Turkish Rights Are Protested at Bulgarian Rally

About 1,000 demonstrators rallied outside Parliament on Tuesday, protesting recent government moves to safeguard the rights of Bulgaria’s Turkish minority.

The protest sparked fears of a surge in ethnic tensions as an unexpected side effect of the Communist leadership’s attempts at political and economic reform.

Arriving in the capital from the southern city of Kurdjali near the Turkish border, the demonstrators presented a letter to National Assembly leaders asking them to postpone a vote on a series of Communist-endorsed measures protecting the rights of Turks, the official news agency BTA said.

One of the measures guarantees Turkish Bulgarians the right to choose Muslim names. The new policies, announced Friday, also give ethnic Turks free choice of religion and schools.

Earlier, about 10,000 people, including the thousand who came to Sofia, staged a similar protest in Kurdjali, BTA reported.

The demonstration in Kurdjali, 250 miles southeast of Sofia, lasted more than five hours, the agency reported.

Ethnic Turks and other Muslims in the region held their own protest, and police moved in to keep the groups apart, the report said. BTA quoted witnesses as saying they feared violence.

In Kurdjali, a Committee for the Defense of National Interests was formed last week, including Communists and non-Communists, and it organized the demonstrations.

It demands a referendum on the minorities issue and sent a declaration to Parliament saying the leadership, with the new policies, had “once again taken categorical and irreversible decisions . . . forcing its dictates on the popular opinion.”

The protesters accused government leaders of making decisions “in the back room” without being fully aware of the consequences, BTA said.

Leaders of the pro-democracy movement in Sofia, fearing an increase in ethnic tensions, tried to talk to the demonstrators, “calling for wisdom and a search for ways to overcome past mistakes,” BTA said.

The demonstrations come less than a week after the Communist leadership declared an end to its policy of forced assimilation for the nation’s 900,000 ethnic Turks.