MINELRES: Fwd: RFE/RL: Bulgaria's Ethnic Turks Raise Issue of Forced Assimilation
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RFE/RL NEWSLINE Vol. 7, No. 36, Part II, 25 February 2003
END NOTE
BULGARIA'S ETHNIC TURKS RAISE ISSUE OF FORCED ASSIMILATION
By Ulrich Buechsenschuetz
The Movement for Rights and Freedoms (DPS), which is the political party
representing large segments of Bulgaria's Turkish minority, the
country's largest, held its fifth national congress in Sofia on 16
February. While Ahmed Dogan's re-election as party chairman was hardly a
surprise, the congress adopted two other key decisions that left many
observers puzzled.
The first and less controversial move was that Dogan announced he will
nominate an ethnic Bulgarian as his deputy. Among the 105 members of the
party's highest body, the Central Council, 15 are ethnic Bulgarians and
two are members of the Romany minority.
Under the Bulgarian Constitution, political parties based on ethnic
principles are banned. Although the DPS is de facto an ethnic Turkish
party, it has never presented itself as such in order to avoid legal
problems.
The congress's second decision was far more surprising. The congress
approved a proposal to sue the Bulgarian state before an unspecified
"tribunal in The Hague" for its forceful assimilation of Muslim
minorities from 1962-89.
During that period, the communist authorities forced members of one
Muslim minority after another to accept Christian Bulgarian names.
Starting with Muslim Roma and Tatars in the late 1950s, the assimilation
policies were then extended to the Bulgarian-speaking Muslim Pomaks in
two waves in the 1960s and 70s, before the ethnic Turks had to change
their names or face repression in the mid-1980s. Apart from being
forbidden to bear Muslim names, the minorities were forbidden to speak
their vernacular, to wear traditional clothes, or to practice their
religious customs.
These policies, euphemistically dubbed the "Revival Process," aimed at
creating a unified socialist Bulgarian nation. It was as if the
Bulgarian Communist Party (BKP) wanted to enforce Josef Stalin's theory
that nations and national minorities would blossom in the course of
socialist modernization before withering and eventually disappearing
once communist society became reality.
However, the idea of renaming minority members in order to make them
"real" Bulgarians was not new. During the Balkan Wars of 1912-13,
thousands of Muslim Pomaks were baptized with the support of the state
and the Bulgarian Orthodox Church. That was when another theoretical
cornerstone of the later communist policies was laid.
Under that interpretation the Pomaks were originally ethnic Christian
Bulgarians who were forced by the Ottomans to adopt Islam. Similarly,
the Ottomans had forced Bulgarian Turks, who were originally ethnic
Christian Bulgarians, to convert to Islam and to adopt the Turkish
language. By baptizing or simply renaming the converts' descendants,
they were given the chance to "revive" their Bulgarian origin -- hence
the term "Revival Process."
Many people who actively opposed this kind of forceful "revival" were
arrested, oppressed, and sentenced to internal banishment or forced
labor. An unknown number died during various demonstrations against
these policies. As the pressure mounted on the Turkish minority in the
1980s, large numbers of them sought to emigrate to neighboring Turkey,
but this haven was closed to them between 1978 and August 1989. Then, in
a surprising move the BKP decided to not only open the borders to those
Turks wishing to emigrate, but also to expel those who would have
preferred to stay. What followed was the emigration of some 300,000
Turks, until Turkey had to close the border because its refugee
facilities were overcrowded. This move isolated Bulgaria's regime even
within the communist bloc, and also contributed to the overthrow of BKP
leader Todor Zhivkov in November 1989.
Those who planned and carried out the "Revival Process" have never been
held legally responsible. One of the DPS's key demands immediately after
its foundation was to seek justice for the assimilation policies in
Bulgarian courts. However, as a journalist reporting from The Hague
recently pointed out in a commentary published by mediapool.bg, the
party readily dropped this demand as soon as it acquired political power
by virtue of supporting -- together with the postcommunist Socialist
Party -- the expert government under Lyuben Berov in 1992.
However, the recent decision to sue the Bulgarian state for the
communist policies before "a court in The Hague" turned out to be a
major gaff. One day after its adoption, Deputy DPS Chairman Lutfi Mestan
admitted on "Blitz," the joint radio and television program of RFE/RL's
Bulgarian Service and bTV, that none of the three international courts
based in The Hague is competent to rule on crimes committed by the BKP.
In an effort to explain exactly what the DPS wants to do, Mestan said
the congress asked the party leadership to renew its efforts to seek
justice for the victims of the "Revival Process." He pointed to a
pending case that the Military Prosecutor's Office is investigating and
cited the state's "moral obligation for justice," but failed to specify
where exactly justice will be sought.
Some observers, like Veselin Angelov, a member of the recently dissolved
commission on the communist-era secret-service archives, believe the DPS
leadership is under pressure from emigre organizations in Turkey. But it
might also be that the DPS, which is also the junior coalition partner
in the government led by the National Movement Simeon II, will use the
issue to increase the pressure for a longstanding reform of the
judiciary. Whatever the case might be, the way the issue was addressed
left some doubts about the seriousness of the DPS's intention
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