Bulgaria's Ethnic Calm Is a Sharp Contrast to Region's Troubles
Reply-To: [email protected]
Sender: [email protected]
From: MINELRES moderator <[email protected]>
Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2001 06:41:30 +0200 (EET)
Message-Id: <[email protected]>
Subject: Bulgaria's Ethnic Calm Is a Sharp Contrast to Region's Troubles
From: MINELRES moderator <[email protected]>
Original sender: Azer Hasret <[email protected]>
Bulgaria's Ethnic Calm Is a Sharp Contrast to Region's
Troubles
Bulgaria's Ethnic Calm Is a Sharp Contrast to Region's Troubles
Los Angeles Times
Monday, February 12, 2001
Balkans: The Turkish minority has suffered, but the country has been
a model of tolerance, especially in the post-Communist era.
By DAVID HOLLEY, Times Staff Writer
NOVA MAHALA, Bulgaria - Sabrie Balaktcha, 80, is poor, angry and
almost out of hope. Her two sons living here are unemployed. A third
fled to Turkey more than a decade ago to escape a Communist-era edict
requiring Turks to take Slavic names. She hasn't seen him since.
"It's very difficult to live because my pension is too low," she
said. "But what shall I do? At the moment I have no money, not even
a stotinka," worth half a U.S. cent.
Despite Balaktcha's anger, however, she and her village paradoxically
reflect one of the past decade's greatest successes of ethnic
relations in the troubled Balkans. The ethnic Turks of Nova Mahala
and other villages don't blame their problems on discrimination by
ethnic Bulgarians.
"We know that the Bulgarian people were absolutely not at fault for
the changing of the names," said Nova Mahala Mayor Kemal Alliman, 35,
an ethnic Turk. "The problems were with the authorities."
Here, in a part of the world that is often viewed as a place where
ethnic groups nurse historical grievances for generations, the
democracy of the 1990s has brought with it remarkably calm and
friendly relations throughout Bulgaria between ethnic Turks, who
generally are Muslim, and ethnic Bulgarians, usually Orthodox
Christians.
During a decade of ethnic and religious wars that devastated the
neighboring former Yugoslav federation - including the conflict
between Muslim ethnic Albanians and Orthodox Christian Serbs that
engulfed the province of Kosovo - Bulgaria has been a model of peace.
"We have absolutely no problems between Bulgarians and Turks," said
Nedjmi Indje, 41, an ethnic Turk on the village council here. "We are
their guests and they are our guests."
Without doubt, most of the people of this predominantly ethnic Turkish
village - like many Bulgarians who have seen their living standards
decline during a decade of post-Communist economic change - are angry
about high unemployment, rising prices, low wages and tiny pensions.
Most also suffer the lingering pain of divided families, the result of
longtime Communist dictator Todor Zhivkov's heavy-handed attempts at
forced ethnic assimilation, which prompted nearly one-third of the
nation's roughly 1 million ethnic Turks to flee the country in 1989.
But ethnic Turks here blame the economic pain on the changing economy,
not ethnicity. And they generally blame the forced name-changing and
subsequent exodus either on the Communists in general or on Zhivkov in
particular.
Todor Zhivkov Left a Legacy of Bitterness
As Communist rule began to soften here in late 1989, it was by no
means clear that Bulgaria would fare so well. Zhivkov's persecution
of the Turkish minority had left a legacy of bitterness, with fear on
all sides in this country of 8.2 million people - of whom about 85%
are ethnic Bulgarians, 9% are ethnic Turks and 4% are ethnic Roma, or
Gypsies.
During the 1984-85 efforts to force Turks to take Slavic names, "the
technique was to surround a village using paramilitary units,"
recalled Deyan Kiuranov, a scholar at the Center for Liberal
Strategies, a think tank based in the capital, Sofia.
"They would use local Communist Party members, teachers, and go home
to home, giving you new [internal-use] passports and destroying the
old ones," Kiuranov said. "Of course, there were atrocious things.
Minarets were pulled down by tractors, or bulldozed. Medical records
were destroyed because they had the old names. We tried to
clandestinely do some research in 1986. Our estimate was anything
between 100 and 200 persons had been killed."
In the summer of 1989, emigration controls were lifted on ethnic
Turks, and about 310,000 fled the country in what at that time was the
biggest movement of refugees in Europe since just after World War II.
Then on Nov. 10, 1989, an internal Communist Party coup ended
Zhivkov's 35-year rule.
That winter many ethnic Turks came back, which provoked a nationalist
backlash that was manipulated by die-hard supporters of Zhivkov, still
in power at the local level. "Bulgaria was on the brink of civil
war," Kiuranov said.
But in the months after Zhivkov was overthrown, reformists within the
Communist Party, leaders of the democratic opposition and moderate
ethnic Turks worked together to defuse the situation.
A Respect for Individual Rights
Analysts attribute their success to a variety of factors: quick
reversal of discriminatory policies; the soothing impact of respect
for individual rights; a century-old history of ethnic tolerance that,
despite Zhivkov's moves, retained deep roots; and the lack of an
incendiary figure like former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic,
who stoked Serbian nationalism to boost his own power.
The key was "civil rights and individual liberties" that "helped a lot
to ease tensions and re-integrate the Muslim minority," said Ognyan
Minchev, executive director of the Institute for Regional and
International Studies in Sofia. "People were immediately given the
right to restore their names and their cultural identity in terms of
religious activity and everything."
Yunal Lutfi, vice chairman of the Movement for Rights and Freedom, a
party that draws its support from Turks and other Muslims, agreed that
in late 1989 "we had every condition for Bulgaria to become a Bosnia
or Kosovo." "Only a match was needed in order to make an ethnic
conflict explode in Bulgaria," Lutfi said. "We as a party knew that,
and we did every necessary thing. We wanted to search for a peaceful
and civilized way to restore our rights, and we did that. I don't
want to say we were the only persons who did so much for that. In the
dawn of democracy in Bulgaria, many democrats ...made contributions."
The country's minorities also were helped by pressures to respect
human rights imposed by the European Union and the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization, Lutfi said. Bulgaria wants to join both
alliances.
"What happened [to the ethnic Turks] in the 1980s was a big exception
inspired by the political leadership that was not accepted by the
population," said Solomon Passy, a former dissident who is president
of the Atlantic Club of Bulgaria, a group working in favor of NATO
admission. "Bulgaria is a country that has remarkably tolerant
people. The first time [this was demonstrated] was when the Armenians
were in trouble at the beginning of the century. They were killed in
Turkey, and they found shelter in Bulgaria."
Passy noted that when allied with Germany during World War II, the
Bulgarian government refused to send the country's Jews to
extermination camps despite Nazi demands. "Bulgaria had the
remarkable record of saving 50,000 Jews who were living here," Passy
said. "It was a heroic act inspired by leading politicians."
Memories of Centuries of Ottoman Rule
Ethnic peace in the 1990s was achieved despite Bulgarians' resentful
memories of nearly five centuries of direct Ottoman rule, Lutfi said.
"This domination by the Ottoman Empire, in the textbooks, literature
and history is written as if it were slavery - like it was five very
dark centuries for the Bulgarian people, and Turks are to be blamed
for this," he explained.
Efforts at better relations have been reflected in at least some
textbook modifications.
"Fifteen years ago, the [Ottoman] period was dubbed as a 'Turkish
yoke,' " said Sofia University student Assia Traytcheva. "Now it is
described as a 'Turkish occupation.' But I think what is described
under those terms hasn't changed. We have Bulgarian national writers
who have written a lot of things about the Turkish occupation using
words like 'atrocities.' That is the way they felt about the Turkish
occupation."
But that doesn't mean young people have to grow up with prejudice,
Traytcheva added.
"We have to know what happened, but we don't need to be hostages to
the past," she said. "Even though I have read all the things our
national writers have written, I do not have a negative attitude to
the Turks, because I am conscious that the Turks who live here now are
not the Turks who lived 150 years ago."
Selim Mumun Mehmed, 40, who last fall became chief mufti, the highest
Muslim religious leader in Bulgaria, said he is pushing hard to
redress continuing injustices left from the Communist er while keeping
good relations with the country's current leaders.
"During the Communist regime, we suffered a lot," Mehmed said.
"Despite these very serious things done against the Muslim population,
and despite the great expulsion [of 1989], the Muslims in Bulgaria
don't hate the Bulgarians at all, because the Muslims feel this wasn't
done by Bulgarian citizens but by world communism."
Mehmed added, however, that he wants to see the state either drop
controls on the content of religious education at private Muslim
schools or start subsidizing Muslim activities the same way it
subsidizes the Bulgarian Orthodox Church. Also, in several cities
across the country, he is seeking the return to Muslim control of
mosques that were seized by the state during the Communist era.
Still, "Bulgaria is going in the right direction, and we are very
happy for that," Mehmed said. "If we keep on this direction in
Bulgaria, on the path of democracy, we won't have any problems between
our people. I personally have lived with Bulgarian neighbors for 35
years. Between our families there have never been insulting words.
Not even once."
--
==============================================================
MINELRES - a forum for discussion on minorities in Central&Eastern
Europe
Submissions: [email protected]
Subscription/inquiries: [email protected]
List archive: http://www.riga.lv/minelres/archive.htm
==============================================================