Tag Archives: racism

May 15, 2019

Anti-Roma Riots in the Heart of Bulgaria: Racists against Inequality?

by Stefan Krastev  

We are publishing this article in cooperation with the Serbo-Croatian web portal Bilten. In the “Offenders in Gabrovo!” Facebook group, natives of the eponymous Central Bulgarian town comment upon all sorts of irregularities: they lambaste the owner of a car parked on the wrong side of the street, mobilize to replace a broken lamp post, ridicule the municipality’s failed street disinfection campaign, announce a lost set of keys, and criticize irregular public transportation. With more than 25 000 members, roughly half the town’s population, the group serves as a messy sort of a citizen’s ass ..

January 13, 2019

Statement by LevFem Regarding the Latest Demolition of Roma Houses in Bulgaria: please circulate widely

by lefteast  

Anti-Roma racism, ethnophobia, and prejudice have reached intolerable proportions in Bulgarian government, the Bulgarian public sphere, and Bulgarian society at large. LevFem stands in solidarity with our Roma sisters and brothers who are subjected to incessant daily racist abuse, harassment, violence, and dehumanization, and navigate countless forms of prejudice while surviving an increasingly hostile racist, ethnophobic, and xenophobic social environment. On January 9, Vice Prime Minister of Bulgaria Krasimir Karakachanov called bulldozers and began the demolition of informally-built Roma homes in the village o ..

March 2, 2018

Bulgaria (not) only for Bulgarians

by Rositsa Kratunkova  

Note from LeftEast editors: The article was originally published on dversia.net in Bulgarian on the 10.09.2017 At this year’s summit of G20, the newly elected French president Emanuel Macron stated that the problem with the slow economic development of Africa was civilizational. As an example, he noted that African women gave birth to 7-8 children, in which he saw a negative economic effect without accounting for its economic roots–the reason must be the “innate backwardness” of the people. Similarly, in Bulgaria the problem with the social and economic segregation of the Roma is viewed as civilizatio ..

December 11, 2017

In the Name of the Constitution: Ethnic Minorities and Technologies of Disenfranchisement in Bulgaria

by Jana Tsoneva  

Note from the editors: Starting next month Bulgaria will assume the presidency of the Council of the European Union. To acknowledge this momentous occasion, this month LeftEast will carry two texts by Jana Tsoneva analyzing the politics of contemporary Bulgaria. This article originally appeared in July on the Serbo-Croatian portal Bilten and is republished here with their generous permission. It is a habit of the lazy mind to associate only ex-Yugoslavia with ethnic conflicts, but in the late 1980s Bulgaria, too, was on the brink of an “ethnic war”. The post-1956 period regime was marked by the increase of ra ..

September 25, 2017

The Red and the Black: the Riddle of post-Soviet Racism

by Maxim Matusevich  

This text was originally published in Russian in the web-journal ReLevant: a Journal of Current Analysis. We are much obliged to Maria Brock for its English translation. Anyone who has crossed paths with Soviet immigrants in the West will have noticed the strange phenomenon of post-Soviet racism, which is all the stranger because the overwhelming majority of emigrants from the Soviet Union are “individuals of Jewish origin,” that is, people who not only faced quotidian and structural racism, but who also ended up fleeing from it. Dr N was pensively stirring his cappuccino, which had long gone cold. We were ..

October 13, 2016

Hungary: the Népszabadság Affair

by G.M. Tamás  

Note from the LeftEast editors: Last Saturday employees of  Népszabadság  newspaper, the widest circulated daily in Hungary, found themselves locked out of their workplace and told they were no longer needed. On the  Népszabadság  editorial team facebook page the team team wrote: “Our first thought is that this is a coup. We will soon come back with more” after the newspaper’s website , stopped working , and invited the public to join them to demonstrate at Parliament later that day. They were joined by some 2,000 people. This article is translated into English for LeftEast by Lolo f ..

June 28, 2016

Making sense of the Brexit tide of reaction and the reality of the racist vote

by lefteast  

Source: Workers Solidarity Movement, Ireland Words: Andrew Flood Illustrative head image: Collage of photos posted by diamond geezer ‏@diamondgeezer and daniel watson ‏@DWxLW in the days after Brexit. The Leave / Brexit vote in the referendum came in the end as a surprise, a narrow win for Remain was expected. This may be because the core Leave vote was in the run-down white working class communities of the now desolate English and Welsh industrial zones. A population trapped in conditions of long-term unemployment and poverty who no one really pays much attention to anymore. Some on the left have seized ..

April 26, 2016

VIDEO: Jock Palfreeman about Bulgarian Prisons and the Prisoners’ Association (Interview)

by admin  

Note from the LeftEast editors: This is an interview with Jock Palfreeman, an Australian citizen and prisoner in Blugaria, who is the founder of the Bulgarian Prisoners’ Association. In 2007 Jock was convicted for the murder of Bulgarian Andrei Monov although claimed that he was trying to help two Roma people that were attacked by a group of fifteen football hooligans. Many details about this night remained unclear to this day. The main witnesses–the two Roma–have disappeared. The surveillance camera footage that could show what happened this night has vanished without a trace. And even if Jo ..

October 27, 2015

Call for international meeting, manifestation and solidarity action in Slovenia

by admin  

For more than a week the so-called Balkan Route is passing through Slovenia. The Slovenian government intended to impose the entrance quota of 2500 refugees per day. Croatia answered by sending the refugees and migrants over the so-called “Green” border. This controversy between Slovenia and Croatia created dire humanitarian conditions for the refugees and migrants. The Slovenian government used this humanitarian emergency produced by states and what they call a chaotic situation on the Southern border to rapidly militarize the society and call for an EU summit on the Balkan Route. The results of the Sunday s ..

September 29, 2015

Call for Support: Hungarian Left-wing organizations demand adequate policies for the refugee crisis

by admin  

The crisis in Western Asia and North Africa keeps deepening. Neither the key North American and European actors in the one and a half decade-long armed conflict, nor their regional allies are willing to abandon the politics of brutal interventions, even if these are indefensible according to international law. The aim of maintaining political violence is clear: gaining control over the arms market, trade routes and sources of raw materials, most importantly oil. NATO and the great powers are responsible not only for aggravating the crisis, but for the civilian casualties of the armed conflicts and the millions of ..