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First Eight Days of Protest in Sofia, Bulgaria, Anti-corruption, Anti-government, Anti-police

Writer's picture: Protest2020Protest2020
Jul 17, 20202 min read

Updated: Nov 19, 2021



ProtestBlog.org: July 17, 2020. Protesters have filled the streets of Sofia and, increasingly, other Bulgarian cities, over the course of the last 8 days and nights, demanding the resignation of the country's president who is widely seen as corrupt and having badly mismanaged the coronavirus pandemic and the economy. Thousands of angry people fill the streets and their numbers continue to grow, all clamoring for a new government. Of course, all of this is part of waves of protests sweeping the planet, the closest to Sofia being Belgrade, Serbia, where the resignation of the president was also demanded with many protesters arrested, over mostly the mismanagement of the pandemic and corruption. In both cases, the governments are seen as favoring the interests of the rich and powerful to the detriment of the people.

On Thursday, the 16th of July, protesters began at the triangle of power in Sofia, following a traditional protest route and then gathering again in front of the Council of Ministers. A little after 10 pm, several smoke bombs were thrown into the square, escalating tension. In order to avoid provocations by agitators, the protesters formed a live chain in front of the police cordon. In a sign of gratitude, the police removed their shields.

While the protests lasted for days recently in Serbia, and they continue in Belgrade, mostly it is a struggle to free from custody those protesters who were arrested during the first days of the protest. Bulgaria, however, shows signs of having a broader base, representing a protest against inept management from the coronavirus and a corrupt president, with a certain deeper level supporting the movement that is anti-oligarchical, and even anti-corporate, clearly inspired to some extent by events in the USA, Bernie Sanders, and Black Lives Matter. All available evidence at this time points to these being watershed times in Bulgaria, in fact, along with Serbia, bringing Eastern Europe onto the frontlines of global protest against abuse of authority.


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ProtestBlog.org

We invite you to create and maintain your own blog here on protestblog.org about Climate change or any other issue that you feel strongly about. If the alternative is silence, then this might be a good opportunity for you to speak out, joing the struggle, and meet link-minded soldiers devoted to the same

 

All of us are vulnerable, and awareness is growing that we are all in this together. Nevertheless, the struggle, if it is to prove ultimately successful, is only just now beginning. While in many places, protests have turned violent and thousands of arrests have been made, there have not yet been large numbers of fatalities among climate change protestorss.

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Score of protesters have died and continue to die, however, throughout 2021. Myanmar and Colombia come to mind. We at protestblog.org extend a special invitation to protesters from Myanmar, Colombian, and many other places where levels of social unrest accompanied by protest are very high. Become a blogger, write your own blog!

 

In other parts of the world, most notably the Middle East – home to warfare for decades – particularly in Iraq and its neighbor and former enemy Iran, hundreds of protestors have been killed with live, military-grade ammunition, over the course of the last couple of years. After several years of civil war in Syria, protest gradually gave way to military action, death and destruction. The numbers of people murdered by the governments of the region are not fully known, and especially hard to verify in Iran, where a brutal religious dictatorship maintains a thick cloak of secrecy over such information. It would be a special honor to host guest bloggers from this part of the world in particular.

ProtestBlog.org: 2021

 

The Taliban are now whipping women in public, in the streets, as they deem necessary. While women continue to protest, they do so at their utmost, explicit peril. Iran retains a perilous hostility to the West that consumes its resources at the expense of its people. The hostility between China and the USA, in particular, bodes ill for the global economy, already hamstrung by COV-19. Those parts of the world most vulnerable to the ravages of climate change are already suffering; places like the Philippines are experiencing devastating and lethal storms, one after the other, breaking all historical records. At this writing, one heat wave after another is scorching North America with unprecedented temperatures, nurturing year after year of record-breaking fires.

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Much of Australia, for example, was on fire at the beginning of 2020 - with the hottest temperatures on record - and few anticipate Australia to fare better in 2021. This is changing Australian lives, politics, and the consciousness of the ordinary Australian who is now getting involved in the struggle to save their island, and coming to a better understanding of how their survival is linked to the rest of the world. In Japan, forces are growing in protest to push the Japanese government towards support for the Hong Kong protestors, confronting mainland China; also supporting the struggles of minority groups in mainland China, reporting on government abuses, etc. The US government has expressed its full support for the Hong Kong protestors, further escalating tensions between these two superpowers along with ally Russia. These tensions were already at their most aggravated moments as a result of the US/China trade war. By early n2021, however, it was simply made clear that dissent from Communist authority in Hong Kong would simply not be tolerated in any form. For some time, increasing numbers have fled to the UK.

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Our world in 2021 is a tinderbox as never before. The rapid pace of climate change is especially alarming. I fear that my 9-year-old may never become an old man. Rather than do nothing, myself and many others prefer to protest, hence this site. Join with us, let us at the very least complain, even if we are nearly sure to die anyway. We here at protestblog.org await your contribution, just paste your email into the form on the left and we weill send you an invitation!

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At ProtestBlog.org, we invite you to protest, share your vision, and help us all to march towards a more sustainable and peaceful world that will not totally implode, at least within our lifetimes, leaving hope for life to continue in more intelligent forms, through greater appreciating our planetary home. We ultimately seek harmony with nature so as to preserve life as we know it, as we dream it could be, our best-case scenario, at least giving our children and their children a fighting chance of survival. Everything depends on how hard we are willing to fight to make it so.

 

Let’s get arrested, the more of us there are the better chance that our children will live into old age!

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