Ethnic Strife in Bulgaria Fueled by Fear

The fear of Dimo Bodurov is the problem of Bulgaria and Eastern Europe itself as the region attempts to revive democracy.

A petty entrepreneur in this small factory town, Bodurov in many ways is a man to be admired.

He runs the local market and is an active member of the Ekoglasnost opposition group, one of many budding organizations that will challenge the ruling Communist Party as early as next May in Bulgaria’s first free elections since 1946.

But sitting next to a small electric heater that took the edge off a recent frigid winter afternoon, Bodurov made it clear that democracy is not his first priority.

Above all, Bodurov is afraid of the Turks--so afraid, in fact, that he is against restoring such basic human rights to Bulgaria’s Turkish minority as the freedom to choose one’s own name.

“We’re frightened that it’s only a first step,” he said. “Then they will want something else. We want democracy very much, but we feel threatened and afraid.”

Among Western diplomats and other political observers, this festering, centuries-old enmity is judged as the single biggest threat to Bulgaria’s move toward democratic government.

Much as in parts of the Soviet Union and Romania, decades of repressive Communist rule appear to have exacerbated rather than buried long-dormant ethnic tensions.

As elsewhere, these emotions simmer in Bulgaria as a threat to newly won freedoms. The raw fear of Communist repression has been lifted, only to be replaced by more uncertain anxieties born of age-old differences.

Bulgaria’s Turkish population, estimated at between 1 million and 1.5 million of the country’s 9 million people, is concentrated largely in the southeastern regions.

Bulgarian concerns may seem irrational to outsiders, but they are rooted deep in the history of a people who clung to their identity despite five centuries under sometimes brutal Turkish rule.

Unlike much of Eastern Europe, the Russians are liberators to the Bulgarians. A statue of Czar Alexander II stands in central Sofia, honored for his help in freeing the nation from its real enemy, the Turks.

Kurdzhali itself was part of the Turkish Empire until the early part of this century, and reminders of that period are everywhere in the southeastern part of the country. A bridge over the Maritza River in the town of Svilengrad carries a plaque with the inscription, “This bridge was built under the rule of Sultan Suleiman, 1529.”

But there is another dimension to the intolerance here that is a product of Bulgaria’s prolonged isolation and its long years of totalitarian rule.

Some Bulgarians interviewed, for example, expressed genuine surprise that Britons and Americans were permitted to have “non-British” or “non-American” names.

“After years in which the interpretation of human rights were confined to criticism of the bourgeois humanitarian concepts, we are still not in a position to fathom the idea of human rights, including the right to a name,” Kiril Kertikov, an associate professor at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Sociology, commented in a Sofia weekly newspaper recently.

His observation is equally valid in other parts of the region.

In 1984, the aging Communist Party boss, Todor Zhivkov, believed he’d solved the Turkish issue once and for all when he closed Turkish schools, forbade the use of the Turkish language, ordered all Turks to take Bulgarian names and then simply pretended the Turkish minority did not exist.

After all, he had already conducted the forced assimilation of Bulgaria’s more than 100,000 Gypsies and 250,000 Bulgarian Muslims without resistance.

But the legacy of Zhivkov’s brutality now haunts Bulgaria as it moves tentatively toward democracy.

Efforts since his downfall last Nov. 10 to restore the rights of ethnic Turks have already brought Bulgarians into the streets. Earlier this month, there were protests and strikes, and while a tenuous peace formula was agreed to on the issue last Friday, few see it is a permanent solution. “The ethnic issue has become the primary issue in the country,” commented a Western diplomat. “It has distracted people from the reform movement.”

Added opposition leader Zhelio Zhelev: “Somehow, we have to learn to conquer these fears and concentrate on the real issues.”

It is widely believed the recent disturbances were encouraged by hard-line local Communist Party bosses who still cling to power in outlying regions they have ruled like feudal lords for decades. More than anyone, they helped implement Zhivkov’s policy of forced assimilation.

For them, stirring latent Bulgarian fears of the Turks was a tailor-made tactic, both to defend their own interests and to strike back at their recently emerged political enemies.

They moved quickly after both Communist reformists and the opposition coalition, known as the Union of Democratic Forces, had called for restoring human rights to the Turkish minority in a declaration Dec. 29, an action the hard-liners said was tantamount to selling out the nation.

Here in Kurdzhali, factories went on strike, and Bulgarian nationalists held street protests. Tensions heightened further when Turks mounted counterdemonstrations, but there was no violence.

The volatile issue caused splits for the first time within the opposition, which believes its stand could diminish its electoral support among the country’s majority Bulgarians.

“The situation is calm now (but) those who started this have won a round,” said Roumen Danov, editor of a leading magazine, Otechestvo (Fatherland), and an opposition activist.

Diplomats believe many, if not most, of these local leaders are likely to be replaced in the run-up to a Jan. 30 special Communist Party congress called in the wake of Zhivkov’s fall. But the fear and mistrust nurtured over centuries is certain to remain.

In Kurdzhali, where minority Turks make up about 20% of the population, neither side seems happy.

Around the central marketplace and at the mosque nearby, ethnic Turks still recall the late December day in 1984 when armed security police surrounded the town and began the process of forcibly changing names.

Some were hauled off buses on the way to work, while others were confronted at home by armed police. They said they were forced to hand over their identity documents, then unceremoniously given a piece of paper with new names. They were later told to retrieve their identity papers with the new names from the party headquarters.

Amid this terror, there were incidents of incompetence, bordering on farce, with siblings given different family names. Many got new identity papers carrying names that bore no relation to the name assigned by officials.

Later, Turkish language schools here were closed and all but the very old were harassed if they approached a mosque. But it was the name-changing that Turks here remember as the most humiliating.

“When they took my name, it was like entering the grave,” commented Ramis Shurkriev, who is known to Bulgarian officialdom as Reicho Shenkov.

It was also apparent that few Turkish Muslims here paid much attention to any official name other than their own.

One said he had no idea what his mother’s Bulgarian name was, explaining he would be ashamed to use it.

When, under pressure from human rights groups, Zhivkov last year agreed to grant passports to all Bulgarian citizens, more than 300,000 ethnic Turks fled across the Turkish frontier before Turkey closed its borders.

With the prospect of free elections only a few months away, minority Turks claim they know exactly what they want.

“We want our names and our self-respect back,” said Shurkriev. “We want our Turkish schools, Turkish television and radio programs, so we have the same rights as Bulgarians.”

Despite the relatively modest Turkish demands, many Bulgarians fear the consequences.

Last week outside the Parliament building in the capital, Sofia, knots of people heatedly debated the issue. A woman in a fur coat claimed that the restoration of Turkish names, religion and customs would desecrate the memory of all Bulgarians who died during the five centuries of Turkish rule.

“Do you know what atrocities they committed?” she asked a foreigner standing on the edge of the group. “It was a terrible time for our country.”

Others labeled her an extremist.

“Only a dialogue can solve this problem,” said Kurdzhali’s mayor, Dimiter Bogdanov. “People have to be prepared for this (the restoration of Turkish rights).”

But for those like Bodurov, such preparation could take a long time.

“The problem here is history,” he said. “The fear among Bulgarians is that it (Turkish supremacy) could all happen again.”