Bulgaria’s Turkish minority celebrates the 20th anniversary this week of an uprising that eventually helped topple the country’s communist regime.
On May 19, 1989, Bulgaria’s ethnic Turks — who make up 10 percent of the total population — started a wave of spontaneous protests against the forced assimilatory policies of the communist regime.
Beginning at a funeral in the village of Dzhebel in the southern Rhodope mountains, the protests spread within a week to the south and northeast of the country, regions with large Turkish populations.
In response, Sofia embarked on a policy of ethnic cleansing that left it so isolated internationally — even within the Soviet bloc — that communist dictator Todor Zhivkov was ousted.
Nowadays, the Turkish minority party, the Movement for Rights and Freedoms, is a vital force in Bulgarian politics and has acted as a junior coalition partner in all of the country’s governments since 2001.
But in communist times, the Turks were an oppressed minority, and in 1984, the regime adopted a law forcing them to change their Turkish names to Bulgarian ones, banning their language and outlawing Muslim customs.
“The alternative to changing our names was deportation,” said Reshad Uzturk, a 46-year-old driver from Dzhebel.
And the repressions did not stop there, he said.
“Anyone who spoke Turkish in the street was fined ‘for using incomprehensible language,’ circumcised baby boys were not admitted to kindergarten,” he said.
A 70-year-old woman, who asked not be named, said police tore up their shalwar, or loose trousers, “and made us wear skirts. I was so ashamed I could have died.”
In the communist jargon of the time, the process was referred to as one of national “revival.”
According to the official propaganda, the Turks were actually the descendants of Bulgarians who had been forced to convert to Islam under Turkish rule between the 14th and 19th centuries, but had now forgotten their true origins.
As a Western-oriented country, modern-day Turkey was seen as the arch enemy, just waiting to get its hands on Bulgarian territory.
And the authorities would not tolerate any form of resistance to their national “revival” policies.
In the uprisings of May 1989, nine ethnic Turks were killed and dozens more injured, researcher Mihail Ivanov said.
“The regime was worried about the growth of this minority and responded to the revolts with ethnic cleansing,” said Antonina Zhelyazkova, head of the Sofia-based Center for Minority Studies.
“Leaders of protest movements and thousands of intellectuals were expelled to Turkey. Ordinary people were terrified and followed,” Zhelyazkova said.
On May 29, 1989, communist leader Zhivkov demanded Turkey open its border to Muslims wanting to leave Bulgaria.
The Bulgarian secret service’s archives indicate that some 370,000 Bulgarians of Turkish origin crossed the border between May and November 1989, when Turkey closed it again to stem the influx, Ivanov said.
Only around 155,000 of them later returned.
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
Armed with 4,000 eggs and a truckload of sugar and cream, French pastry chefs on Wednesday completed a 121.8m-long strawberry cake that they have claimed is the world’s longest ever made. Youssef El Gatou brought together 20 chefs to make the 1.2 tonne masterpiece that took a week to complete and was set out on tables in an ice rink in the Paris suburb town of Argenteuil for residents to inspect. The effort overtook a 100.48m-long strawberry cake made in the Italian town of San Mauro Torinese in 2019. El Gatou’s cake also used 350kg of strawberries, 150kg of sugar and 415kg of
RSS