BERLIN – The Bulgarian government flatly rejected on Thursday reports that
meetings between official representatives of the government and Hamas officials
took place.
Vessela Tcherneva, the spokeswoman for the Bulgarian Foreign
Ministry, told The Jerusalem Post that “the news about an official visit of
Hamas is wrong and false” and no one has invited Hamas from the side of the
government.
She said the Hamas representatives are “on a private
visitation of an NGO” in Sofia.
A spokeswoman for Israeli Ambassador to
Bulgaria Shaul Kamisa Raz conveyed a statement to the Post from Israel’s top
envoy in the country saying that “Hamas is recognized as a terror organization
by the EU. There can be no ambiguity about this group and its purposes. As for
this recent visit to Bulgaria, we are looking into this. In order to understand
the exact circumstances under which this visit took place, we prefer not to make
any further comments at this point.”
Ismail al-Ashkar, the head of the
Hamas parliamentary list Change and Reform, led the delegation. Hamas
legislators Salah Bardaweel and Mushir al-Masri, who is also a spokesman for the
Islamist terrorist movement in the Gaza Strip, accompanied him.
The three
Hamas officials arrived in Bulgaria at the invitation of the Center for
International and Middle East Studies, sources close to the movement
said.
Austrian and Arab media reports said the trip to Bulgaria was the
first visit by Hamas to a European Union country since the EU designated the
group a terrorist entity in 2003. Switzerland, a non-EU country, allows Hamas
representatives into the country.
The Bulgarian Foreign Ministry
spokeswoman told the Post that “Bulgaria is part of the EU politics as listing
Hamas as a terror organization.”
She said Bulgaria maintains diplomatic
relations with the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah and the PLO’s embassy in
Sofia.
Countries who were formerly part of the Soviet Union’s Warsaw pact
upgraded the PLO in 1988 to embassy status during the communist period. When
asked why the Hamas representatives were allowed to travel to Bulgaria, she said
there was no European list for a travel ban and the terror “list prescribes
financial transactions and organizations... These folks are not on a travel ban
list.”
A representative of Bulgaria’s Interior Ministry told the Post via
email that “there is not an official visit or official meetings,
concerted/coordinated between the diplomatic representations of Bulgaria and
Palestine. The Hamas representatives are visiting our country as their private
initiative.”
The Post learned that a program for the Hamas
representatives contains visits with the radical right-wing extremist party
Attack and the left-wing socialist party headed by former Bulgarian prime
minister Sergei Stanishev.
It is unclear if the meetings will proceed.
Critics in Bulgaria said Attack and its founder Volen Siderov stoke xenophobic,
anti-Semitic and racist ideologies.
According to the Sofia News Agency,
the Center for Global and Middle East Studies and its director Muhammad Abu Assi
invited Hamas. Assi told the news outlet Dnevnik.bg that Bulgaria’s Foreign
Minister Nikolay Mladenov “should not worry. He should assure his Israeli
friends that the visit does not have anything to do with the Bulgarian
government.”
Critics accuse the center and Assi of pro-Hezbollah
activities and inflammatory anti-Israel rhetoric. Solomon Bali, the president of
the B’nai B’rith Carmel lodge in Sofia, told the Post that the center and its
director are serving as the “official representatives of Hezbollah” in
Bulgaria.
During an interview with the FOCUS news agency in late December
2008, Assi claimed that Israel was creating a Holocaust in the Gaza
Strip.
The Center for Middle East Studies played a role in sending
Bulgarian journalists from TV Station 7 to Beirut after the Burgas attack to
broadcast anti-Israel interviews via Al-Manar, a Hezbollah- controlled
television network.
France banned Al- Manar reception because the
station’s programming is contrary to French values and promotes
anti-Semitism.
Germany has outlawed reception of Al-Manar in
hotels.
It is unclear who funded the Hamas trip and the nature of the
center’s funding streams. The Bulgarian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman told the
Post, “it is not in the Foreign Ministry’s portfolio of research on their
activities from the viewpoint of national security.”
The center was
slated to hold a panel discussion on Friday with the Hamas representatives to
cover the Palestinian perspective on the conflict between Israel and the
Palestinians.
The Hamas visit comes on the heels of a report into the
July terror attack in Burgas, which resulted in the deaths of five Israelis and
a Bulgarian national, in which Bulgaria’s government blamed the terror attack on
Hezbollah.
Khaled Abu Toameh contributed to this report.