Unlike other countries in the Soviet Bloc, Bulgaria saw its anti-communist dissident movement emerge based on environmental issues. The green ideas continue to fuel many street protests today, 25 years on. Generations have gone, but the struggle is the same. It is about the right to a clean natural environment, as well as to clean hands, minds and hearts in political affairs.

Way back, it all began with the documentary film Breathe focused on the systematic and absolutely ruthless gassing of the city of Rousse with chlorine compounds. One of the authors of the film was our late colleague Violet Tsekov. Breathe contains footage from the first spontaneous demonstration of Rousse mothers who had taken to the streets with their babies in prams. „This was no screenplay but sheer coincidence”, explains engineer Stefan Sedmakov, a close friend of Violet. During the last years of the communist regime, the two of them were among the founders of the first independent civil movement Ekoglasnost inspired by the ground-breaking ideas of Mikhail Gorbachev for glasnost and perestroika (freedom of speech and transformation). The film Breathe is stunning. After its first screening at the House of Cinema in Sofia those present were urged to set up the Civil Committee for Environmental Protection of the City of Rousse. This took place in March 1988, a year and a half before the collapse of Bulgaria’s communist regime. In April 1989 the Rousse Committee grew into the Ekoglasnost Independent Movement founded in a private apartment in Sofia owned by Alexander Karakachanov, the future leader of the Green Party, the first new political organization in Bulgaria after the collapse of the Berlin Wall.

From today’s perspective all this looks like a very innocent job. However in the context of even the late communism, any opposition to the regime involved major risks and required plenty of civil courage at the face of possible repression. Making use the Ecoforum in Sofia, an important international forum of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe in October 1989 Ekoglasnost started to collect signatures in the park outside Crystal Café in the center of Sofia. The signatures were collected for a petition objecting plans to build a water cascade in Rila Mountain, a project based on reverting the course of two big rivers in Rila, Mesta and Struma. On 16 October plain clothes policemen and secret agents dispersed the rally and arrested some of the petition’s organizers. In the stampede, a BBC reporter was hurt. Stefan Sedmakov revisits the depressing sense of fear that was very much in the air at that time. On the eve of the Ecoforum, he was among the Ekoglasnost teams distributing illegal protest posters on public transport stops in Sofia, to benefit from the morning rush hour. Stefan had teamed up with his brother Lubomir and with poet Edvin Sugarev, who later grew into a symbolic figure in the struggle against communism.

"It was an intense experience”, Stefan Sedmakov recalls. “I cannot say I wasn’t afraid because getting arrested was quite a possibility. It didn’t happen though. I still remember the way people waiting at bus stops reacted to our job. We started sticking posters, and those waiting at bus stops pretended there was nothing unusual, as if we had become invisible. They neither opposed nor supported us. They were numb with fear. The sensation was striking.”

Stefan Sedmakov keeps another memory of that time – the first mass protest rally in the last days of communism. Back then no one was aware communism was going to collapse so soon. On 3 November 1989 close to 7 thousand protesters headed to the National Assembly to submit a petition with 12,000 signatures against the Rila-Mesta Project.

 It was exhilarating when the rally spontaneously started singing the classical Bulgarian song, You Are Beautiful My Forest.At the same moment, the church bells of St. Alexander Nevsky Cathedral started chiming. And while we waited outside the National Assembly to submit the petition, the crowd was chanting “democracy” for the first time.

The Bulgarian dissidents during late communism, the activists from Ekoglasnost, were bound to play an important role in the emergence of the anti-communist Union of Democratic Forces at the end of 1989. Almost all candidates from Ekoglasnost were elected MPs in the Grand National Assembly, Bulgaria’s first post-communist parliament. The Green Party, another political child of Ekoglasnost, produced a prime minister of Bulgaria - Filip Dimitrov. We are reminded of that fact by Borislav Sandov, co-chairman of the party of the Greens founded in 2008 and attracting green thinkers and activists from the generation of young people born after the communist era. They believe they have inherited the ideas of their predecessors from Ekoglasnost.

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Bulgaria’s green civil idea has passed through a few stages. In the early 1990s the environmental imperatives in the work of the green political groups were eclipsed by more fundamental values including democracy, freedom and rule of law. The expert human resources became professionalized as many civil environmental organizations were created involved in European projects. Street environmental protests died out but not for too long. At the dawn of 21 c. the incredible construction boom in Bulgarian seaside resorts prompted a new wave of civil protests, this time led by the young generation of green thinkers. The first stage of this new and very strong environmental movement had to do with the protection of the Black Sea Irakli Beach. This movement soon found unity in a coalition of civil organizations with the motto Let Nature Remain in Bulgaria whose political speaker is the party of the Greens. Similar to Crystal Café for Ekoglasnost, the crossing at Eagle’s Bridge in central Sofia has become the venue of their rallies. This new wave of youth protests backing various environmental causes signaled the awakening of the civil society in this country which in the bracket from 2012 to 2014 has toppled two governments and has become a moral corrective of the political class. The young activists of the party of the Greens are fighting not only for a green environment but also for a new morality in political affairs.

 "Politics is a dirty business because we have left it in the hands of rogues”, Borislav Sandov says. “It is not enough to protest and deny values or policies; it is more important to change the state of affairs by getting involved in politics. Young people are not aware that being active participants in protests they are already into politics. I myself was not fully aware of it while I was a university student. I thought it absurd to opt for politics while I was already involved in it in a way. Therefore, we the Greens, stated from the very start that we would never compromise on moral issues and would never let short-term success stand in the way of our long-term goals.”

This prejudice against politics explains the paradox why the Greens have not been successful at elections while in the meantime their street actions and lawsuits lodged jointly with Let Nature Remain in Bulgaria coalition have succeeded in imposing amendments to important laws and in halting many nature-hostile projects. Their achievements are as follows: the inclusion of 34% of the territory of Bulgaria in the European Natura 2000 environmental network, the amendments to the Forest Act, the ban of cyanide use during gold mining, the ban on growing GMOs in this country, the ban on shale gas extraction, the measures to boost organic farming and sustainable alternative tourism.

Similar to their predecessors from Ekoglasnost who looked for support from the OSCE forum in 1989, the new Greens in Bulgaria have a strong ally: the European Union and its environmental laws. The European Commission has been referred to by various environmental groups, and conducts a dozen legal procedures against Bulgaria for noncompliance with environmental directives, forcing the Bulgarian authorities into a friendlier treatment of nature and into a proper regard of the rights of Bulgarians to a healthy environment. The battle continues.

English: Daniela Konstantinova