Turkish Exodus Echoes Cold War : Ethnic Unrest in Bulgaria Locks Nations in Abusive Duet

In a Europe where frontiers are falling at a historic pace, the fortified border here between Turkey and Bulgaria stands as a heart-breaking anachronism.

The Bulgarians, Communist true believers given to Stalinism and other primary colors, have painted this piece of the Iron Curtain, a wire fence, an incongruous powder blue. Even more improbably, about 310,000 refugees have streamed through the frontier into Turkey over the past three months. They are Bulgarian-reared ethnic Turks fleeing Orwellian repression by the Bulgarian government.

“Would you stay someplace where the government insisted you change your name, forget your language and abandon your religion?” asked Metin Baba, 27, a house painter living in a refugee camp near the border. “They changed my grandfather’s name in the town records--after he died. I’ll die, too, before I go back.”

The flight of the ethnic Turks from a Christian, Communist Warsaw Pact country to a democratic Muslim North Atlantic Treaty Organization ally is already one of the largest cross-border migrations in Europe since World War II.

It has been stopped, at least for the moment, by a Turkish government belatedly alarmed at its internal consequences. But, with Turkey and Bulgaria locked in an abusive duet of pride and miscalculation, the exodus could start anew.

Rattling Adjectives

If there is any solace in the dispute 50 years after the start of a war that rewrote Europe’s frontiers and future, it is that today’s angry neighbors rattle more adjectives than sabers. Still, the Turkish-Bulgarian frontier is a sobering, yesterday place. As Hungary dismantles its fences with Austria and Western Europe poises to erase all its internal frontiers, the Cold War lives on at Kapikule.

Except in the judgment of President Todor Zhivkov’s regime in Sofia, original sin in the refugee drama rests with Bulgaria, an agrarian land not badly off economically by East European standards. The Slavic majority speaks a Russian-related language and has historic ties to the Eastern Orthodox branch of Christianity.

Turkish-speaking Muslims have lived among the Bulgarians for centuries, since the days when Turkey ruled Bulgaria as part of its Ottoman Empire. When tempers flared into irrationality in June, ethnic Turks numbered 10-15% of Bulgaria’s 10 million population.

The Turks have clung obstinately to their language, their customs and their religion, resisting all attempts by Sofia to wrap them into the Slavic majority. A 1984 assimilation law ordered the ethnic Turks to take Bulgarian names. It forbade them to speak their language and restrained Islamic practices. Offenders were fined. Protesters found themselves dispatched to a prison island.

Echoing unrest elsewhere in the Soviet empire, ethnic Turks in Bulgaria staged human rights protests in May. At least seven people died in clashes with police, by Bulgarian government count. Turkey says it was 60.

“ ‘Forget your name,’ they told me. ‘Use one we like better,’ ” said refugee Mehmet Kara, a 28-year-old cook. “They said I was to be called Mladen Hristoj. That is a Christian name. They said my young son could not be circumcised as Islam demands.”

‘Bulgarian Muslims’

In a fit of pique after the demonstrations, the Sofia regime began expelling ethnic Turkish leaders. Then, rashly, it announced that ethnic Turks, whom it calls “Bulgarian Muslims,” could leave immediately as part of eased foreign travel being afforded all Bulgarians as of Sept. 1. Amid escalating tension featuring almost daily verbal salvos between the two governments, Turkish Prime Minister Turgut Ozal, rashly, said Turkey would welcome all its kinsmen who wanted to come home.

By mid-June, refugees themselves now acknowledge, a kind of mass hysteria swept Turkish areas near the border and in the Danube Basin deep inside Bulgaria. Whole villages began emptying. Extended families--grandparents to cousins--abandoned homes, jobs and crops.

Several thousand refugees a day, most of them peasants and skilled blue-collar workers, streamed through the blue wire from early June until late August. They came by train, in carts pulled by donkeys as far as the frontier, and by more than 15,000 old Russian Fiats and battered Moskviches.

“Our home was in Razgrad, about 350 kilometers (217 miles) from the border, but there is hardly anybody left there now,” said Fatima Yilmaz, a shop assistant who came with her construction worker husband and their two boys.

The Yilmaz clan was one of 599 families, 2,099 people, living in 651 tents at a spick-and-span refugee camp in the city of Edirne near the border one day late last month. Ahmed Arababa, a Turkish government official at the camp, said another 533 families had already left the center en route to resettlement elsewhere in Turkey.

Bigger Than Expected

Officials in both Turkey and Bulgaria now tell journalists, but not one another, that neither expected the exodus to be of such magnitude; by some reports 200,000 more ethnic Turks would leave Bulgaria if they could.

By now, people in both countries are paying the price for perestroika gone awry.

At a time when it is seeking economic growth and assaying some modest political liberalization, Bulgaria finds itself short of labor in industry and in key farm areas as harvest season approaches.

It also must now endure international opprobrium. Condemnations have ranged from NATO proclamations to the recalling last Tuesday of U.S. Ambassador Sol Polansky to Washington “for consultations,” a diplomatic rebuke accompanied by a statement about the “ongoing abuse of the human rights of Bulgarian ethnic Turks by the government of Bulgaria” from the Bush Administration.

On the home front, Bulgaria confronts the prospect of increased intransigence among the hundreds of thousands of ethnic Turks who remain in a country where their kind is not welcome.

Sweeping Consequences

The consequences for Turkey are sweeping. Ozal, who hopes to swap his prime minister’s post for Turkey’s presidency in indirect elections this fall despite an approval rating in the polls of 13%, is under fierce opposition attack for closing the border.

Since last week, only ethnic Turks with visas will be admitted to Turkey from Bulgaria. In the meantime, Turkey calls for negotiations with Bulgaria that would allow more orderly future immigration.

Bulgaria says Turkish consulates are not issuing visas. Turkey says Bulgarian police are preventing ethnic Turks from reaching Turkish legations.

In turning off the refugee spigot, Ozal is seen by many Turks of having blinked first in a showdown with Zhivkov.

“People say ‘We lost this round.’ That will cost Ozal politically,” said Sami Kohen, a columnist for the Istanbul newspaper Milliyet.

Even more troubling to everyday Turks are the social and economic consequences of a major new influx of workers to a country where unemployment is already 17%.

The Turkish economy is soft, inflation has been 74% in the last 12 months and there are chronic shortages of housing, schools and social services in a rapidly developing but still Third World country of 55 million. Residential areas in Istanbul, the 6-million-strong commercial and industrial heart of Turkey, are without water every other day this summer.

The massive refugee flow has caused dislocations large and small around the country. More than 60,000 refugees are overwhelming resources in the automobile manufacturing city of Bursa, home to earlier refugees from Bulgaria. The provincial governor says no more will be allowed to settle.

The Bulgarian Turks, it has become quickly apparent, are better educated, more highly skilled and accustomed to a higher standard of living than many Turkish workers.

Resentments fly in both directions. Native Turks object to intruders who jeopardize their jobs. One young Turk in Istanbul passed a long-awaited competitive exam for a job vacancy in a government hospital, only to be told at the last minute that the government had ordered it filled by a refugee.

Some of the Bulgarian Turks, by contrast, resent low wage offers, high living costs, the difficulty in finding housing and suggestions that they settle in lesser developed areas of the country. Already a few thousand among the new arrivals have opted to return to Bulgaria.

Others, though, say that getting out was worth whatever comes next.

“I know it will be difficult in Turkey, but I also know that I will be free to say that I am a Muslim and I am a Turk,” refugee cook Kara said.

In the refugees’ eyes, such freedom will be a long time coming to Bulgaria. Many have fled from villages where, by community conspiracy, the tombstones are blank. Forbidden to use Turkish names even after death, the Turks of Bulgaria bury their dead with only a stone and a photograph to commemorate them.