‘Nuff police serials says the President

2010

  1. ‘Nuff police serials says the President

    October 15, 2010 by Christopher Buxton

    President Purvanov – that Dorian Grey of world statesmen – has delivered a veiled rebuke to his arch rival, every Bulgarian’s fantasy-drinking-companion, Prime Minister Boyko Borisov.

    In an address to a local government conference in Albena, Purvanov has said that ordinary Bulgarians have no need of “police serials”. They need calm and reassuring government.

    What he means is that Boyko Borisov and his morose looking Home Secretary should draw back from their sensational highly publicised but so far ineffective campaigns against organised crime and concentrate on the task of making Bulgarians feel better about themselves. Why should ordinary Bulgarians be concerned by extortion in high places when health and education systems seem to be going to hell. As many of the Mayors in his audience may have been feeling the heat of criminal investigation, I’m sure the applause was hearty.

    Some might say this is rich coming from the svelte sophisticated President who has not escaped accusations of corrupt business links over his long reign. Now nearing the end of a second mandate he has worked alongside three improbable Prime Ministers – the barely articulate ex-Tsar Simeon Saxekoburgotsky, the anally retentive pursed lipped Socialist Sergei Stanishev, and now the absurdly populist Boyko Borisov.

    In the first months of Boyko Borisov’s government, not a day passed without headlines reporting arrests of significant criminal gangs along with corrupt high ranking civil servants, magistrates, police and customs officers. The most trumpeted arrests were those of the chief of the National Security Agency and of a band of kidnappers known as “the Blackguards”. Meanwhile highly publicised trials of colourfully named gangsters were roared on from the sidelines.

    A year on and as Boyko takes time out to be filmed lumbering around the football field with his role model, former football star and greatest living Bulgarian, Hristo Stoichkov, it is left to his the sad-faced balding Home Secretary to comment on the fact that hardly any of the previous year’s spectacular arrests have led to satisfactory prosecutions and sentences.

    Lumbering police investigations, incompetent prosecutors, compromised evidence, shaky witnesses and sharp defense lawyers have been key factors in court’s decisions to release suspects on bail pending limitless delays of legal process. Home Secretary Tsvetanov accuses the courts of being in league with organized crime. The Judges in turn fault Tsvetanov’s lack of manners. The vulgar Bulgar has not understood the necessary constitutional separation of Administration and Judiciary. They parrot the textbook constitutional rights of any advanced civil society – just because the whole nation fervently believes the accused are guilty, these wealthy powerful men and women should still have the right to obfuscate and delay, to plead illness and enjoy the comforts of home, in the hopes of eventually establishing their innocence – or at the least the state’s inability to prove their guilt.

    Purvanov’s judgement that the Bulgarian people have no need of such “police serials” is yet another attempt by the fastidious aristocratic Socialist to gain the moral high ground over the right wing bull in a china shop/man of the people.

    Police serials take two forms. They either reassure a trusting public that however dastardly the criminal, the forces of law and order will always win and so justice will prevail. Or (like the successful American series The Wire)they flatter a skeptical audience by demonstrating the complex Dickensian links between criminal gangs and powerful social structures. In either event, police serials are entertaining and satisfying fictions that bear some relation to real life.

    The problem for the Bulgarian public and its self elected spokesmen, is that Borisov’s police series are far from satisfying. In a recent article, Martin Karbovski describes the thin layer of mire that sticks to all aspects of Bulgarian life. Ageing Bulgarians are encouraged to believe that this mire is not so bad. Bulgaria is not Greece or Sicily. But according to Karbovski, the inability of government and judiciary to deal with this mire promotes a feeling of hopelessness in the young and accounts for their mass migration to the west.

    Meanwhile Boyko Borisov picks up a tennis racquet. His press people are showing that he is at least trying to bring criminals to justice. Is that superstar Pironkova around? Fetch up the cameras! Anyone for tennis?

  2. Standartnews photos

    October 6, 2010 by Christopher Buxton

    I have long been fascinated by the pictures chosen to accompany stories in Standart.

    We all know how expensive it must be to employ photographers. Standart’s usual practice where primary resources are lacking is to accompany generic stories – robbery, prostitution, gypsies, narcotics with pictures lifted straight out of Google images. Thus any story about burglary is usually illustrated with a scary photo of a man in a balaclava pointing a shotgun straight at the viewer.Any story involving prostitutes shows a leggy woman leaning over to talk to a car driver and so on.

    Some choices are just bizarre – as in the example above. The story is about a village in England which is successfully using human waste to power their electricity.

    So our intrepid editor picks up the first picture he can find on the internet – a headless cutie sitting on the toilet. But hang on a minute. What are those men’s feet doing dangling in the front of the picture? And why is there another toilet so close to the first without a barrier in between.

    My first thought is that the man is jumping for joy at the prospect of toilet intimacy – but the picture is too crisp. His feet look stationary. Has this headless cutie managed to hang her husband, so she can enjoy the sight of his protruding tongue while she takes a pee?

    Unfortunately as this picture features non-Bulgarians and Standart obviously lacks the funds for an international murder investigation, we will never know the answer.

  3. Happy Wedding Day

    October 1, 2010 by Christopher Buxton

    On Saturday Malinna and Richard got married.

    Meteorological felicity, Olympian logistics, adventurous guests from across the world, atmospheric venues, sartorial surprises (especially Vlad’s suit) exhilarating music and Dionysian dancing all combined to celebrate the union of this beautiful couple.

    So thank you, Julie and her mum and all her family for sharing Richard with us. Thank you Tony Glew for driving us to London and back. Thank you love-bus driver for ferrying us through such narrow traffic jammed streets. Thank you Galen and your musicians for getting to both venues in time to get our feet moving with your bagpipes. Thank you all you wonderful guests and your readiness to jump into a horo. Thank you Vlad for being so unflappably and caringly organized.Thank you Tom for the witty speech on art appreciation. Thank you Jeanette for your generous warmth and thank you baby girl in the bus for being such a receptive audience for my songs. Thank you Travel Lodge for honouring our bookings. Thank you God and the forces of nature for averting all catastrophes. Above all, thank you Richard and Malinna!

  4. Kristin Dimitrova: Sabazius

    September 15, 2010 by Christopher Buxton

    Kristin Dimitrova is one of the Bulgarian writers I particularly enjoyed over the summer. In her novel Sabazius she has found an ingenious approach to the post communist condition.

    By giving her characters the names and attributes of Greek/Thracian Gods and heroes, she has found a way of explaining a mystery that was to confound many of those anti-communist activists who saw “democracy” quickly turn to kleptocracy. How was it that the old Communist elite and their children still pulled all the strings?

    The main character is Orpheus, an angry young man of principle, a skilled musician, in love but unable to communicate with his wife, Eurydice, a frustrated actress. Eurydice cannot understand why Orpheus doesn’t use his father’s connections to further his and her careers. Apollo is an old guard poet still living in the luxury flat provided by the party for its one time proteges.

    Orpheus finds that his life and the lives of those closest to him are increasingly controlled by the charismatic gangster, Sabazius – a Thracian variant of the son of Zeus, better known as Dionysos. Sabazius is a ruthless enforcer and manipulator. His cars roam the dark streets of Sofia’s industrial zones. He owns a string of night clubs where drugs are sold openly. Enemies and business rivals are eliminated. He uses the autocratic media mogul Midas’ television station to promote chalga. He breaks up Orpheus’ band, leaving Orpheus jobless and deserted.

    In the end it turns out that Sabazius is himself but a tool for the old gods and when he becomes inconvenient he will die in a hail of bullets.

  5. It’s all very well

    September 15, 2010 by Christopher Buxton

    Bulgarian Finance Minister Simeon Dyankov woke up one morning with a good idea. One sure-fire way of getting rid of corruption, tax evasion and money laundering at a stroke would be to abolish large cash transactions.

    Easy-peasy – with an absolute majority in Parliament – you just pass a law making it illegal to walk around with over 5000 leva in your pocket. Did I say walk around? – scratch that! – substitute drive around in your street busting 4×4.

    The good idea is that everyone will use banks for their transactions – thus providing the tax collectors and police with a useful paper-trail to follow. The new law provides that anyone found with such a sum on their person will see a quarter of it confiscated. So at a stroke Dyankov has put a red cross over the steotype of fat boys in dark glasses carrying Bila bags stuffed with bank notes to pay off street runners, police informers, judges and mistresses. Ageing pop stars will no longer receive their tax free fees under the table. Everyone’s heart will now thrill to the opening of bank statements announcing the safe arrival of legal money in their accounts.

    In a society in which large amounts of cash are transported in unsuitable vehicles over potholed roads, perhaps Dyankov was seeking to reduce opportunistic crime. Recently in the Rhodop village of Musachevo, gun toting gangsters made off with all the villagers’ monthly pensions, just after they had been delivered by van. Given that information about the regular movement of cash to remote villages is easily come by, such a raid would not have required much intelligent planning.

    In Bulgaria awareness of imminent crime is fanned by the press and magnified by friends’ lurid stories of thumbless Gypsy pick-pockets. I remember the sick feeling in my stomach when buying our first flat in Bulgaria in the early nineties. This involved drawing a vast sum from The International Bank, then walking through open streets to the State Savings Bank where the money was counted three times before a receipt was issued. It seemed a very risky thing to do. Out in the street I looked at the world through paranoid lenses. As I clutched the bag of money under my arm, everyone in my field of vision was transformed into a potential robber. I should have been carrying a gun.

    At the outset of capitalism in the nineties, honest fledgeling businessmen rattled vast distances with their trabants filled with banknotes, praying that they would not be robbed.

    Since then communications between banks has improved, but payments take time and organization. Buying a car, getting insurance, buying an apartment for my mother-in-law, I have toiled through the expensive and difficult international bank transfer route, making rapid calculations in dollars, euros, levs and pounds, keeping my fingers crossed that correct amounts are landing in the right accounts. Nevertheless, this is preferable to carrying cash without body guards. But it would be even better if credit cards were accepted everywhere.

    Good ideas always raise a storm of buts. The most obvious but is that a large number of Bulgarians don’t have bank accounts. Firms used to paying their employees in cash are already complaining that the system is unworkable.

    More frustrating for non-Bulgarian residents is the unpredictability of credit card acceptance. Thus I can use a credit card to pay supermarket, petrol and telephone bills, but I can’t use it to pay my Car and House Insurance. Large bills have to be paid by multiple use of cash machines over days.

    With the French Ambassador demanding that the Bulgarian Government appoints a Minister for Gypsies, a further interesting point arises. How will the black economy now function for this illiterate minority who depend on it?

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