Print, Video, Radio Journalist
When it comes to popular music in Bulgaria, it’s Chalga. Chalga is a blend of eastern Turkish rhythms, western pop and local folk music. The King of Chalga is a singer named Azis. He’s a controversial figure. Many Bulgarians love him, but he also inspires a lot of animosity. Matthew Brunwasser has today’s Global Hit. Continue reading “Bulgarian Gypsy transvestite pop-folk star”
SOFIA — The director of the Sofia central heating company might not have a glamorous job. The company, a Soviet- era behemoth, is more than €50 million in debt and is owed €80 million by customers unable or unwilling to pay their heating bills. The pay for the director is just €500 a month.
But Valentin Dimitrov, the director until April, managed to live well: making a splash at high-society parties with Elena Tihomirova, Miss Bulgaria 2003, living in a villa worth €400,000, or $506,000, and driving a customized Lexus sport utility vehicle.
After 10 years in the post, through three governments involving all the major political parties, Dimitrov inadvertently provoked the end of his career by seeking in February to raise consumer rates by 12 percent. Continue reading “In Bulgaria, a fleeced public is left in cold”
VIDIN, Bulgaria — Construction has not yet begun, but a new bridge over the Danube is already lifting hopes among Bulgarians and Romanians on both sides of the river.
The bridge, which will span the Danube from this downtrodden city to the dusty Romanian town of Calafat, will not just forge new connections, but is also meant to help one of Europe’s least developed regions.
After eight years spent arguing over the location and four years of looking for funding, the €230 million, or $290 million, project is expected finally to enter the construction phase next year thanks to European prodding and finance. Continue reading “Bridge to a new era for Bulgaria and Romania”
STAVRI DIMITROVO, Bulgaria — A powerful illustration of how Bulgarians see border officials living according to separate rules is the so-called “customs officers’ village” here on the Ivailovgrad Reservoir, 30 kilometers from Svilengrad, the town nearest the Kapitan-Andreevo border station. Half of the 40 or so homes in the village are luxurious weekend villas built by former and current border officials and “businessmen.”
The first sight upon entering the village is a hotel-sized mansion on the other side of the reservoir being built by Rumen Atanasov, popularly known as “The Goat,” a hotelier and the former Black Sea representative of Georgi Iliev, a Bulgarian ex-wrestler and organized crime boss who was shot and killed last summer. Continue reading “Border officials living in opulent villas”
KAPITAN-ANDREEVO, Bulgaria — The spindly observation towers on the Turkish side of this frontier post’s barbed- wire fence stand abandoned, like decaying concrete dinosaurs of a distant Cold War past.
“This border was built to force people to pass through very slowly” from Bulgaria to Turkey, said Nikola Karaivanov, chief of customs at the Kapitan-Andreevo border station. “Now,” he said, “it needs to be changed in the opposite direction” – to control passage into the European Union.
EU officials say that this sprawling border area about 300 kilometers, or 185 miles, southeast of Sofia will soon become one of the EU’s busiest external frontiers: 35 lanes of increasing trade and passenger travel between Turkey and an expanded, 27-member bloc. Continue reading “In Bulgaria, a porous gateway to EU?”
SOFIA — Emil Kyulev, one of the richest men in Bulgaria, was being driven to work in Sofia in his BMW sports utility vehicle on Oct. 26 when, shortly after 9:00 a.m., according to the police, he was shot and killed by a man hiding in the bushes.
A few kilometers away, at the moment Kyulev was slain, Bulgaria’s justice and interior ministers were meeting the press to play down a European Union report expressing “serious concerns” about organized crime in the country. The problem, the report noted, “so far has not been a priority on the political agenda.”
Interior Minister Rumen Petkov said the criticism, issued the previous day, was “not a surprise.” Then, as officials learned of the killing, the press conference was abruptly cut short. Continue reading “A killing complicates Bulgaria’s EU hopes”
published in Archaeology Magazine Vol 58 Issue 2
Archaeologist and showman Georgi Kitov’s spectacular discoveries raise questions about managing Bulgaria’s past.
On a soft, gray fall afternoon, a crowd of several hundred waited patiently outside the Iskra History Museum in Kazanluk, the unprepossessing main town in central Bulgaria’s rose-growing region. The blank concrete facade of the museum, like that of most Communist-era cultural institutions, created a notably joyless impression.
But inside, the 15 visitors allowed at a time into the small exhibition hall were awed by fantastic Thracian gold, silver, bronze, and ceramic objects, 28 in all, recently discovered only eight miles away and on public display for the first time. An ancient amphora housed on a wobbly metal stand rocked ominously as a woman brushed by. The excitement of the visitors washed over the tiny provincial museum as they carefully studied the objects that have been heralded across the world. Continue reading “Thracian Gold Fever”
Scotland on Sunday
Sun 21 Sep 2003
Pagans fight for divine rights of old Greek gods
MATTHEW BRUNWASSER IN LITOCHORO, GREECE
IN THE shadow of Mount Olympus the toga-clad worshippers sway to the
beating of a drum as the bearded man leading the ceremony throws a pinch of
grain into a torch, then circles his hand above the flames.
While the group, dressed in yellow, red and blue robes, may appear to be
taking part in some bewildering historical re-enactment, they are members a
growing pagan movement dedicated to resurrecting the religion and way of
life of ancient Greece. Continue reading “Pagans fight for divine rights of old Greek gods in Greece”
Now the army of elderly refugees has been granted a temporary homecoming, if not the return of the money and property seized during the savage conflict that pitted them against their fellow countrymen.
Greece is finally facing up to its history of ‘ethnic cleansing’ and beginning the process of extending full rights to its minorities, who faced decades of persecution and discrimination under successive oppressive regimes and right-wing dictatorships. Continue reading “Exiles bring Greek guilt home”
broadcast on PBS: Frontline/World
Winner of the Columbia Online Journalism Award for General Excellence, and the Investigative Reporters and Editors Award for Online Journalism
LEONID EFIMOVICH MININ
From Ukraine, a New Kind of Arms Trafficker
The scene in Leonid Minin’s hotel room on the night of August 4, 2000 could have been taken from a Quentin Tarrantino film: Minin, a pale Ukrainian, abundantly fleshy and naked, freebasing cocaine, flanked by a quartet of Russian, Albanian, Italian and Kenyan prostitutes. A pornographic film flickers in the background. Minin, the majority owner of the Europa Hotel in Cinisello Balsamo, a small town outside Milan, Italy, has transformed his two-room suite into a bedroom/office and den of debauchery.
CONTINUE READING…
MONZER AL KASSAR
The Prince of Marbella: Arms To All Sides
This case study details the expert machinations of Monzer Al Kassar in breaking the U.N. arms embargo on Yugoslavia. Distancing himself from his activities through intermediaries, he appears fully confident of avoiding any legal liability.
The case illustrates how Al Kassar and his associates tried to obscure the money trail of an illegal arms sale through various bank transfers, and it clearly establishes Al Kassar’s role as the broker arranging the sale of Polish arms to Croatia and Bosnia during the wartime arms embargo on Yugoslavia. The information presented here is drawn from the report of a Swiss judicial investigation into Al Kassar’s financial activities.
CONTINUE READING…
VICTOR ANATOLIYEVICH BOUT
The Embargo Buster: Fueling Bloody Civil Wars
Victor Bout is the poster boy for a new generation of post Cold War international arms dealers who play a critical role in areas where the weapons trade has been embargoed by the United Nations.
Now, as FRONTLINE/World reports in “Gunrunners,” unprecedented U.N. investigations have begun to unravel the mystery of these broken embargoes, many of them imposed on African countries involved in bloody civil wars. At the heart of this unfolding detective story is the identification of a group of East European arms merchants, with Victor Bout the first of them to be publicly and prominently identified. The U.N. investigative team pursued leads that a Mr. Bout [pronounced “butt” in Russian] was pouring small arms and ammunition into Angola, Rwanda, Sierra Leone and the Congo, making possible massacres on a scale that stunned the world.
CONTINUE READING…
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