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Bulgarian opposition questions blaming of Hezbollah for bomb
A truck carries a bus, that was damaged in a bomb blast on Wednesday, outside Burgas Airport, about 400km (248miles) east of Sofia July 19, 2012.
Credit: Reuters/Stoyan Nenov
SOFIA |
SOFIA (Reuters) - Bulgaria's opposition criticized a government statement that Hezbollah carried out a bomb attack that killed Israeli tourists, saying on Wednesday the conclusion was unjustified and dangerous.
The July attack in the coastal city of Burgas raised tensions in the Balkan country, where 15 percent of the 7.3 million population are Muslim, and opposition parties said the government acted under Israeli and U.S. pressure.
The charge made by European Union and NATO member Bulgaria on Tuesday may open the way for Brussels to join the United States in branding the Iranian-backed Lebanese militant movement Hezbollah a terrorist organization.
"It is an unjustifiable act that is very dangerous," Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP) leader Sergei Stanishev said. "The government entered into an international political game in an irresponsible manner, without calculating the consequences."
The nationalist Attack and ethnic Turkish MRF party joined the Socialist criticism, saying it was too soon for the rightist government of Prime Minister Boiko Borisov to blame Hezbollah because the investigation had not yet concluded.
They said the government had failed to provide a thorough analysis of faults in national security and Bulgaria would remain vulnerable.
Israel blamed the attack in Burgas - which killed five Israeli tourists, their Bulgarian driver and the bomber - on Iran and Hezbollah, which is part of the Lebanese government and waged a brief war with Israel in 2006.
Iran has denied responsibility and its U.N. envoy accused arch-enemy Israel of plotting and carrying out the bus bombing. Hezbollah, designated by the United States as a terrorist organization in the 1990s, has not responded to the charges.
INDEPENDENT INVESTIGATION
Bulgaria's Foreign Minister Nikolai Mladenov said the investigation had been independent.
The EU's police organization Europol, which helped the investigation, supported the Bulgarian conclusions. It said early assumptions the bombing was a suicide attack had proven false and investigations showed the device was detonated remotely.
"Nobody has ever exercised any pressure over Bulgaria," Mladenov told BNT television.
Since the attack, nationalists have charged that Bulgaria could be an easy route into Europe for radical Islamists.
Most of the Muslim population are a centuries-old community from the time of Turkish rule and not recent immigrants. A trial of 13 people on charges of spreading radical Islam has further stoked tensions.
(Additional reporting by Tsvetelia Tsolova; editing by Andrew Roche)
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The BBC World Service reports today that a new movie, ‘The Gatekeepers’, shortly to be on general release in the US and Israel, makes the tacit admission that, notwithstanding Netanyahu’s intransigence, many Israelis recognise that today’s so-called ‘terrorists’ may well be tomorrow’s ‘freedom fighters’.
The Gatekeepers, a 2012 documentary film by director, Dror Moreh, that offers this conclusion, tells the story of the Israeli Shin Bet from the perspective of six former heads of Israel’s secretive internal security service and is an astonishing volte face that is causing turmoil in the minds of Israelis from across the political spectrum.
In 1946/8, the Irgun Zvai Leumi, a Zionist militant organisation who perpetrated the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem and the massacre at Deir Yassin which brutally killed hundreds of civilians, both British and Arab, and who were officially designated ‘terrorists’, are now celebrated, at least in Israel, as ‘freedom fighters’. One was even made Prime Minister!
Maybe Israel is finally coming to the obvious conclusion that its policy of occupation and suppression is not only inhuman but horribly misconceived by a country that claims to be a democracy. Maybe this cathartic revelation by senior figures in the Israeli establishment will finally force the Likud government to end the illegal settlements and bring about an independent state for the largest indigenous people of the region, the Muslim Arabs.
In 1948 Israel’s IRGUN was a ‘terrorist organisation’: but in 1958, were renamed as ‘freedom fighters’.
In 1953 Kenya’s MAU MAU was a ‘terrorist organisation’: but in 1963, were also renamed as ‘freedom fighters’.
Both Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Gaza’s Hamas have been termed ‘terrorists’. How long before these militants will also be recognised as fighters for freedom and self-determination, or is that a little premature?
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