A three-day conference on the radicalization of young people took place in Sofia from March 29 to 31. Before that, on March 14, an international conference was organized on the same topic, to mark International Francophonie Day. Between the two forums, on March 23, Prime Minister Boyko Borissov gave a two-week deadline for opening a public debate on the draft counter-terrorism law. And all this after at the end of December 2015 the government adopted a strategy for counteracting radicalization and terrorism and an action plan for putting it into effect.

With society and the institutions in Bulgaria putting the subject to discussion so often and so persistently one is left with the impression that they are obsessed with the idea. But there is also a feeling of scepticism because what emerged at these discussions during the week was that strategies or conferences are not the way to combat radicalism and terrorism, what is needed are concrete steps and actions.

There was one concrete action against radicalization during the week. The trial against 14 imams, charged with spreading the ideas of the so-called Islamic State and advocating war continued in Pazardjik. According to the prosecutors’ office, their leader Ahmed Musa Ahmed had preached in the social networks calling for Jihad, advocating religious intolerance and urging his brothers to fight for ISIS, if the need arises and in this he was helped by volunteers of the so-called Islamic State. According to the special services in Vienna, Ahmed was in contact with the ISIS terrorist base in Austria. The activities of the defendants have been no secret for a long time, yet the trial has been dragging along since 2012 with no result. And this is probably so because, as a State Agency for National Security expert said at the conference in Sofia, Bulgarian legislation does not recognize the phenomenon “radicalization” and it is only treated by an antiquated article - article 108 of the Criminal Code applicable to the activity of “advocating a fascist or any other kind of anti-democratic ideology”. The SANS expert says, and with good reason, that the fact itself that the law has no accurate wording or provisions gives rise to endless controversies and expert analyses as to what advocating or anti-democratic ideology actually mean, whether it is part of a religious outlook or is something that really is dangerous. That is why the only female defendant standing trial in Pazardjik, in whose home thousands of copies were found of the book Apostasy – a book she herself translated that is even banned in many Muslim countries – is, according to the defence, no danger to the country. Totally ignoring the fact that she made a flag of the Islamic State with her own hands.

There are people who find some aspects of the discussions on radicalism irritating. At the conference in Sofia for example, it was stated with a measure of timorousness, that there was radicalization in “different” groups and attempts at altering traditional conduct “in some” communities in Bulgaria. Yet there is no room to be timorous in calling a spade a spade for fear of hurting the feelings of any community. The community where a tangible change in the traditional conduct is setting in, a change that merits public debate, is the Roma community, to which preaching religious hatred has always been alien, yet in recent times, an, as yet, small portion of this community has been identifying with the Salafist Islamic community. It is more than obvious that this change is taking place under outside pressure, because Salafism has never been typical of the Muslim community in this country. It is imported by training imams in Arab countries, something that is public knowledge but has never resulted in any public reaction except ideological disapproval.

The frequent, and according to some excessive discussion of radicalization shows that Bulgarian society is well aware of the need to get to grips with a problem that is extremely poignant in light of the wave of terror that has been sweeping across Europe. And it is not a question whether to have such a discussion but of taking this discussion out of the sphere of wishful thinking and generating concrete actions. It is the only way it can become adequate to the grim reality.

English version: Milena Daynova