- Anna Mudeva is a Reuters senior correspondent based in Sofia, Bulgaria. Her special report “In eastern Europe, people pine for socialism” looks at widespread disenchantment with capitalism in the region. -

Driving through the dense willow and poplar forests of Bulgaria’s biggest Danube island of Persin on a sunny October afternoon, my throat grappled with a lump of horror and disbelief.

What twisted mind had once picked this idyllic place with its painfully beautiful white herons and pelicans to set up a communist death camp?

Actually, it was so typical for those 45 years of communist rule.

Deliberately or not, the old regime would always choose the most beautiful places to build an ugly, polluting factory or open a prison.

Near my hometown in south-western Bulgaria, the communists erected a chemical plant which gave jobs to thousands but shrouded the entire valley — surrounded by magnificent mountains — in dense fog each morning and left many with asthma and lung diseases.

I heard much about the Belene concentration camp in the first years after the regime fell in 1989 but never before that autumn visit 20 years later I had truly realised what actually happened there.

Walking through long grass on the site, I could picture nightmarish scenes of torture, beatings, animal struggle for survival, dead bodies fed to pigs and stray dogs.

What remains of Belene now are the crumbling buildings of another old jail built after the camp was closed 50 years ago.

In the 1990s, the jail was turned into barns by the inmates of the only prison still functioning on the island. They raised pigs, rabbits, goats and chickens.

The surreal farm today consists of a huge wild boar and several goats accompanied by a shady man with missing teeth, jailed for murder and sent to guard the old, forgotten camp.

If not for a small marble plaque that tells the story of Belene, one would never guess what happened there in 1949-59.

The island is off limit for ordinary people. One needs special permission from the Justice Ministry in Sofia to visit. Ornithologists and the staff of the Persina nature park are the only exception.

A big part of the island’s forests and marshlands were declared protected area in 2000 in an attempt to save the endangered yellow water rose, Dalmatian pelican, great white heron, pygmy cormorant and sea eagle.

Entire colonies were wiped out during the communist era when the then pristine island was turned into a giant vegetable garden and prisoners were forced to work, often to death, in the fields.

An employee at the island’s still functioning prison, who accompanied our Reuters team on the Belene trip, reminisced with nostalgia the days when the island used to produce huge amounts of potatoes, pumpkins, tomatoes and peppers.

Happy to be on camera, he assured us the bad things were forgotten.

The prison’s deputy-director, wearing black sun-glasses, a black shirt and shiny, dark suit, said he heard from a famous TV journalist that reports about communism were no longer in vogue or of any interest.

A number of people in the town of Belene, linked to the island with a pontoon bridge, refused to talk about the past. Many in the capital Sofia also find talking about the socialist times boring, old-fashioned, embarrassing or unnecessary.

Disappointment with the past 20 years of transition marked by flourishing corruption, crime, a climate of impunity and low living standards is palpable across the entire country.

Perhaps the renowned Bulgarian artist Nikola Manev is right in saying that 20 years was not a long enough time to open a new page and come to terms with the past.

“What people have achieved for many decades we want to achieve for just 20 years. Look at wine and cheese — for it to mature and become old, it needs a lot of time.”

SPECIAL REPORT: In eastern Europe, people pine for socialism

When the Berlin Wall fell 20 years ago, the momentous event marked the triumph of the market economy over planned economic structures, says British economist John Kay.

He explains his views on why the capitalist system reigns supreme.

The fall of the Berlin Wall, on November 9, 1989, was one of history’s truly epochal moments. During what became a revolutionary wave sweeping across the former Eastern Bloc countries, the announcement by the then-East German Government that its citizens could visit West Germany set in train a series of events that led, ultimately, to the demise of the Soviet Union itself.

Twenty years on, what is most striking to me are the massive, enduring ramifications of the events of November 1989. Only several decades ago, the Cold War meant that the borders of the Eastern Bloc were largely inviolate; extremist religious groups and ethnic tensions were suppressed, there was no internet (at least as we know it today) and travel between East and West was difficult. The two great Glaciers of the Cold War produced a frozen hinterland characterised by immobility.

Today’s world is a vastly different place. When one of the great Glaciers - the former Soviet Union – melted it helped unleash a potential torrent of security problems. We now live in an era characterised by huge mobility and instability, in which issues such as mass migration, international crime and international terrorism have a much higher prominence.

The end of the Cold War, together with subsequent conflicts across Africa, the Balkans and the Middle East, for instance, has led to many millions of people migrating the globe in hope or fear. In the West, this has given rise to pressure on jobs, healthcare, education, housing and cultural identity, causing local populations to feel threatened.

While international migration has generally been culturally enriching and beneficial, it has nonetheless also increased the range of threats to our societies. For instance, the 48 radical Islamicists implicated in terror plots in the United States between 1993 and 2001, including the 9/11 hijackers, all used legitimate immigration devices (e.g. “green cards”, student/tourism/business visas, and amnesty and asylum) to get into the country.

Getting to grips with this specific threat is a major challenge and the reason why, as UK Home Secretary, I placed so much emphasis on the need to overhaul our immigration system. Key elements of the changes I championed include a new points-based system — which represents the biggest reform of UK immigration procedures for more than half a century; electronic border controls (all UK entry visas, for instance, are now based on finger prints); and the National Identity Scheme which features compulsory fingerprint biometric identity cards for foreign nationals.

It is globalisation that lies at the heart of our transformational post-Cold War World. This inexorable process has extended the opportunities of world-wide interchange. Driven by technological advances in transport, communications, and electronic networks, globalisation has delivered massive opportunities in terms of mobility, movement and exchange of people, ideas, values, resources, commodities and finance.

But this same globalisation process and associated technology has also brought major new threats, or intensified existing ones, rendering everyone increasingly inter-dependent and vulnerable. The threat we face is seamless, running across the boundaries of defence, foreign affairs, domestic and social life. For instance, it has left nations and peoples ever more vulnerable to phenomena ranging from international crime and terrorism through to cyber-attack, health pandemics, energy-politics, resource shortage and financial crises.

The net result is that there are far more sources of insecurity than during the Cold War. The uncertainty this generates means that crises (defined as crucial turning points in events rather than as catastrophes) are more recurrent. Moreover, this bias towards instability is exacerbated by the fact that the nature of the potential crises we face is constantly evolving. In the context of international migration, for instance, terrorists and other international criminals are constantly trying to find new ways to evade our security safeguards.

Given the complexity of the threats we face, it is essential as a nation that we continually upgrade our capacity to deal with them by identifying, exposing and remedying our deficiencies. If we are to be able to keep up, and potentially be one step ahead of our adversaries, we will increasingly need to pool our ingenuity to innovate and deliver solutions.

This is a relatively uncontroversial ambition, shared by many. But I believe it requires nothing less than new thinking, new urgency and a new approach to studying tomorrow’s security problems today.

That’s partly why we are establishing the Institute for Security and Resilience Studies at University College, London. The new Centre will address projects of vital importance to national and international security arising from globalisation in the post-Cold War World. The goal is to assess and embed resilience as well as analysing threats; and to extend this analysis into action in outlining policy options to shape our preparation, response and recovery to crises.

This insistence on “embedding” resilience throughout organisational structures and culture is essential given the nature of contemporary society. Where there is, for instance, now a global availability of information through the internet, satellite and mobile communications, resilience to threats must be embedded in a decentralised way (rather than top-down). To the degree that resilience can ever be said to have depended on an elite management at the top of organisations, this is no longer the case — hence the need to bring together practitioners from the public, private and third sectors with academics in order to combine theory and practice in targeted projects.

The goal must be nothing less that ensuring that government, business and society can not only cope with, but flourish, in the increasingly uncertain times in which we live. The fall of that wall symbolised the emergence of a world offering both unparalleled opportunities and unprecedented insecurities. The challenge of maximising the first and countering the latter is a legacy demanding an ingenuity and endurance from the next and subsequent generations to match that of their predecessors.

- Erik Kirschbaum is a Reuters correspondent in Berlin. -

Will the party that traces its roots to Communist East Germany’s SED party that built the Berlin Wall soon be in power in a west German state?

Or is the rise of the far-left “Linke” (Left party) in western Germany to the brink of its first role as a coalition partner in a state government with the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) simply a political fact-of-life now so many years after the Wall fell and the two Germanys were reunited?

Will a “red” government in Saarland scare away investors and doom the state, as its conservative state premier Peter Mueller argues in a desperate fight to his job?

Or will the new leftist alliance in Saarland be able to better tackle state’s woes, as the SPD state premier candidate Heiko Maas insists?

Depending on your Weltanschauung, that’s what Sunday’s election in three German states boils down to — an emotional debate about whether the ex “Communists” in the form of the Left party should be allowed to be part of the next Saarland government or not.

It doesn’t matter that the Left has already been in eastern state governments and will probably also be part of the next state government in the eastern state of Thuringia, which also elects a new state assembly on Sunday.

The “Cold War” has flared up again in Germany ahead of Sunday’s elections in three German states, a closely watched warm-up for the national election on Sept. 27 when Chancellor Angela Merkel will be seeking a second term.

It’s hard to explain to anyone outside Germany why the Left party has been seated in state and local governments throughout eastern Germany for the last 15 years with hardly a murmur while it was until recently an absolute taboo in western Germany. It’s also not easy to explain to some Germans, especially those born after the Cold War.

But here goes: Many western voters have until now had a knee-jerk reaction to the Left party — as well as its predecessor the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), which is the direct descendent of Erich Honecker’s SED. Westerners remember the Wall, the shoot-to-kill orders, the barbed wire and the Iron Curtain that divided post-war Germany.

“It’s not a big deal in Saarland anymore,” Maas, the SPD candidate in Saarland, told me in an interview on the campaign trail in Saarbruecken this week. “The CDU is trying to make a scandal out of it.

They’ve been trying to whip up fears about ‘red-red’ for months but there hasn’t been any movement in the opinion polls. I think that shows people aren’t interested in the parties mud-slinging about coalitions. They’re tired of those games. They want political leaders to resolve their problems.”

Many eastern voters long ago realised the Left party is not the SED that built the Wall. In the east, the Left  has become the most powerful party in many regions partly due to nostalgia for East Germany but mainly due to its fighting for leftist ideals as well as standing up for the so-called “losers” of unification.

“A ‘red-red’ government would send Saarland down the tubes,” said CDU leader Mueller.  And Merkel added at a rally in Saarbruecken: “This state cannot be allowed to fall into the hands of ‘red-red’.” She does not use that line in her campaign speeches in the former Communist east, where she was raised, because she knows it would sound ridiculous to eastern ears.

The SPD rules out a “red-red” coalition with the Left party at the national level because of deep differences over foreign and economic policy. But it now says it is ready to open the door to such alliances in western states — after some painful experiences in the last few years. And Maas in Saarland could be the first to go through. The SPD will probably drop that ban on “red-red” coalitions at the national level someday as well after having abandoned it for eastern Germany in 1994.

So is it “The Commies are at the Gate in Saarland?”  Or is it just part of a democratic evolution that the renamed, reborn East German Communists are about to gain a small but important foothold in western Germany?
-
Tune into the Global News blog on Sunday evening for live blog coverage on the elections in the three German states.

Related Story: Merkel faces left threat in German state votes