[LINK] "EU entry helps Romanians and Bulgarians understand each other"

The International Herald Tribune reports that, in the Bulgarian city of Ruse, located on the Danube, the expansion of the European Union to Bulgaria and Romania has managed to create overnight a new transnational community.

Before both joined the EU on Jan. 1, 2007, Bulgarians and Romanians considered each other with almost total indifference, despite being formal allies in the Warsaw Pact during the Cold War and sharing a Danube River border 470 kilometers, or 290 miles, long.

Even for residents of Ruse, at the Bulgarian end of the only bridge connecting the two nations, the people on the opposite river bank might as well have been on another continent. When they thought of Romanians at all, it was usually to dismiss them as "mamaligari," roughly "polenta-makers," after the Romanians' national dish mamaliga.

Romanians, for their part, would put down Bulgarians as "castravetari" or "cucumber-growers," for their perennial vegetable-gardening.

But shortly after the border between them formally dissolved because of EU membership, a tidal wave of bargain-seeking Romanians crashed over northern Bulgaria.

Many residents of Ruse are now embarrassed that they were close-minded for so long.

"The new relations with Romania have opened a new world," said Ivelina Belcheva, 40, a television journalist born and raised in Ruse, whose motorcycle club, "Spirit of Freedom," has since started riding with new friends from Romania. "It has always been close by, but always very closed."

Before 2007, Ruse was known for its faded glory, depopulation and rusting behemoths of Soviet-era heavy industry. The birthplace of the Nobel laureate Elias Canetti, it grew wealthy in the 19th century from trade along the Danube. Neo-Baroque and neo-Rococo architecture grace its center, an echo of Central European Habsburg glory far upstream in Vienna and Budapest. Until the early 20th century, when it was eclipsed by Sofia, this was the economic and cultural capital of Bulgaria.

In the past two years, this city of 175,000 has undergone a marked revitalization, fueled by a Romanian spending spree. Romania, which with 22 million people versus 7.5 million in Bulgaria has a far larger economy, boasts average salaries of €450 a month, compared with about €265 for Bulgaria - the lowest in the EU.

Seven separate new shopping malls are planned - five of them already under construction. The biggest, the €100 million Grand Plaza slated for completion in 2010, is to boast a 90,000-square-meter, or 970,000-square-foot, mall; a 5,000-seat arena for sports and cultural events; a 115-room luxury hotel; and 11,000 square meters of offices.

And while the global economic slowdown is starting to be felt here, it did not diminish extra-large holiday crowds from Romania, and so far has not affected construction of the malls.

Romanians come in large numbers on weekend shopping trips. They buy property and start businesses. Restaurants in the city center offer Romanian menus. And Romanian language courses have sprouted, with the tiny supply of translators unable to meet new and growing demand.

Sofia is more than 300 kilometers away, while Bucharest, the Romanian capital, is not 70 kilometers distant, and Ruse is sucked into its economic orbit. Since EU membership has eliminated long waits at the border, people from Ruse now regularly use Bucharest Airport. Traffic congestion in Bucharest means the drive from southern Bucharest to Ruse is often shorter than driving to the northern part of the Romanian capital.

"They say it's good to know Romanian because someday Ruse will be a neighborhood of Bucharest," said Anka Staneva, a long-time Romanian teacher and translator. The six students in her classroom work in the medical profession; many of their clinics participate in exchanges of staff members and patients with Giurgiu, the Romanian town across the bridge.

"Speaking Romanian will be helpful in the future, and I'm looking ahead,"

Already, the government is offering Romanian language courses to the city's unemployed. The phenomenon seems to be quite similar to the new cross-border communities of Slovaks in Austria or Poles in Germany.

[LINK] "Turkey’s Circassians Press Ankara to Reopen Sea Route to Abkhazia"

Paul Goble writes about one way in which the large Caucasian diaspora in Turkey is trying to make its weight felt.

Leaders of the six-million-strong Circassian community of Turkey met with that country’s President Abdulla Gul this week to press for the reopening of ferry service from Trabzon to the Abkhaz port of Sukhumi, a link that was suspended in 2006 when the CIS imposed an embargo on that breakaway republic.

On Monday, Gul received the leaders of the Caucasus Federation Khase, which unites 56 Circassian groups in Turkey, for 45 minutes to discuss this and Circassian demands for more broadcasting in their by Turkish channels and more Circassian language classes in Turkish universities (www.kafkasfederasyonu.org/haber/tr_basin/2009/070109_bianet.htm and
www.natpress.net/stat.php?id=3756).

After the meeting, Khase general coordinator Dzhumkhur Bal told the media that the reopening of sea communications with Abkhazia was not only possible but vital for his community because now after the August 2008 war, “there is no need for compatriots of Abkhazia [such as the Circassians living in Turkey] to obtain a Russian visa.”

And he added that expanding Circassian broadcasting in Turkey, where TRT-3 now broadcasts seven hours a day in that language was especially important given the increasing attention of his community to what is taking place in Abkhazia and other historically Circassian areas in the northern Caucasus.

From the 19th century on, modern Turkey has received large numbers of Muslim refugees fleeing southeastern Europe and the Caucasus ahead Christian nation-states and the Russian Empire.

[T]he Russian defeat of the Circassians (Çerkezler) in the North Caucasus in 1864 led to an estimated one million Muslim refugees fleeing to the Ottoman Empire.

The gradual contraction of the Ottoman Empire and the emergence of new states led to millions of Christians and Muslims being uprooted from their Ottoman homelands from the late 19th to early 20th century. Those displaced—many forcibly—included Armenians from eastern Anatolia and Greeks from central and western Anatolia, as well as Muslim Albanians, Bosnians, Pomaks, Tatars, and Turks from the Balkans.

The early years of the Turkish Republic continued to see large movements of people in both directions. Most significant of these was the forced exchange of population between Greece and Turkey in the mid-1920s, involving over a million Greeks from Turkey and almost half a million Muslims and Turks from Greece. The government also established an immigration program encouraging Muslims and Turks from the Balkans to settle in Turkey.

[LINK] "Canada misses chance to help citizens flee Gaza"

The Toronto Star's Oakland Ross reports about the Canadian government's apparent forgetfulness in regards to Canadian citizens in the Gaza Strip.

Thirty-nine Canadians, still stranded in war-wracked Gaza yesterday, could have safely departed the territory last Friday – if only Canadian diplomats had known it.

Early last Friday, more than 30 hours before the launch of a deadly Israeli ground offensive, more than 200 foreign nationals fled Gaza via the Erez border crossing, which had been opened by Israeli authorities for just that day and for just that purpose.

Had the Canadians shown up at the border on Friday, they likely would have been permitted to cross, said Maj. Peter Lerner, spokesperson for the Israeli agency that handle's this country's activities in the territory.

"We don't like to be surprised," he told the Star last night, "but I'm pretty certain we would have facilitated that."

But it was only on Friday that Canadian diplomats first provided the Israelis with a list of names of Canadians who wanted to leave the territory, and no attempt was made to contact them that day, to tell them to get to the border right away, because it was open.

Meanwhile, beginning early Friday, 226 citizens of six other countries – Kazakhstan, Moldova, Russia, Turkey, Ukraine, and the United States – began crossing into Israel, where they were put onto buses and driven to neighbouring Jordan.

The embassies in Israel of each of these countries had all contacted Israeli authorities days beforehand in order to arrange the departures, submitting lists of the names of their nationals wanting to leave.

"Those embassies spoke to us," said Lerner. "It's a ritual that repeats itself every time there is an increase in tension in Gaza."

As it happened, 20 Ukrainians not on their embassy's list also showed up at Erez on Friday and were nonetheless permitted to cross, the same treatment the 39 Canadians likely would have received, if only someone had told them to get to the border.