Thanks

Hey,

Thanks for the hundreds of comments, direct messages, blog posts, facebook shared items and twitter RTs.

Here’s what some of you have been saying:

John Mulligan : “This situation exists because the rest of Europe has decided that it is acceptable… There was full knowledge of these abuses within the Enlargement Commission, but they did absolutely nothing to put pressure on these countries to end these appalling scandals. If anything, they concealed the true extent of the problem from the European Parliament… Where is the Commission in all of this now? Are these victims somehow lesser citizens of Europe? Unbelievably, the EU is now providing funding to renovate institutions at the expense of community living, thus further compounding the wrong done to these men and women. This disgraceful approach is a matter of great shame on all of the people of Europe.”

bgles : “… the word ‘different’ should not mean ‘invisible’…”

Ina : “…Change is being achieved and we’d better stop waiting someone else to achieve it for us. Change is in our hands”.

Justine : “…but the dumping grounds for people continue to exist and nothing, nothing, nothing has changed for decades. Humiliating. Impossible. Till when?”

Nervous shark : “Shock and shame. That’s what I personally feel in this case. Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Eastern Europe are the things that spring to mind… Bulgaria in 2009 did not move up from the bottom of the swamp, not even with one centimeter”.

Radan : “This is not merely about the fate of several thousand Bulgarian citizens, locked up and treated in an unutterable way. This is about the fate of a society, which deals with its social problems by excluding the vulnerable and the different”.

Epistemic Murk : “Institutional fetishism… The state care is manifested as care for the physical conditions of the institution, not as care [for the people inside] and as services directed to them”.

+ Stefan, Bend your circuit, Galya, Monev, Silvia, Niki, Peio, Petar and whoever I am leaving out – *bow*

Thank you all once again for trying to turn this into a public debate.

~

So many of you have been saying “what can we do”?

Asking the question is already the first step.

Letting more people know is the second.

And here’s the third. More info about that is coming soon.

~

Update: The investigation has been published in English by Balkan Insight and republished by The Sofia Echo online.