"Much can be said about how Bulgaria conceives of its historical past by monitoring current day-to-day political decisions involving connections with the pre-1989 past."

Memory Laws in Bulgaria: It's Not Even PastA City Council   session in Sofia recently evolved into a quasi-professional conversation on contemporary art when it was voted that Plamen Deyanoff’s work, “The Bronze House,” would take the place of the former Mausoleum[1]. This resulted in the usual confrontation between the different interpretations of the past, masked as a “technocratic” concern about the urban landscape.

The laws concerning the country’s past provide an overview of the reasons behind such occurrences. Memory laws in Bulgaria are more about memory than about law, since their   practical implications in case law are negligible compared to the scandals they provoke. Law cannot serve its function in providing universally valid rules, since there is no universally valid   interpretation of the past. For example, there is still no state institution examining in detail recent Bulgarian history so as to potentially provide such an interpretation. Moreover, the efforts   of organs such as the commission that discloses information about former communist-era secret service agents are repeatedly undermined.

 Speaking of memory in the Parliament is a favorite tactic of any government in order to avoid an open discussion on laws with greater impact on citizens’ lives. It has even become   possible to equal fascism and Islamism by amending the Criminal Code which came into effect in 1968. Art. 108 (1) CC envisaging punishment for a person who preaches “fascist or   another anti-democratic ideology or forceful change of the social and state order as established by the Constitution of the Republic of Bulgaria”. In December 2017, a new paragraph was   adopted at first reading according to which “radical Islamism” and every other religious view used as a political vehicle was listed explicitly as anti-democratic ideology. This paragraph, an attempt from the “patriotic” parties - part of the current ruling coalition - to look more patriotic, could soon enter into force. The law arguably falls afoul of ECHR standards as developed in Gündüz v. Turkey, according to which peaceful preaching of anti-democratic ideology is protected under Art. 10 of the Convention.  It also displays the inconsistent logic of the legislator: a law that served the “historically triumphant” communist ideology in the battle against its “anti-democratic” counterparts became a weapon to deal with current problems, including immigration.

Art. 108 (1) CC was tailored for a centralized state, existing in constant paranoia and with no free speech, so the potential “anti-democratic” ideologies end up interpreted as fascism and its derivatives. However, the undefined “another anti-democratic ideology” has still remained a mystery to the legal community. Throughout almost 50 years of existence this rule was used mainly against boys drawing swastikas on walls or running websites dedicated to Hitler. This renders Art. 108 (1) even more meaningless since these “criminals” are not the ones who are likely to weaken the power of the state and national security, which is the specific purpose of incriminating these actions.

Almost 30 years after the beginning of the transitional period to democracy, the political status quo has failed to reach agreement on the anti-democratic nature of communism.  It was never brought to trial either pursuant to Art. 108 (1) CC or in any other way. This certainly has something to do with the continuing nostalgia towards communism and its “calm life”[2]. At the same time, the ill-considered way of coming to terms with the past was present in the law as well. As the turmoil of the 1990s came to its end and a majority right-wing government took office in 1997 for the first time, memory legislation mirrored ideas for deregulation, privatization and restitution, because they were all based on denial of the past in its various forms. A product of this was the Law on Declaring the Criminal Nature of the Communist Regime in Bulgaria, in force since 2000 (Law 2000).

Law 2000 is the only one in the whole Bulgarian legal system which is called a law but essentially cannot be enforced like any other legal act. A law under both the Bulgarian Constitution and the common understanding of the word shall stipulate legally binding provisions, and in order for it to be binding, non-compliance should be sanctioned. Otherwise, a law becomes purely declaratory.

Law 2000 is persuasively declaratory in its language.  It condemns the communist regime for “purposefully and deliberately ruining the values of European civilization” and holds communism responsible for “violating the main principles of democracy, rule of law, international agreements and legislation in force thus placing the Communist Party interests above the Law”. However, these strong words lack an addressee, as there is generally no answer to what happens once the law is passed and how its purposes are to be enforced. The Law could have imposed particular duties both on the state with respect to learning the truth about communism or on citizens regarding their obligations to the past. However, it fails to do so.

During its 17 years of existence, the only visible consequence of Law 2000 was its immense use as an argument in wider social debates such as whether to remove the Monument to the Soviet Army or to include communism as a mandatory topic in school. The already divided people became only more divided, although Law 2000 explicitly equaled communism with criminality. Meanwhile, the communist past was successfully exploited by advertising agencies, “retro” bars and even tourist shops, yet the Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borissov pendulated between, on the one hand, the story of his grandfather being murdered by communists, and, on the other, the statement that if modern Bulgaria builds one percent of what was built during the communist period, it would become a huge success.

In the beginning of 2016, a set of proposed amendments to Law 2000 confirmed once again that any memory law implemented in Bulgaria is destined to be controversial. For the first time, state institutions were obliged to remove symbols of the communist past and to hand them in to the recently established Museum for Socialist Art, while learning about past communist crimes was being included in the mandatory curriculum. Violations of Law 2000, including any refusal to remove communist symbols, were made subject to sanction. While parliamentary discussion detoured into personal stories of life before 1989, peppered with heavy doses of sarcasm and including commentary on the need to remove the five-pointed red star from Heineken beer bottles, the idea that there could ever be irrefutable law on recent history became highly doubtable. The amendments were adopted at first reading, but the government resigned thereafter, and no second reading has followed. Ironically, the MPs who drafted the amendments were not elected for the next Parliament.

The Bulgarian memory legislation is in no way as aggressive as those adopted in Poland or Hungary. However, it reflects in the same way the state of its political leaders which does not necessarily mirror the general public feeling. Quite like Poland and Hungary, which weaponize memory to strengthen their “macho” illiberal power, Bulgarian politicians, too, manipulate historical disagreement to facilitate any possible interpretation, so as to appease everyone.

In the famous words of William Faulkner, the past is not dead yet, it is not even past. These words can be attributed to the Bulgarian version of memory laws. The country is caught in its past, is even still living in it, but it is also and at the very same time emotionally overwhelmed and preoccupied with far less legalistic motives. Legislating memory in this context does not enable reconciliation with the past; rather, the inability to reconcile with the present creates monstrous memories.

 

Anastas Punev is a lawyer and a PhD candidate at the Sofia University. He follows closely the debates about memory legislation in Bulgaria and Europe.

 

[1] Georgi Dimitrov’s Mausoleum, located next to the building of Bulgarian National Bank, was a ceremonial tomb containing the embalmed body of Bulgaria’s first communist leader, Georgi Dimitrov. In 1999 the mausoleum was destroyed, albeit through an “embarrassing” failure to destroy, as BBC reports including the fact that there was no wide consensus whether destruction is the best possible decision.

[2] See for example the conversation between John Feffer and Petya Kabakchieva:  http://www.johnfeffer.com/remembering-the-calm-life/

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