Professor Petkov on Mogilino
03/03/2008
Kostyo Petkov is the Professor of Sociology at the University of Sophia. In his career he has lectured all over the world as well as contributed to over 500 publications on a variety of subjects including social policy, labour and economics. From 2000 to 2005 he was a member of the national assembly and held the post of deputy Head of the Health Commission. Here he gives his assessment on the social care crisis and argues that 'the tragedy of Mogilino is not a single isolated case, but the consequence of a severe social disease affecting the whole of Bulgarian society.'
The Mogilino Tragedy and Bulgarian Drama
The situation in the home for disabled children of Mogilino is tragic from many years. Doomed to suffer, these infant children are living their earthly days in trance and agony. Their physiological and psychological condition is closer to non-human. They are raised all together like animals isolated from the good herd. No speedy recovery appears on the horizon.
The BBC filmed the story at the end of 2007 and showed the social misery to the world. Dozens of Europeans signed under a petition in defense of the victims (and against the Bulgarian barbarism). BTV reporters made of the tragedy the bad news of the year. Human rights defenders are threatening that the revelations will continue with another seven social institutions.
The world is in a shock. The Bulgarians are silent (with the exception of few journalists and professionals involved into the media debate). There is no force to make us unite and act. Whether we are sentenced in Strasbourg or not is of no importance, it will be the state, in the end, that will pay the bill. A state that is socially discharged. The society and citizens are living out of it in another dimension. There will be a change if only Europe applies penalties – for instance the safeguard clause, or if we are deprived of our national sovereignty and the care for the abandoned Bulgarian children.
The national silence is not for shame. Or anger alone. We were silent for fear for 45 years as in the past the state considered normal to separate disabled from healthy children. The silence has continued over the last eighteen years – by inertia from the past. Therefore, the tragedy in Mogilino is not a single isolated case, but a consequence of a severe social disease affecting the whole Bulgarian society.
The disease is: a chronic deficit of solidarity.
Sociologists know what happens to societies of no solidarity – they collapse. Historians have preserved the memory of states having fallen apart because of weak nations. Recently, President Parvanov warned about the symptoms of the disease. Yet, there has been no public response.
The deficit of solidarity is not a contagious phenomenon. There is no way that we explain it with having caught it from other nations. The Bulgarian nation has come to a phase, which is difficult to overcome as a result of consistent misuse of overdoses of hatred, insensitivity and lack of rights.
Hatred appears as a consequence of separation. Human societies - primitive or civilized – become united to survive and prosper. We have been being separated and instigated against each other for eighteen years: at first anti-communists against communists; later the rich against the poor; today an ethnos against another; tomorrow – Bulgarians against Europeans. Thus, everybody becomes accustomed to despising the rest, only because they are „other”. The strike of the teachers last year is a telling example of how the powerful elite took advantage of the social separation to incite parents and children, pensioners and the media against a whole guild.
The children’s colony in Mogilino is a small fenced piece of territory in a separated Bulgaria. Nobody hates these disabled children, yet they are not provided generously with good care. Their life illustrates collective indifference - first, of parents who have abandoned their children, then of a society that has closed them in a social isolator, and finally, of semi-literate nannies promoted to the rank of „tutors”. Social compassion has been excluded even from the sermons of the Orthodox Church.
Lawlessness has become a social norm tolerated by the state and its citizens and observed by international human rights activists. (There is nothing wrong with that, on principal, providing they are equally zealous in their prosecution of human rights violations perpetrated against Bulgarians abroad).
The Bulgarian drama does not end here. It is now to enter a stage of protraction - the same protraction which turned the social authorities into a fire and rescue institution acting after the events. Five years have passed since the first alarm of tragic fates of children. We have heard about legal stupidities and mayor caused obstructions for the close-down of the social isolators. We have also found out that there are alternative homes and services, the capacity of which is, however, short to accommodate all disabled and abandoned children and provide them with conditions close to the European standards. If it were a matter of gambling or loan swaps, the failures would be rectified within 24 hours. The oligarchy has its lobby in the Parliament; the lonely Bulgarian children do not!
Nevertheless, there is a chance for some urgent treatment – of the symptoms for the time being, and after that of the disease roots. The alternative is: a National Crisis Plan to close down the social isolators. The deadline has to be maximum two years; the action needs preferential funding to cover all 27 social institutions and 1600 children closed in there:
- The problem is not in securing the funds any more. Yet, money is the start of it. To take these children out and put them in a normal environment for the time being would require 20 million BGL. The Ministry of Labour and Social Policy has received half of this money from the budget surplus (however it has been allocated to the construction of an administrative building in the town of Stara Zagora);
- Experts advise that the disabled children should be accommodated in small protected houses designed for 6 to 8 of them. This means that 200 new social houses should be built in the cities in a becoming environment. Such a construction project is a child’s play in the hands of the state;
- The allowance for a child, being a pathetic figure (1720 BGL annually!) has to be guaranteed in order to come closer to the European standards. The salaries of the staff (currently less than 300 BGL on average per year) also need to be increased twice or three times, but be paid to trained and certified social workers, psychologists and tutors;
- The Agency for Child Protection has to be closed down as it has proved to be inefficient. The Agency for Social Assistance should set up an urgent target group /task force/ jointly with good and motivated NGOs; however, the control to be exercised over this special action should be civil or independent. A future ministry of the family and children /as the international practice is/ should take up the cross of civilised and modern care for every disabled person or person in need in Bulgaria.
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