Revolution 1989 (45 page)

But the churches had been deeply compromised by the regime and only a few wanted anything to do with opposition politics. Biologist Frank Eigenfeld wished to set up a peace group in Halle, about 140 kilometres south-west of Berlin. ‘We had basic problems with churches,’ he said. ‘We had problems finding rooms for people to meet in. We depended on parishes to support our efforts and help to provide rooms for grassroots groups. In most cases it was hard to get support. In Halle only three out of fourteen parishes provided any space for us . . . Most churches wanted nothing to do with us.’
⁶

The best-known secular group was the Initiative for Peace and Human Rights, established by the forty-three-year-old artist Bärbel Bohley and her partner Werner Fischer. In January 1988 they were arrested at a demonstration marking the anniversary of the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, two of the founders of the German Communist Party and heroes in the Marxist pantheon. Their offence was to unfurl a flag which in large letters quoted one of Luxemburg’s most famous sayings: ‘Freedom is the freedom to think differently.’ Bohley was given the choice of remaining in jail or leaving the country. After around four hundred people marched in Berlin protesting at her treatment she reached a compromise with the Party that went right up to Honecker for personal approval. She would go to live in Britain for six months, as long as she was allowed to return. By May 1989 she was back in East Germany leading new protest groups and citizens’ committees that the regime dismissed as ‘illegal groupings’.

Yet few people were interested in negotiating with the Communists or reaching a compromise with them. Some enterprising young East Germans looked for a new way to show how they felt. Five days before the municipal elections, West German television had screened a special broadcast from the Hungarian border with Austria. Hungarian soldiers were cutting the wire fence - the Iron Curtain - and opening the border to the West. It was an extraordinary sight that showed some East Germans a way out of their prison nation. If they could not climb over the Wall, tunnel under it or fly over it, perhaps there was a way around it? In small numbers to begin with they started to make their way to Hungary, hoping they might never have to return to the GDR.

THIRTY-SIX

Sofia, Saturday 20 May 1989

 

THE WINTER HAD BEEN one of the harshest on record in Bulgaria. The spring was proving no easier. Queues in the shops were the longest in living memory. Bread, milk, cheese, eggs, fresh vegetables of all kinds were hard to obtain for most families. After the oil price crashed in 1985-6, Bulgaria’s ruse of selling cheap Soviet oil on to the West ceased to be profitable. Western bankers were refusing to lend further money. The country was bankrupt. Todor Zhivkov turned to a tried and tested tactic to deflect any criticism of himself: once again he unfurled the flag of nationalism. The country’s problems, he said, were all caused by the foreigners within. So they would have to go. He announced that he would throw out all the ethnic Turks from Bulgaria. The decision was as bizarre as it was cruel. It triggered a reaction he had not predicted. Zhivkov thought he would strengthen his position on a wave of patriotic fervour. But this time his campaign was treated with disdain by the majority of Bulgarians, prompted a plot against him among his own clique of elite Communist officials in Sofia, and created an international outcry.

By 1989 all but a fraction of the ethnic Turks had been compelled to change their names, as the regime had been forcing them to do since the mid-1980s. Those who refused were either dead or had been jailed, but the bitterness among the minority population ran deep. From 9 May 1989, Turks in the north-east and south of Bulgaria began a series of demonstrations to coincide with the Conference on Security and Co-operation summit held in Paris. There were three marches - in Kaolinovo, Todor Ikonomovo and in Tolbukhin near Varna, organised by the Democratic League for Human Rights. This had been founded by Turks who had spent time on the prison island of Belen for refusing to adopt Bulgarian names. Demonstrators demanded the right to speak Turkish, the right to practise Islam and the restoration of their original Muslim names. The regime’s response was brutal.

About 15,000 attended the peaceful, silent protests, and were met with the full force of the State. They were surrounded by troops and militia who used dogs, clubs, tear gas and helicopter gunships against unarmed civilians. The official figures put the casualty toll at seven dead and forty injured, but reliable witnesses insist the more accurate number was sixty dead and well over a hundred injured. About a thousand demonstrators were arrested. The towns and villages where the protests took place were sealed off by military roadblocks and communications were cut. Four-day curfews were imposed and soldiers patrolled the streets, beating and arresting people indiscriminately. They sought out those who joined the demonstrations for special treatment. Dozens more died over the next few days.

The government’s first reaction was to make an example of the organisers and the Turkish community leaders. But then Zhivkov chose a different, far more radical, route. On this day he decided to get rid of the Muslim minority once and for all, though he would start with the troublemakers. He ordered Interior Minister Georgi Tanev ‘to organise the quick expulsion of all the extremists and fanatics among the Turkish Muslims and to stimulate the emigration of the rest’. Tanev had been Communist Party boss in the predominantly Turkish area of Kurdjali in the mid-1980s and distinguished himself by the zeal he had shown in the earlier campaign to force the Muslims to change their names. Now, within a few days, 5,000 Turks were deported. They were mostly writers, journalists, artists and academics but included many doctors, engineers and teachers - a large proportion of the minority population’s professional class.

A week later Zhivkov summoned his fellow Party chieftains and announced that all the Turks would be expelled speedily. ‘It is absolutely imperative to expatriate . . . at least 300,000 from the Turkish population,’ he declared. ‘If we don’t get rid of them, in fifteen years Bulgaria will not exist. Their population increases . . . Can you imagine what will happen in twenty years?’ Inwardly, as they said later, some of the leadership were appalled by Zhivkov’s pronouncement. But nobody opened his mouth to object.
¹
The next day, 29 May, Zhivkov appeared on prime-time television. He accused Turkey of trying to foment a crisis in Bulgaria and of provoking the disturbances for their own ‘expansionist’ ends. He demanded that Turkey open its borders to every Bulgarian Muslim. Ethnic Turks were forced to leave, often with only a few hours’ notice. Most were allowed to take with them no more than 500 leva, less than a month’s average wages and in any case unusable currency outside Bulgaria. They were banned from selling their property before they left, or damaging it in any way, on pain of long prison sentences.

The Turkish Prime Minister, Turgut Özal, led the protests. For a while at least he opened Turkey’s borders, albeit with great reluctance. The European Community halted talks on a new trade agreement with Bulgaria. The country was isolated - even within the Soviet bloc. The Russians sent formal protests. Gorbachev was furious when he met Zhivkov in Moscow in June. The Bulgarian tried to argue that he had ‘no choice on the Muslim issue . . . if we don’t act we will soon look like Cyprus’. But Gorbachev barely allowed him to finish the sentence. ‘What you are doing is unhelpful and counterproductive at a time when we are seeking to improve our relations with Turkey. We cannot support you,’ he said. From that moment he was determined to see the back of Comrade Zhivkov - and soon.
²

The Turkish exodus was a disaster for Bulgaria. More than 350,000 fled within a few weeks, during the planting and sowing season. Even Zhivkov could see the damage it was doing to the land and desperately tried to backtrack. But it was too late. The regime said they could stay working their farms, and then leave later in the year when the harvest was safely gathered. In a desperate but vain effort to save the crucial tobacco crop in the south-west Gotse Delchev area local officials would issue only postdated passports. In six key villages there were demonstrations, strikes and protests, quelled by soldiers and militia who sealed off the area and forced the people back to work at gunpoint. Nevertheless, entire villages emptied, factories ground to a halt, crops and farm animals were left untended.

Senior Party officials were alarmed. Men like the Foreign Minister, Petar Mladenov, the Prime Minister, Georgi Atanasov, and the finance chief, Andrei Lukanov, had done Zhivkov’s bidding for years. Now they were receiving international protests about Bulgaria’s behaviour and they knew the old despot had gone too far. But they were scared of disagreeing with him or taking any action against him. Zhivkov still had the powerful state security service, the Durzhavna Sigurnost, and the People’s Militia, another armed wing of the Party, on his side. It was dangerous to make any move to challenge him openly. There had been an attempt to force him to retire in the summer of the previous year. But he cannily outmanoeuvred his opponents. He summoned his ministers and cronies for a meeting of the Party leadership and declared that he was growing older and wearier and that he wanted to resign soon and lay down the heavy cares of office. Then, over the next few days, he held private meetings with some of them, at which they all pledged their fealty and assured him he had their support if there was any challenge. Lukanov explained what happened next. ‘Of course, everybody knew this was a provocation. If you had answered “Yes, why not resign” you were finished. So, having interviewed everyone, he held a smaller meeting to inform them that everyone was in favour of him staying in office so he would defer to their wishes reluctantly. This kind of theatre was then represented by him as a serious attempt to retire.’ There was a group of plotters ready to pounce against him, but they knew they had to wait until the time was right.
³

 

This time Zhivkov faced opposition outside the Party to his ruinous and vicious campaign against the Turks. None of the minuscule dissident groups had previously raised their voices in support of the minority Muslims. As the leaders of some of them admitted, it seemed like a side issue for most Bulgarians. Challenging the regime on behalf of the Turks would not have furthered their cause with the majority population. But now human rights groups which had before been silent spoke out. At the end of May six activists were arrested, including three leading figures from the fledgling free trade union organisation Podkrepa and Father Kristopher Subev, an Orthodox priest from the Religious Rights Committee. They were accused of inciting the Turks to riot and faced long prison terms. When they went on a hunger strike in jail they were painfully force-fed. Their plight became a
cause célèbre
on the BBC World Service and Deutsche Welle. Though it was technically illegal to listen to foreign radio broadcasts, both stations were avidly heard in Bulgaria and had audiences as large as domestic radio. Though official state-controlled news barely mentioned the expulsion of the Turks, everyone in Bulgaria now knew about it.

The Club for the Support of Perestroika and Glasnost had been founded the previous summer. Originally it had around eighty members, nearly all of them prominent writers or academics and one-time Communists. The regime had kept a close watch on the organisation. Apart from Sigurnost surveillance, its launch meeting was attended by Goran Goranov, one of Zhivkov’s best-known aides. It had tried to navigate a careful path. All its material ‘was phrased to keep us out of trouble, or so we hoped. We deliberately used the slogans and ideas of perestroika and glasnost as political cover for ourselves. If Gorbachev, the most powerful Communist in the world, used them, who was the Bulgarian dictator to tell us that we could not?’ said Ivan Stanchev, one of the Club’s founders. The most influential member was Zhelyu Zhelev, a dapper, silver-haired fifty-four-year-old philosopher and long-time dissident, who had been thrown out of the Party in the late 1960s and spent six years in internal exile outside Sofia. Zhelev was the author of a clever and profound book,
Fascism
, in 1982, which again landed him in trouble with the regime, though he managed to stay out of prison. He had a shrewd flair for political tactics that matched his powerful intellect. His greatest early coup was in January 1989 when the French President, François Mitterrand, passed through Bulgaria on a fleeting visit. The French Embassy held a breakfast for him and wanted to gather twelve Bulgarian intellectuals to meet him. They asked Zhelev to compile the guest list. ‘This was a recognition that we were a serious opposition group,’ he said. ‘But . . . [we] were monitored much more closely by the secret police.’

When Zhivkov expelled the Turks from Bulgaria, the Perestroika Club protested and presented a petition signed by more than 250 well-known figures of Bulgarian communism, including the distinguished research chemist Alexei Sheludko, who had once been the KGB’s chief of operations in Sofia. There were a few arrests of Club members, though not the most prominent ones, and of activists from Ecoglasnost, who had made a film,
Breath
, about pollution levels near Bulgaria’s industrial plants. It was a fairly muted response, but Zhivkov was planning more vigorous moves. He saw objections to his policy on the Turks as an attack on him personally.
⁴

THIRTY-SEVEN

Warsaw, Sunday 4 June 1989

 

SOLIDARITY ’ S ELECTION HEADQUARTERS were on the second floor of the Café Surprise, just off the main boulevard in the centre of the city. Late in the evening, union activists stared in disbelief at the TV screens as the first poll results began to be announced. It was clear that a revolution had taken place within the Soviet empire and it had happened, peacefully, in the polling booths of Poland. Almost nobody had expected the overwhelming scale of the Communists’ defeat. As the night wore on it became a humiliation for the Party that had ruled Poland for more than forty years. The electoral procedure was highly complex, but according to some figures the Communists won between 3 and 4 per cent of the vote. The election had been turned into a referendum on Communist and Soviet rule. The people’s verdict was a devastating indictment against the regime. In the first of two rounds of voting, Solidarity won thirty-three of the thirty-five seats that were up for free election in the Sejm. The Communists and their allies retained the uncontested 65 per cent of the seats reserved for them in the gerrymandered parliament. But that was little consolation to them. Solidarity won ninety-nine of the hundred freely elected Senate seats. Virtually the entire Communist leadership was defeated, including all the familiar names from the government that had ruled for so long: the Interior Minister Kiszczak, the Prime Minister Rakowski, the Defence Minister Florian Siwicki.