Bulgaria's Plevneliev 'Exposes' Communist Secret Service to German President

Politics » DIPLOMACY | July 3, 2012, Tuesday // 17:44
Bulgaria: Bulgaria's Plevneliev 'Exposes' Communist Secret Service to German President Bulgarian President Rosen Plevneliev, who is an official visit to Germany, met Tuesday with his German counterpart, Joachim Gauck. Photo by BGNES

Bulgaria's President Rosen Plevneliev has "exposed" the former State Security (DS), the secret service and police of the Bulgarian communist regime, in talks with his German counterpart Joachim Gauck.

Plevneliev, who is on his first official visit to Germany, met Tuesday with Gauck, a Protestant priest from the former East Germany, and invited his to the opening of the yet-to-be-created "Museum of DS (State Security)", BTA reported.

According to the Bulgarian President, who claims to have come up with the DS museum idea together with Bulgarian Foreign Minister Nikolay Mladenov, the museum of the Bulgarian communist intelligence and secret police will take about 1.5-2 years to become operational.

Plevneliev believes that the opening of a museum will help put Bulgaria's communist regime past where it belongs – in history.

"I want the millions of Bulgarians to be able to see what methods DS used, what it did, how it did it, and a museum will be perfect for that," he commented in Germany.

BTA points out that the current German President Gauck is also known as the "German Nelson Mandela", and is one of the many Protestant preachers to have contributed to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the unification of East and West Germany. After the German unification in 1990, he was in charged of opening the archives of the notorious East German secret service Stasi.

The initiative to create a museum of Bulgaria's former State Security service (DS) was first announced by the State Archive Agency in September 2011; the Agency proposed using the basement of its building in downtown Sofia which between 1944 and 1972 was used by the Sofia police and the Committee on State Security.

According to the head of the Bulgarian State Archive Agency, Prof. Martin Ivanov, the creation of a DS museum will cost BGN 1.2 M, with the German foundation Konrad Adenauer supporting the work of four experts who are supposed to come up with a concept for the museum.

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Tags: Bulgarian President, Rosen Plevneliev, Joachim Gauck, German President, State Security, DS

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