This is slightly bizarre

Bulgarians demonstrating against their corrupt politicians (whom, I believe, they elected but that is another story) is not bizarre. Nor is the trapping of "more than 100 politicians, journalists and staff" inside the Parliament building overnight particularly bizarre. I bet most of them were harmless, underpaid staff rather than politicians but that is the way of demonstrations, riots and even revolutions.

What is bizarre in my view is the support voiced by the European Commission for the anti-corruption protests.

EU commissioner for justice Viviane Reding at a Citizens’ Dialogue event in Sofia said she was “very much moved by the strong desire of the Bulgarian citizen to have this change, to fight for democracy, to fight against corruption.”

“My sympathy is with the Bulgarian citizens who are protesting on the streets against corruption,” she said.

Nothing wrong, one might say, with supporting the protesters. I feel the same way myself. But is the Commission now on the side of street protests against the governments of member states? Does it intend to form an alliance in order to strengthen its own position?

Bulgaria has an interim Prime Minister

Over and over again, we see this. Things go badly for the elected government, it resigns and somebody appoints someone for the time being. Now it is Bulgaria's turn.

Bulgaria's president on Tuesday picked a career diplomat to lead an interim administration tasked with safeguarding political and financial stability after the center-right government quit last month amid swelling protests against austerity and corruption.

President Rosen Plevneliev said that Marin Raikov, a former ambassador to France who served as deputy foreign minister in two previous administrations, would lead the government until elections on May 12. Kalin Hristov, the deputy central bank governor since 2009 tasked with managing the peg linking Bulgaria's currency to the euro, will run the finance ministry.

The move to pick bureaucrats with no overt political affiliations was aimed at showing protesters there has been a clean break with a political class they view as corrupt and unable to improve living standards in the European Union's poorest member country.

None of this would matter, as I keep saying, but for one thing. The Bulgarian government is also our government and will be as long as we remain in the EU.

The last Stalinist show trial

Sixty years ago this week, on November 20, 1952, the last of the Stalinist show trials, that against the "Trotskyit, Titoist, Zionist" agents Rudolf Slansky and cohorts, opened in Prague. It lasted several days and at the end eleven of the fourteen accused were condemned to death. They were executed on December 3 and their ashes thrown out of a car onto an icy road because the people in charge could not be bothered to carry them to the appointed destination. Three months later Stalin died and much of the Communist world changed.

On another blog I have written a long piece about the Stalinist purges and trials of post-Second World War Eastern Europe. I can't say enjoy it but I hope people will read it and find it interesting. It is not possible to understand developments in Eastern Europe without knowing something about those events.

More on the Bulgarian terrorist explosion

We now have a final figure of those killed: five Israelis, the Bulgarian bus driver and one terrorist. The last one has been named by the Bulgarian media as Mehdi Ghezali, though when this went to press there was no independent confirmation. The story came from somewhere, though.

Ghezali was reportedly a Swedish citizen, with Algerian and Finnish origins. He had been held at the US’s Guantanamo Bay detainment camp on Cuba from 2002 to 2004, having previously studied at a Muslim religious school and mosque in Britain, and traveled to Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

Following a lobbying effort by Swedish prime minister Göran Persson, Guantanamo authorities recommended Ghezali be transferred to another country for continued detainment, and he was handed over to Swedish authorities in 2004.

The Swedish government did not press charges. He was also reportedly among 12 foreigners captured trying to cross into Afghanistan in 2009.

Covering all bases here.

More information here.

Mehdi-Muhammed Ghezali was born in Stockholm in 1979. He is the son of an Algerian immigrant and a Finnish woman. He finished secondary studies in 1999 and trained as a welder.

Mehdi-Muhammed Ghezali then he traveled to Portugal, supposedly to pursue a career as a Football player. Ghezali was apprehended by the Portuguese Police in Algarve, on 07/31/1999, for a suspected bank robbery and a jewelry theft. Mehdi-Muhammed Ghezali and his partner were sentenced to three and a half years imprisonment, but were released early. Ghezali was released from prison on 06/12/2000, after having spent 10 months in a Portuguese prison, and returned to Sweden (his father claimed that Mehdi-Muhammed Ghezali went to Algeria to serve in the Algerian Army).

Mehdi-Muhammed Ghezali then traveled to Medina, Saudi Arabia, to study at the university. However, he was not accepted and returned to Sweden in 04/2001 for a brief period before travelling to London where he studied at the Madrasa of the Muslim cleric Omar Bakri Muhammad. He then travelled to Pakistan in the summer of 2001 in order to study at one of the Madrasas situated there. After failing to gain acceptance into any of the Madrasas he then travelled to Afghanistan, where he according to his own statements stayed with a family in Jalalabad.

You can also see him on the video if you scroll down. We are assuming this is the right guy.

Not in Syria

There was a deadly explosion in Damascus, which killed President Assad's top aides. But a little nearer home, we are getting reports of a deadly explosion in Bulgaria, where a bus carrying Israeli tourists was blown up with at least three people killed and twenty injured.

UPDATE: Latest information says seven dead.

UPDATE: Seven dead and thirty-two injured.

Bulgaria lays down conditions

Or so they say. In fact, the Bulgarian Parliament has voted to join the Fiscal Pact. But, said the Foreign Minister, there are six conditions:

Foreign Affairs Minister, Nikolay Nladenov, informed the MPs that the country has set six conditions for the joining, such as no tax harmonization in the EU.

The Eurozone pact aims at establishing more rigid fiscal discipline and stronger coordination of economic policy.

On Wednesday, MPs from three Parliamentary Committees - on Foreign Policy, on European Affairs, and on Budget, at a joint meeting, passed the proposal with which the Parliament gives the cabinet green light to take part in negotiations for the Pact.

The decision states that in joining the Pact, Bulgaria should not assume fiscal responsibilities and will not coordinate its economic policy with the one of the countries in the Eurozone; will not harmonize taxes with the Eurozone, and will have a status of observer at meetings of Eurozone members.

Another condition is for the rules to be valid for the entire EU, without exceptions and parallel structures. The decision also states that Bulgaria will fully endorse the Treaty after joining the Eurozone.

Can't wait to see how they will negotiate all those conditions.

Entertainment

To be absolutely honest, I cannot invent or find any entertainment that can better the enthralling saga of phone-hacking, newspapers, dead journalists, resigning senior police officers (the only part of the story that is at all important) and so on, and so on. I do hope that John Putnam Thatcher, the banker hero of Emma Lathen's novels gets on the case soon before it becomes too tedious and before we all become too sick at the gloating shown by the BBC, the Guardian and all other "superior" beings who are hoping that the terrible Fox News (which, I was told by somebody today, has no journalistic credentials being on the Republican side) disappears together with the Murdoch papers like the New York Post that has brought journalism into disrepute.

So, let's go for another story and that is the painting over of the Soviet War Memorial in Bulgaria by some unknown art lover who turned all the Red Army soldiers into Superheroes. The pictures are great and the pompous comments are very funny. Enjoy.

Former Communist is more acceptable

Or so Ivo Indzhev, a Bulgarian political blogger, comments about the appointment of the Bulgarian diplomat Irina Bokova to become UNESCO's first woman Director-General.

Those who dislike communism in this country are not happy about her promotion. For people in this region, her appointment sends the message that the West can swallow someone’s communist past very easily but can’t abide an Arab who is anti-Israel.

It is not entirely clear whether this means that Mr Indzhev thinks it would have been a good idea to appoint a man who is not just anti-Israeli but downright anti-Semitic and who, as Egypt's Culture Minister, has presided over a destruction of any semblance of free media in that country or whether he is just incensed at the idea of Comrade Madame Bokova getting the position.

It is true that Madame Bokova comes from a privileged Communist apparatchik family and, as so many of them, she made the transition to a privileged post-Communist political and diplomatic life with great ease. She is, needless to say, a great supporter of European integration and, indeed, of all transnational organizations.

Farouk Hosni did not appear to be a good loser:

Meanwhile, the Egyptian culture minister defeated by Bokova has blamed her victory on "Zionist pressures". Last year Hosni said he would burn "Israeli books in Egyptian libraries". He later apologised for the remark.

"The organisation has become politicised," Hosni told reporters at Cairo airport on arrival on September 23. "The reality is that we waged a fantastic battle. The Egyptian candidate had the newspapers and Zionist pressures against him every day," he said, referring to himself.

The Egyptian press echoed Hosni's remarks. Opposition weekly Al-Ahrar wrote on its front page about "a ferocious campaign against him by the American administration, under Jewish pressure".

I am, of course, shocked to find that anyone should think that any organization to do with the United Nations can have been politicized but I do think that Mr Hosni can rest assured that Zionism is not a strong force in any of them. For one thing it strains credulity to imagine Madame Bokova to be a Zionist.

It is, however, interesting that the only two serious candidates were a highly oppressive, anti-Semitic Minister of Culture and a former Communist, whose own attitude to such matters as freedom of speech must be doubtful. (Incidentally, there are some curious gaps in the lady's career. Just exactly how long did she spend at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations?)

According to AFP, Egypt may grumble but is unlikely to change its foreign policy because of this outcome. Or its culture policy, one must assume.