Bulgaria – Official Policy
Abolish A People
By:
Maxine Pollack
Virtually overnight, hundreds of thousands of Muslim Turks have ceased to exist, officially, in Bulgaria. Due to a government inspired ‘Bulgarization’ offensive, which reached a peak of intensity in early 1985, the ethnic minority Turks in southern Bulgaria have been forced, sometimes at gunpoint, to exchange their Turkish and Islamic names for Bulgarian and Christian names. Moreover, they have been afflicted by a systematic persecution that has severely curtailed religious and civil freedoms.
“There is nobody with a Turkish name left in Bulgaria,” notes a State Department official. “Hence, the Bulgarians themselves say, ‘There are no Turks in Bulgaria.’ Clearly, that is an untruth and a travesty.”
Affected by the Bulgarization drive are no fewer than 900,000 Turks, 10 percent of the population of the Balkan country. Officials in the capital, Sofia, claim that the ethnic minority became Bulgarized ‘spontaneously’ as part of a ‘national revival’ movement. However, reports from diplomats, recent émigrés and human rights activists point directly to forcible assimilation.
Birth certificates, passports, marriage licenses and job applications are now uniformly printed in Bulgarian. The penalty for insisting on official papers rendered in
Turkish, ranges from official denial to imprisonment. Despite large-scale protests in several towns and villages, resentment at the grass roots level has not succeeded in a lifting of Bulgarization measures.
Amnesty International has estimated the number killed for resisting the drive at 300 to 1,500. According to Arch Puddington, a Radio Free Europe analyst, “If even the lowest estimate is accurate, it would place Bulgarization among the bloodiest episodes in postwar Eastern Europe…The first three months of Bulgarization claimed more victims than did the 1953 uprising in East Germany, the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia or the imposition of martial law in Poland.”
The U.S. Helsinki Watch Committee, a New York-based human rights monitoring group, has done extensive research on the situation of Turks in Bulgaria. Its first report, pointedly titled “Destroying Ethnic Identity,” indicates that “the authorities attempted to force ethnic Turks to give up Islamic practices and the Turkish language and to discourage Turkish customs and traditions.” In addition, newspapers and radio broadcasts in Turkish were discontinued, and copies of the Koran were confiscated.
Jeri Laber, executive director of Helsinki Watch, was barred from touring Bulgaria’s Turkish areas, but she has visited Turkey twice on fact-finding missions, most recently in June. There she conducted numerous interviews with Islamic Turks who managed with difficulty to flee Bulgaria, often leaving close relatives behind. “Family reunification is now a prime issue,” she says. “There are people in Turkey who have totally lost track of their relatives in Bulgaria. Children can’t locate their parents, and vice versa. Telephone calls are blocked and mail is returned to senders.”
Part of the problem, analysts say, is the namechanging that has left members of families scattered throughout Bulgaria with different last names, because authorities frequently assigned the names indiscriminately. Another stumbling block has been the forced relocation of Turks within Bulgaria. Hundreds and possibly thousands have been dispatched out of their traditionally agricultural, southern homelands to distant regions that are predominantly ethnic Bulgarian.
Bulgarization has been fueled partly by officials’ fears that the Turkish birthrate has far surpassed the low birthrate of ethnic Bulgarians. ‘Sofia wants to avoid any separatist or fundamentalist upsurge on the part of its Islamic minority,’ explains a State Department official. “By unilaterally declaring the country a one nationality state, they hope to defuse any potential division of ethnic loyalties.”
One target of the campaign has been the practice of circumcision. Soon after the namechanging was initiated, examinations of all sons of Turks were carried out. Circumcision was formally banned and follow-up checks ensued to ensure that the new law was being observed. Failure to comply could result in a fine or imprisonment for the boy’s father, for the person who performed the circumcision and for anyone who assisted in arranging the ritual.
Similarly, people face arrest if they attempt to attend services at the few remaining mosques. Speaking Turkish in public is forbidden and Turkish language schools have been closed. Even the wearing of traditional Turkish dress has been outlawed.
Bulgarian authorities maintain that the Turks are descendants of Slavic Bulgarians, who were forcibly converted to Islam, centuries ago, when Bulgaria was incorporated into the Ottoman Empire. “We are simply undoing that which was perpetrated and forced on us,” a Bulgarian official said last year.
But Islamic Confederations in particular deny the charge and have on more than one occasion tried to tour the ethnically Turkish regions of Bulgaria.
Until recently, such attempts were met with official hostility in Sofia. However, a threeman delegation from the 46-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference was permitted, after two postponements, to make a brief and limited tour of the country in June. Although the group has not yet filed a report on its findings, it passed resolutions last year expressing concern over the ‘systematic persecution’ of the Muslims in Bulgaria. The Mecca-based Muslim World League followed suit.
The name-changing is by now a fait-accompli. Nevertheless, human rights monitors in the United States and Britain are pressing for international agencies to investigate “continuing human rights abuses” against ethnic Turks in Bulgaria. “We have asked the United Nations Human Rights Commission to take up the issue,” says Laber. “We want them to appoint a special rapporteur to look into the problem which we view with grave concern.”
