The candidates for ambassadors, which will replace the diplomats, revealed to have worked for the former Communist State Security, will be decided by February, Bulgaria's Foreign Minister Nikolay Mladenov said.

The minister said Saturday that the selection process is about to begin and by the next few weeks, he will present Bulgaria's President Georgi Parvanov with a list of candidates, who will replace the 42 senior diplomats, who were exposed as collaborators or agents to the former Communist State Security.

"I depend on the president to adopt reasonably and responsibly these proposals and to comply with the will of the National Assembly," Mladenov said and reminded the declaration, adopted by the Bulgarian parliament on Friday, which demands the withdrawal of the discredited diplomats.

He also expressed his opinion on the hypothesis that Parvanov might not agree to dismiss the ambassadors.

"The will of the Bulgarian parliament is clear and firm. Whoever thinks he is larger than the Bulgarian nation, should not comply with the will of the National Assembly. Let everybody read carefully the decision of the majority, which states firmly that Bulgaria, like the other countries from Central and Eastern Europe, is ready to turn the page," the foreign minister said.

Mladenov said he did not want to imagine a situation, in which the Bulgarian president would not comply with the decision, agreed by two thirds of the MPs.

The foreign minister said he has not discussed the new appointments with Parvanov yet and will not have this conversation with him before the candidates for the posts are decided.

Next week, the Foreign Ministry will also announce a competition for the posts of several Consul Generals, who were also among the agent. All the candidates will be checked for collaboration with the communist-era secret service.

A month ago the Bulgarian diplomatic corps and the government as a whole were shaken by a scandal spurred by the disclosure that almost half of Bulgaria's acting heads of diplomatic missions were collaborators with the notorious "DS", or State Security, the secret police and intelligence service of the Bulgarian communist regime.

A special Bulgarian panel, investigating the communist-era police files, known as the Files' Commission, revealed that 192 diplomats, out of 432, who worked for the Bulgarian Foreign Ministry after the fall of the communist regime in 1989, had records of ties with the former State Security.

Among those 192, 41 (or 45%) are current heads of Bulgarian diplomatic missions, including the Bulgarian ambassadors in the UK, Germany, Italy, UN (New York and Geneva), Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, Turkey, Russia, China, Sweden, Romania, Norway, Japan, Qatar, Kuwait, Syria, Egypt, Bosnia, Greece, the Vatican, Slovakia, Albania, Georgia, Armenia, and Venezuela.

Bulgaria's Foreign Minister Mladenov was infuriated by the discovery, and declared his firm determination to purge the diplomatic corps of all former DS agents, arguing that the host countries' leaders would no longer trust the respective Bulgarian diplomats now that those have been revealed to have collaborated with the former communist intelligence and secret police.

Bulgaria's Prime Minister Boyko Borisov has backed firmly Mladenov stating that the discredited ambassadors have got to go. In order to recall most of them, however, the Borisov Cabinet of the center-right GERB party will need the signature of President Georgi Parvanov, a former leader of the Socialists, with whom GERB has been at odds.

Parvanov, who himself was revealed in 2006 to have worked for DS under the code name "Gotse", has not said explicitly whether he will sign the recall orders of the former-agents-turned-ambassadors but he has defended them. His accusations of double standards for Borisov led the Prime Minister to get his Diaspora Minister Bozhidar Dimitrov to resign as Dimitrov was the only Cabinet member with a DS record.

As 2010 drew to a close, Borisov and Mladenov has launched measures to recall the 41 discredited diplomats but it is unclear if most of the recalls will get through because of Parvanov's opposition, which might intensify as the President's second term is expiring in 2011-end, and he cannot seek reelection but has sought to a start a new political movement called ABV.

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