Are environmental activists in CEE being singled out for harassment?
By Pavel Antonov
Fidanka and Eoin McGrath, a newly married couple of nature lovers, spent two of the hottest days of August in quite unusual circumstances: they were being interrogated by police. Even as summer blockbuster Die Hard 4 portrays Bruce Willis' character as cooperating with hackers to save the day, it is becoming increasingly commonplace for authorities in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) to target activists for things done, or not done, over the internet.
If you were looking to find a model of successful coexistence between European integration and environmental sustainability, the McGraths would be a good one. Fidanka, a Bulgarian environmental activist, and Eoin, an Irish computer programmer, settled in the countryside to tend their own bio-farm. Their pastoral existence was disturbed abruptly this summer, however, when the two were called in by the local unit of the GDBOP (the Bulgarian acronym for the Chief Directorate for Combating Organised Crime). The GDBOP is a vestige of the communist State Security agency, which broke up after 1990.
Eoin accepted an informal invitation to appear in person at the Blagoevgrad precinct (with neither a lawyer nor a translator) only to learn that he was the suspected author of a bomb threat. News of the threat in question, sent from a Russian server and signed by a non-existent environmental group, was published in the Bulgarian mass media in February. The threat warned that controlled explosions were set to initiate a catastrophic avalanche over the Bansko Ski Resort — revenge for alleged environmental damage caused by resort construction. Police found no explosives, although resort operations were suspended for a few hours, the media reported.
Responding to the news, environmental organisations from the 'Save Pirin' coalition, which had campaigned against the resort's development, condemned the threat as a provocation. Half a year later, interrogating officers urged McGrath that a confession would "make things easier," online daily MediaPool reported; after more than two days of questioning, however, neither of the McGraths admitted to any involvement in the email threat.
"The police were friendly, but that may have merely been an interrogation technique," Fidanka McGrath told MediaPool. The investigating police officer refused the media any comments.
The incident sparked outrage among environmental campaigners, as it was the second time within a month that authorities had applied pressure on activists for conducting allegedly illegal online activities. In July, Michel Bouzgounov was called in by the GDBOP in Sofia and advised in similarly 'friendly' fashion to refrain from covering environmental protests on his blog.
That same month, protesters angry about over-construction on the Black Sea Coast took to the street after the Supreme Administrative Court in Sofia had stripped Bulgaria's largest natural park, Strandja, of its protected status, thus green-lighting yet another major coastal hotel project. After Bouzgounov promoted the street protests on his personal blog Optimiced, he was ordered to "refrain from quoting other sources of information when possible violation of the law is involved; namely, the organising of non-permitted civil protests," and to sign his name in agreement. No copy of the warning protocol was handed to him.
Upon his release, Bouzgounov returned to his blog and wrote: "Yes, I wrote about Strandja because I care about whether or not this park will exist tomorrow! No, I did not call for riots, illegal action, violence or anarchy!" He went on to complain that a government agency equipped to fight organised crime was instead using it resources and personnel to "investigate bloggers, free people, writing about Bulgaria's nature — reporting on past and future protests in [nature's] defence."
Police action against bloggers writing opinion or posting information on the environment is completely unacceptable, agrees Dan McQuillan, coordinator of Amnesty International's Irrepressible.info internet rights campaign. Lawyers from the Access to Information Programme in Sofia back this opinion. Freedom to publish information on the internet, which includes blogging, is a form of expression guaranteed under the European Human Rights Convention and by the Bulgarian Constitution, the organisation stated.
