This morning we talked to D who is the director of a number of enterprises, one of which sponsors the Rose Festival. He says that ‘Europe’ does not want Bulgarian industrial products, only the agricultural ones. He bought into a state-owned electro-ceramic works where his father was a director and which employed 2,000 workers, thirty-five percent of whom were Roma. After privatisation orders kept falling despite the quality of the product because it is cheaper to buy the insulators in Turkey or even have them shipped over from China. There are only 86 workers left ‘on the payroll’ but they are on strike because they have not been paid for five months. He also says that the ‘Roma problem’ has got worse because of the lack of jobs and the fact that social security and health services are now based on contributions by employers and employees and not as a basic right.
He dances round the subject of corruption which, according to EU reports, permeates almost every kind of business and is especially well established at a local level. According to Transparency International, an agency that publishes an annual corruption perception index based on institutional and business sources, Bulgaria has slipped ten places in the last five years from 54th to 64th. Comparatively, countries such as Slovakia and Poland which started off much lower on the list have been more active in reducing corruption. Thus although Bulgaria is placed in the index before, for example, the ex-Yugoslavian republics involved in the recent wars and well before China and Russia, it is clear that it is still a major issue. The radical political changes and the subsequent sale of publicly-owned assets provided opportunities for corruption on a major scale both for those involved in selling and those involved in buying. Dimitrova also mentions other, equally larcenous but more easily understood aspects – Boris III’s 1943 armour-plated Mercedes went missing (to turn up in a private collection in Las Vegas) and Georgi Dimitov’s Packard also disappeared. |
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D goes on to tell us that the general rate of unemployment around here is over 20 percent and he arranges for us to visit the stranded factory in the afternoon.
On the way there, along the wide valley at the foothills of the Balkan range, we notice faded lettering on the bridges over the main road. B says they are exhortative slogans from the eighties. Some have been deleted by rough over-painting. All those that can still be deciphered concern patriotism and the ‘homeland’.
The afternoon is hot when we arrive at the works and announce ourselves at the gatehouse. Across from the entrance there is a box with a sign suggesting that ‘if you become aware of corrupt practices, please report it’. A caretaker appears along with a representative of the administrative staff. They lead us through the different silences of the various departments that used to be concerned with mixing kaolin, expelling air from it, forming the insulators and firing them. All around there are signs of by-gone activity: pictures on the walls, worn benches, ancient but still serviceable machines and management injunctions such as ‘It is the duty of every worker to avoid industrial accidents’. It is a factory in suspended animation, it is still possible to imagine the machines starting up one by one, the furnaces beginning to roar, the heavy trolleys with their cargo moving into the loading bays, the din in the canteen. It is just possible that the factory awake from its Rip Van Winkle sleep, but it’s very unlikely. Some of the machines have been sold off , says our guide, the ones that extract air from the kaolin and the specialist one that produced meter-long insulators.
As we return to the gatehouse to leave we notice a displaced relict of the past staring straight up at the blue sky with sightless eyes, a seer whose vision has come and gone, lying, guillotined in the middle on a bier. |
