Bulgarian politics, pizza make odd combo !

Daniel Patrick Sheehan.

Bulgarian politics,pizza make odd combo !

Daniel Patrick Sheehan

In The Burbs

April 21,2010

Destiny is strange. Because a volcano erupted in Iceland, I ended up sitting in a Bushkill Township pizzeria across from Yane Yanev, a Bulgarian politician who told me his homeland is headed by a mobster and seems likely to slide back under complete Russian dominance unless the world starts paying attention. Not my usual column topic -- you'll recall I wrote about a dog park a couple of weeks ago -- but I could hardly pass on the opportunity to interview Yanev, an anti-corruption leader who was elected to the Bulgarian parliament in 2005 and heads a conservative political party called Order, Lawfulness and Justice. I was tempted to quip we had a number of TV shows by that name, but one worries about first impressions. Yanev has been on a working tour of the United States in recent weeks, advocating for his homeland in meetings with politicians, academics and immigrants in Washington, New York, Chicago. He was supposed to have flown home by now, but the volcano, as you know, has disrupted air traffic all over Europe. So Yanev and his two companions have been staying since Sunday with an old friend named Roumen Trahanov, who lives in Nazareth and is part of a small population of Bulgarian immigrants in northern Northampton County. Pizzeria owner Mehmet ''Mike'' Zimmer is also part of that population, so we met at his store, Original Dough Boys, where my conversation with Yanev evolved slowly through his translator, party member Zhivko Temelkov. It took time to make clear that I was a suburban reporter for a mid-sized newspaper and not the sort of heavy hitter who could do justice to a story about Bulgaria's precarious political state. But I promised to write as much about it as I could. It was fascinating. Bulgaria, like the rest of Eastern Europe, escaped communist domination two decades ago with the collapse of the Soviet Union. But in Yanev's account, the main political players from communism's heyday merely slipped into new positions of power. That's left Bulgaria under control of Bulgarian oligarchs who are beholden to Russian ones, thwarting the transition to genuine democracy, Yanev said. ''We want to get away from the cold hug of Russia,'' he said. ''Of the Russian bear,'' added Atanas Semov, a professor of international law and vice president of Yanev's political party. To make matters worse, the country's prime minister, Boyko Borisov, is an associate of known mobsters and has been linked to nearly 30 unsolved murders, according to an investigation commissioned by a private bank and reported on two years ago by Congressional Quarterly. The Quarterly's story said Borisov -- a karate expert who worked as a bodyguard for Bulgaria's last communist dictator -- was a key player in the Bush administration's negotiations to base American forces in Bulgaria, a potential staging ground for a strike on Iran. Yanev suggested America doesn't want to risk that strategic asset by inserting itself in his nation's affairs, even though Bulgaria is a member of both the European Union and NATO. But in the long term, ''that practically assures the possibility that Bulgaria will be brought back under the influence of Russia,'' he said. ''If this tendency is kept up, Bulgaria will in fact play the role of Trojan horse [for Russia] in NATO and the European Union.'' That's the impetus behind his U.S. journey, which included sit-downs with various members of Congress and think tanks devoted to Eastern European affairs. Yanev also mentioned a meeting with the FBI, but said he couldn't discuss it. At that point, I felt I had wandered far past my pay grade, so I asked Zimmer what he thought of his lunch guests. He nodded approvingly. ''I told them, I know you very little,'' he said. ''But if you're good for the people, you're good for me.''

http://www.mcall.com / Bulgaria Today