Turkish Minority in Bulgaria Often Persecuted

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

The centuries-long Ottoman Empire rule over Christian peoples in the Balkans was never accepted as legitimate. However, some did convert to Islam, in many cases in order to benefit from becoming part of the rulers’ own faith.

As the Turks were slowly driven out, such people were often left “stranded,” as it were, a residue in newly-sovereign Christian states that were not very hospitable to these remnants of Islamic empire. They were viewed as a reminder of Turkish Ottoman domination.

Bosniaks and Albanians in the former Yugoslavia faced hardship, including two major wars, in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo, in the 1990s.

Less well-known is the persecution suffered by Turkish Muslims in Bulgaria during that period.

Three decades ago, the Communist regime in Sofia started to assimilate the Turkish minority by force. Bulgarian Turks had to change their names and were no longer allowed to speak Turkish in public.

In 1984, army and police units surrounded the Kardzhali district in southern Bulgaria, fairly close to the Turkish border, and home to the bulk of the Turkish minority. The Turks received new identity cards and all previously existing minority rights were revoked.

Resistance mounted, and by 1989, the Communist rulers in Sofia realized that the situation was spiraling out of control. Bulgarian Communist leader Todor Zhivkov decided that only a mass emigration of the Turkish minority to Turkey could ease the pressure.

Fortunately for the Turks, the Communist regime collapsed soon afterwards.

As Bulgaria transitioned to a post-Communist political order, parliament unanimously voted that Turks and other Muslims could again use their own names. Still, the majority of the 300,000 emigrants never returned.

The 1991 post-Communist Bulgarian Constitution contained a provision banning political parties “formed on an ethnic basis.” So the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSDP), successor to the Communists, asked the country’s Constitutional Court to declare unconstitutional a new political party formed by the beleaguered Turkish minority.

However, the Court affirmed the legality of the new Movement for Rights and Freedoms (DPS), which today largely represents Bulgaria’s Turkish and other Muslim ethnic minorities.

As Bulgaria moved towards trying to gain admission to the European Union, in 1999 parliament ratified a resolution for the protection of minorities. The country joined the EU in 2007; it is also a member of NATO.

Today Bulgarian Turks represent about 10 per cent of the country’s population of 7.3 million. The DPS party won 38 of 240 seats in the Bulgarian election of 2014, with 14.8 per cent of the total vote (including 83 per cent of Turkish voters), and is the third biggest party in the National assembly.

Its opponents consider the party to be excessively pro-Turkish, in contrast to Slavic Bulgarians, who, as Orthodox Christians, historically have tended to sympathize with Russia.

In December 2015 Lyutvi Mestan, chairman of the DPS, was expelled from the party following a declaration he had made in support of Turkey following the downing of a Russian fighter aircraft by Ankara a month earlier.

Mestan then founded a new party, DOST, an acronym which stands for Democrats for Responsibility, Solidarity and Tolerance in Bulgarian, but spells and sounds like a word for “friend” in Turkish