — we are a real "academy of sciences" in Ecoglasnost!
"We have declared our programme and we will fight for it no matter what kind of government we have in the future in this country."* P ETAR BERON, Bulgaria's leading zoologist and founder member of Ecoglasnost, became President of the Union of Democratic Forces in August 1990. "A MINORITY of the UDF, including myself, was inclined to support the proposal of forming a government (with the BSP), that would act along definite lines, within a definite framework, for a specific time to fulfill specific tasks. But the majority was against this joint venture
BULGARIA with the Communists...
"The 36% we got in the (June) election is OK. We think we shall do better now in the local government polls in November. If we win, maybe the next parliamentary elections will not be very far off...
"We are doing our best to keep all the parties in the UDF together and I think that we shall manage this for some time to come. All of them are well aware that they can't count on any success against the Communists on their own. They have to stay together...
"Everything was controlled by the nomenklatura and now these same people, these red capitalists, want to get their hands on the private property. We are trying to prevent this...
"We shall try to establish a sort of safety net for the poorest, most deprived strata of society, though whether it will be successful or not I can't say. We have very little experience...
"Privatization should not be allowed, in my opinion, to permit the big capitalists and the monopolies to take the lion's share of everything. We would prefer to have small shareholding firms..." K RUSTYO PETKOV, a sociology professor, leads the three million members of the Confederation of Independent trade Unions in Bulgaria -founded in February this year in an attempt to transform the decaying official trade unions. He has supervized a drastic overhaul of the old state-dominated union structures and could soon be instrumental in setting up a social democratic 'Labour' party along British lines if the present political stalemate in Bulgaria continues. "UNLESS our trade unions are really independent there is no point in us going on with our Confederation. Especially during this economic and political crisis, which I believe is going to continue, people need strong unions...
### BULGARIA
"We have had to set up a system of social partnership and to educate our members that the best instrument for defending their interests is collective bargaining; strikes too, though only in the future, I would say...
"We lost some support from traditional party cadres who had infiltrated the trade unions, not because of our orientation, but because we removed the old union structures and reorganized on the trades and branch principle. Most of these people were old cadres from the (partycontrolled) regional and municipal coun cils so when you touch their interests they begin to act against you...
"We have heard that some in the Bulgarian Socialist Party are suggesting that the BSP needs its own unions in order to have an influence on the workplace. We decided to send a letter to the BSP congress in September arguing that this would indeed be a wrong step — that it would divide the trade unions and backfire on their party. I can't guarantee whether they will react positively to our letter. But we've decided that if the BSP does try to split off some of our union branches, we shall counter-attack straight away. And I believe we would take at least half of them back with us...
"The Confederation thinks that privatization must be done with the participation of the workers. They can buy or be given shares in certain industries. In the modern industrial world you see a lot of examples...
"I believe it is our role in the trade unions to push for a national jobs' creation programme. This was done for example in the Western world in the 1930s. It is not just an economic question, but a very important political question. If unemployed people here get no support, this will provide fertile ground for populist and 17 extremist movements." *
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Photo: Georgey Kazakov