Brussels, 07/02/2014 (Agence Europe) - On Wednesday 5 February, the Bulgarian minister for home affairs went to court to accuse the previous Conservative government of mismanagement of funds to help refugees, when Bulgaria was caught short by a major influx of asylum seekers in 2013, AFP reports.
“Thirty million leva (€15 million) were spent” between 2008 and 2012, mainly on printing brochures, buying expensive computers or holding seminars, according to Home Affairs Minister Tsvetlin Yovchev.
For the most part, these funds - from the EU and the Bulgarian budget - were earmarked to improve the country's capacity to accept refugees, said the minister. “At the end of the day, we did not know where to put the refugees up”, he said, in reference to mistakes made by the previous Conservative government of Boiko Borissov (2009-2013). In 2013, Bulgaria was taken unawares by the arrival of 11,000 refugees (well beyond the country's capacity to host them), mostly Syrian civilians fleeing war in their country and transiting via Turkey. Yovchev claims that a great many secret service reports alerted the former government to a likely mass influx of refugees.
The country had to stop the migrants from entering by posting 1,300 police officers on its border with Turkey and by building a wall 35 km in length, measures which were denounced by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (HCR) and by the European Commission. Without these measures, “Bulgaria would not have been able to cope with the arrival of refugees”, said the home affairs minister. The services of Home Affairs Commissioner Cecilia Malmström said on Thursday 6 February that they were unable to give an immediate response, as the checks on the use of the funds had come “far too late”. (SP/transl.fl)