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The annual academic forum of National and International Security Department this year is devoted to regional security and reforms in the European Union. Foreign academics and researchers from Poland, Macedonia, Serbia, Russia and other countries are taking part in this broad forum.Why have we chosen this topic?Today, in the first quarter of the 21st century, it appears that the world is on the verge of tolerance of risks and threats. The range of these threats is enormously broad - from the danger of wars between countries and coalitions, to violence among people within states. The world is in a period of devastated global equilibrium and a slowly developing new equilibrium. The temporal distance between these two states opened a place for the manifestation of chaos.In this increasingly difficult to predict world, the European Union has not been so far under such a criticism as the present since its creation. It comes from the ultimate right and the ultimate left, pass through the center and involve more and more ideologists and representatives, even the classical left and center-right political parties. But even a glimpse of their criticism does not show a way out of the crisis. It does not show how to preserve what is valuable in politics, economics and democracy that Europeans have undoubtedly enjoyed and continue to enjoy and how to transfer it into a future European Project.
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The report analyses the participation of transportation companies in smuggling practices, more specifically: • it examines and describes a range of companies and individuals involved in organized crime groups whose main business is the trafficking of consumer goods; • it also gives and overview of the criminal and semi-legal networks involved in smuggling Chinese and Turkish goods; • it presents new data on oil and oil products smuggling; • it examines the role of duty-free shops and their involvement in illicit cigarettes imports.
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The Center for the Study of Democracy has undertaken a special inquiry into the topic of drug abuse - which was fueled by the drug epidemic of the late 1990s and has grown to become a real social threat - and the problem of drug dealing, which is a major mechanism for the generation of organized crime in Bulgaria. This report addresses drug supply and demand in Bulgaria with the ambition of mapping a vast information void and identifying the basic mechanisms and stakeholders of the drug market. However, the peculiarities of drug diffusion and consumption do not allow the use of the standard suite of economic research tools and vehicles throughout the study. This analysis has been divided into three sections. The first addresses the genesis of drug distribution, while the second describes its structure and functioning. The findings about supply presented in the first two parts are based on a series of in-depth interviews with dealers of different groups of drugs, long-term drug users, with police and security officers (experienced in combating drug traffic, drug production, and drug dealing), doctors, and civil organizations engaged in treatment services to drug addicts. Section 3 highlights drug demand, and brings into play the findings of the First National Population Survey on Drug Consumption in Bulgaria conducted by Vitosha Research. For the purpose of this study, CSD and Vitosha Research used the research tools of the European Monitoring Center on Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA).
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Political changes that took place in the USSR in August 1991, when the power of the CPSU collapsed, opened access to archives that had been completely secret before. They also made it possible to collect and analyze evidence of the criminal nature of the soviet system. In the first place, these are documents about the “Great Terror” of 1937–1938 and documents that show how Stalin and the top Politburo figures organized mass killings of hundreds of thousands of people. These documents and statistics of repression had been kept secret from the public even during “perestroika” (1987–1991). Stalin’s crimes seemed to be exposed in those years, and a special commission of Politburo studied the history of repression. To date, efforts of Society Memorial and International Foundation “Democracy” have resulted in the publication of many documents about the soviet terror and mass violation of human rights. For example, the “Democracy” Foundation established by Alexander Yakovlev published more than 50 volumes of documentary collections. Society Memorial released a CD “Stalin’s Shooting Lists”. It includes materials about how Stalin and his closest aides issued death sentences as they took up the role of the judiciary bodies. Another CD released by Memorial contains a database about repressions in the USSR. It includes more than 2.6 million names of the repressed. Th us, we now have the documentary basis for making a legal assessment of the soviet crimes. Important documents are published, such as regulations about repressions, implementation reports, and the total statistics of repressions.
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The independence of the Republic of Estonia was proclaimed exactly today 92 years ago. Today is Independence Day in Estonia. Estonia lost its independence in 1940 according to the secret protocol of the non-aggression agreement between the Communist Soviet Union and Nazi Germany and did not regain it after the end of the WWII. Th e occupation and annexation of the Baltic States was never recognised by the United States of America and other Western countries. Estonian diplomatic representations were active in the United States and the United Kingdom for the duration of the Cold War. Estonian passports issued by these representations were accepted as valid travel documents in many Western countries.
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„My mother had three wishes: returning to Latvia, seeing her brothers and our family and having a flat. All of these wishes have been fulfilled. But even today my mother wakes from a dreadful dream. Again it is night and someone is knocking at the door. Strange men enter and order her to get ready. The deportation nightmare begins, and my mother in despair thinks: “The last time it was a dream. Now it’s real.” On waking she gazes long into the empty night until she calms down and understands: she is home again. In Latvia.“ I have chosen these last lines in Sandra Kalniete’s book With Dance Shoes in Siberian Snows, a book that has been translated into 11 languages, to remind ourselves that the term “crimes against humanity” as a legal abstraction, last defined in Article 7 of the 1998 Rome Statute, is woefully inadequate in terms of fully grasping the human tragedy and its lingering aftermath for which the original crime is only a starting point. The statute concentrates on the perpetrators and their culpability. Any culture of memory must be much more inclusive and never leave sight of the victims and survivors as the direct carriers and inheritors of the memory. It must not only deal with the crime but the entire context in which the crime was perpetrated and even more – the lingering political, social, moral and psychological after-effects. The crime is with us as long as the nightmare persists in the psyches of its victims.
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Conclusion Th e Soviet Union has disintegrated. Disintegration signs originally appeared in 1960s. Practice is an indicator of the theory validity. Practice of the USSR construction has proved non-viability of the communism theory. Thus, the Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism “doctrine” turned out to be an unscientific doctrine. Th is “doctrine” belongs to the sort of sectarian ones. And the communist party that completely professes the principles laying in the construction of the USSR, cannot be considered to be a party, but rather is, a sect. There were different sects in the history of mankind. They gathered groups of people. They established, quite frequently, extremely severe rules of mutual relations between the members of a sect and finally collapsed. The Communist Bolsheviks sect has done a lot of harm to the people of the former USSR. Th e number of human victims in the USSR exceeded the number of victims that the mankind of the world has suffered throughout the history of its existence. It is necessary to understand and realize all the harm caused by communism in order to prevent such a misfortune in future. Therefore, in each country, especially in Ukraine the process of the society differentiation, into extremely rich and extremely poor is fraught with grave consequences. This process of impoverishment can be halted, first of all, by joint actions of the authorities and the society. We should build a society, specifically Ukrainian society of a predominant middle class. Uncontrolled development of oligarchic structures in the country automatically generates an antipode – communism. Therefore, the only way towards a reasonable, sustainable commonwealth is to provide beneficial political and economic conditions for the revival in Ukraine and in all other countries of a prevailing middle class. Revival and comprehensive support – that is what is necessary. Thus the main issue of our conference should be a consolidation of the nations in order to set up an international tribunal over the communism crimes as it has been made over the nazism. We should also find out who is really guilty in committing such severe crimes of communism. It could be those who had provoked Bolsheviks Communist revolt and had introduced communism principles. We should be able to figure it out by being well-informed through: legislation and true history. And to prevent such events in future, it is necessary to severely ban legitimization of the parties professing a criminal Communist ideology. Most important for, each country is to provide such conditions when the middle class of the country determines its national, political and economic development.
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Ukraine is one of the countries which suffered most from the communist regime crimes. Millions of the Ukrainians had been repressed by the communist regime since 1918 when Ukraine was occupied by Bolshevik’s troops till 1991 when at last it gained independence. Ukraine became an experimental ground for communists where they perfected scenarios of seizure of power and repressions against dissidents. Later, after 1939 these scenarios were used in the Baltic States, and since 1945 – in Central and Eastern European States. A well-known lawyer, the author of term Genocide and one of the authors of Convention On Condemnation of Genocides Rafael Lemkin called the communists policy in Ukraine a classical sample of Soviet Genocide with the following stages: repressions against intelligentsia, liquidation of Ukrainian national church, subduing of the main layers of Ukrainian people – peasants who were violently hit by artificial famine. The last step was the dispersion of the Ukrainians by means of deportation and colonization of their lands by the representatives of other nations. Lemkin saw in communist actions a clear-cut consistent plan aimed at elimination of Ukrainian nation. Apparently this plan was not similar to final solution of Jewish problem by the Nazi and did not provide for Holocaust of all the Ukrainians. However, according to Rafael Lemkin the realization of this plan would have meant that Ukraine would perish just as if all the Ukrainians were killed because it would lose the part of the nation which preserved and developed its culture, belief, unifying ideas which paved the way for it and gave a soul to it i.e. made it not just population but a nation.
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The totalitarian regimes which ruled in Russia and Germany in the 20th century left millions of civilian victims in their wake. In Germany people died in concentration camps and partly also at work camps. In the Soviet Union, they died in forests, in the cellars of the NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs), or in specially adapted ancient Belarusian forts and chateaux. These mass murders were top secret and this genocide was unknown until 1988. Officially the Soviet authorities only spoke about the gulags, though the gulags existed as a system of work camps. The question arises – where did the millions of victims disappear to? Russian communism was based on the NKVD and on lies, though that chalice of lies overflowed in the 1980’s and communism collapsed. Nevertheless, to this day it has not been possible to establish the number murdered by the USSR – figures from five to 70 or more million have been put forward.
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I think we all have a big problem – how to condemn communism. How to use democratic tools against a totalitarian system. Th is is our main problem. How to deal with the past. How to condemn, in a practical way, the communist system. Because we don’t have the tools. We have the seminars, like this one, where we give speeches, where we express our many views on this topic… What is the difference? Th e difference is that this is the state. Because the forensics, they have the gloves. But we don’t have gloves. We find bodies buried in common graves. But they have, practically, all the tools. They said those crimes were prescribed as ordinary crimes. Not as crimes against humanity, not as a Holocaust. Why not? Are they not similar?
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First of all, I would like to thank our esteemed guests for having accepted the invitation to this conference. It was indeed a representative selection of speakers from whom we can learn a great deal about the nature of the crimes of communism, about the causes which led to them and about the solutions which we need to adopt in order to prevent a repetition of history. I would also like to thank the organisers for the idea of convening this meeting, which was not only about describing the past, but also the present and the ways in which the post-communist countries are coping with the shadows of totalitarianism. And of course also about the future, about seeking ways how to prevent any future possible loss of our freedom. Because it is the future and freedom which should be on our minds above all. History never repeats itself literally. “Real socialism” in its concrete form belongs to the past. And the practices of the current communist regimes differ from one another widely, oftentimes like fire and water. It is not sufficient to state simply that the essence of communist crimes lies in the elimination of democracy. Their essence lies above all in the elimination of freedom.
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In this work the author talks about the fact that the activity of Albanian groups of organized crime from Kosovo and Metohia attracts already for many years the attention of many domestic and foreign experts. It is talked in expert, but also laymen circles in Western Europe and the U.S.A. about the fact that a very strong and intensive activity concerning above all the drug-trade, but also other activities of organized crime, has been developed in several previous decades. The author lists in that sense numerous reports and documents from which it can be deducted that the activities of Albanian mafia groups from Kosovo were not at all unknown to the western publicity. On the other side, however, as the author cites in the second part of this work, just the legal state political structures and structures of organized crime are very often in a certain cooperation concerning the realization of some goals and interests that are covered, and the author there cites numerous examples from the history about how the state and the mafia have collaborated successfully: from the medieval age and the period of colonization of South and North America and the time of the Opium wars in China, up to the time of the war in Vietnam. At the end, Жiriж talks also about some other social, economic, historical, psychological and other characteristics of the Albanians from Kosovo that have enabled them in the last years to build a very powerful, respectable system of organized crime. That was neglected from the part of the world publicity for many years.
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This book is the result of a two-year journalistic investigation that traces the history of Corporate Commercial Bank from its origin to its bankruptcy (1994-2014). The investigation was conducted on the basis of dozens of meetings with direct participants or witnesses of the events, representatives of state structures, political parties, business, regulators. In the process, hundreds of official and informal documents have been analyzed. Access to information by Bulgarian and international organizations has been requested many times. The collected facts, data, documents, and exclusive testimonies included in this book contain for the first time conclusive evidence of political corruption in Bulgaria. The aim of the KTBfiles project is to show the genesis of the "CCB model" (Corporate Commercial Bank model) and the technology of its expansion to magnitude, which pressed all key state institutions to the wall. The book explores the circumstances that made this vicious model possible, as well as the mechanisms for its eradication. This makes the investigation much more comprehensive, multi-layered and important than the chronology of bank bankruptcy, whether it is the largest in Bulgarian history. This qualitative journalistic investigation answers not only to the question #WHO but also to the questions how, why and especially what follows if we stop asking and live permanently with civil indifference and cynicism.
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This study is provoked by one of the most significant cases of abuses over the last two decades in Bulgaria - the bankruptcy of CCB (Corporate Commercial Bank), the fourth largest bank in the country. After the 1996-1997 crisis, when one third of the banks went bankrupt, the country's banking sector collapsed. This is the second case in which huge financial resources "evaporated" and the negative consequences affected a wide range of public institutions and private subjects. The emergence of periodically recurring financial crises, with multiple impacts on public, economic and political life, motivates Transparency International Bulgaria to look for a systematic response to the problem and look beyond the specific case. The present book is based on the analytical approach of the international anti-corruption organization Transparency International "National Integrity System" which assesses clearly defined criteria, the capacity, functioning and management of sectors and institutions with key importance in counteracting corruption. The study is based on an analysis of the legislation and practical actions of the investigated institutions, a wide range of documentary sources, reports, assessments, media publications, and interviews with experts and public figures that have had direct observations and touch with the CCB case. It reflects an attempt to formulate an impartial, objective assessment of the functioning of the banking supervisory system in the 2009-2014 periods but also pursues another objective - to serve as a starting point for policies and strategic actions to give an adequate systemic response to established deficits. Viewed through this prism, this publication expresses the ambition of the Transparency International Bulgaria to not only prevent future crises of this nature, but also to contribute to the institutional strengthening of the system of supervisory institutions in Bulgaria.
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The present Proceedings of the Graduate School of Security and Economics (Volumes I and II) reflect the highly academic and highly productive International Research Conference on „Risks to Ethno-religious Peace in the Context of National and International Security in Southeastern and Central Europe“ held in November 2023. The edition contains the main and plenary papers. They are structured in four scientific panels focusing on topics such as „National Security and Ethno-religious Peace – Dilemmas, Challenges and Prospects“, „Risks to Ethno-religious Peace and National Politics – Security Aspects“, „State Politics, Ethnic Relations, National and International Security“ and „Ethno-religious Peace, National Security and Social Sciences“. Among the authors are Bulgarian and foreign proven names in scientific and academic circles.
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