Has the Haiti Earthquake Changed Bulgaria?

Editorial |Author: Ivan Dikov | February 15, 2010, Monday // 23:36|  views

This is a simple question with a rather important answer. The tragedy of Haiti which devastated the Caribbean nation, one of the poorest countries on earth anyway, shook the world. But how much did it shake Bulgaria?

Bulgaria is the kind of society where active civil efforts are generally scarce – even though there has been some intensification in that area in last few years, and there are many objective and subjective reasons for this scarcity.

As the Haiti earthquake hit, volunteers, NGOs, and civil activism networks from around the world reacted almost immediately in the countries where these activities flourish. That was not really the case in Bulgaria.

For the first couple of weeks most Bulgarians just watched the news from Haiti and felt sad, and that was it. Not that the Bulgarians are not compassionate people – they are just as compassionate as any others. But they have hardly ever had the habit of rushing to help some the wretched of the world located an entire ocean away.

In addition to the still underdeveloped civil society in Bulgaria, this is mostly because of the really strong conviction and mindset that Bulgarians developed, especially over the past 20 years, that they were in fact among the wretched of the world.

Hundreds of phrases and anecdotes ranging from how Bulgarians needed humanitarian aid to the total desperation and desire to leave the country entered the Bulgarian “popular culture” or contemporary “folklore” in the 1990s and are still pretty entrenched in people’s minds.

The general idea has been that we are the ones who badly need help from the rich West. And this, of course, did not originate in 1990 but some time around 1950 when the not so many enlightened minds in the country figured out that we got badly tricked by history, fate, or whoever else is in charge of those things, by being placed in the poor, muddy, and sweaty Soviet sphere…

Today Bulgaria is a very, very weird nation. It is striving desperately to become a Western state in an era that has little by little, but still rather rapidly, started to question the feasibility and even to erode the way of life of Western societies as mighty new actors are rising on the world stage. It is supposed to be a Western state but isn’t. It is the poorest in the club of the rich – and actually poorer than many from the club of the poor. It is supposed to be a developed country but isn’t. It is supposed to be a giver but still has the mindset – and the capacities, as it seems – of a receiver.

Interestingly, 2008 was the first time ever the then Bulgarian government (of PM Stanishev) allocated some tangible funds for foreign aid. Those were negligible by international standards but they were a contribution to the relief efforts after the cyclone that hit Myanmar, the earthquake in the Chinese province of Sichuan, and the hurricanes in the Caribbean.

The only time that Bulgaria had allocated foreign aid previously was during the Cold War when, in its capacity as the most passionate Soviet satellite, it was trying to export the “communist revolution” to “brotherly” developing nations back when those were still called “Third World.”

There were two factors that made possible the first genuine foreign aid on part of Bulgaria in 2008 (of course that was aid for relief not for development). First, there was the booming economy before the real estate bubble burst and the global crisis wiped out much of the foreign investment. Second, there was the EU accession the previous year – after all, Bulgaria was supposed to behave like the other countries in the club.

As the crisis hit, in 2009 Bulgaria took a step back from foreign aid – which on January 12, 2010, just hours before the Haiti earthquake, allowed one MEP to ask Bulgaria’s first (and failed) EU Commissioner-Designate Rumiana Jeleva why she was appropriate to become the first EU Commissioner for humanitarian aid when Bulgaria actually did not have any humanitarian aid programs.

(Speaking of the Jeleva fiasco, one can’t help but mention that Bulgaria would have contributed best to the Haiti relief by making sure its designate got approved the first time… Not only did the Jeleva affair, and her replacement with the successful Kristalina Goergieva delay the entering into office of the entire European Commission and the first EU Commissioner for humanitarian aid but it also diverted the attention of many Bulgarians to the extent that some hardly noticed the Haiti reports.)

But what did really happen with the Bulgarian society as the scope of the Haiti disaster became increasingly evident?

At first, neither the people, nor the government reacted. There was even a letter by two Bulgarians living in Haiti to PM Borisov several days after the tragedy happened who said they felt ashamed their nation was not doing anything to help the earthquake victims unlike the rest of the world – including many of the “developing” states.

It did take a while. However, in the weeks after the Haiti tragedy a number of factors in the Bulgarian society did show a lot of concern and take initiative.

To the international reader – especially one coming from a “Western” society – this might not seem like such a big deal. But for Bulgaria this has been a historic change – literally for the very first time in their nation’s history, a number of Bulgarians organized charity and fund raising events on a mass scale to help people on the other side of the globe!

This is something that should be duly noted because it is about time Bulgaria as a society try to think more about the rest of the world – in various aspects, including trying to aid the others.

It is unclear whether Madonna is really concerned about world issues or just uses them as a cheap PR trick. However, it was rather striking that when a video clip showing world problems was played during her concert in Sofia in the summer of 2009, the Bulgarian audience of 60 000 people hardly reacted and hardly seemed to grasp the message.

Yet, a few months later many Bulgarians showed a different type of reaction.

Of course, it is a whole other issue how efficient foreign aid is, and how much it can do to helped the wretched people of Haiti and elsewhere whose woeful fate fills one’s soul with nothing but grief.

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Tags: Haiti, earthquakes, relief aid, Rumiana Jeleva, Kristalina Georgieva

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