Bulgaria’s Ethnic Calm Is a Sharp Contrast to Region’s Troubles

Sabrie Balaktcha, 80, is poor, angry and almost out of hope. Her two sons living here are unemployed. A third fled to Turkey more than a decade ago to escape a Communist-era edict requiring Turks to take Slavic names. She hasn’t seen him since.

“It’s very difficult to live because my pension is too low,” she said. “But what shall I do? At the moment I have no money, not even a stotinka,” worth half a U.S. cent.

Despite Balaktcha’s anger, however, she and her village paradoxically reflect one of the past decade’s greatest successes of ethnic relations in the troubled Balkans. The ethnic Turks of Nova Mahala and other villages don’t blame their problems on discrimination by ethnic Bulgarians.

“We know that the Bulgarian people were absolutely not at fault for the changing of the names,” said Nova Mahala Mayor Kemal Alliman, 35, an ethnic Turk. “The problems were with the authorities.”

Here, in a part of the world that is often viewed as a place where ethnic groups nurse historical grievances for generations, the democracy of the 1990s has brought with it remarkably calm and friendly relations throughout Bulgaria between ethnic Turks, who generally are Muslim, and ethnic Bulgarians, usually Orthodox Christians.

During a decade of ethnic and religious wars that devastated the neighboring former Yugoslav federation--including the conflict between Muslim ethnic Albanians and Orthodox Christian Serbs that engulfed the province of Kosovo--Bulgaria has been a model of peace.

“We have absolutely no problems between Bulgarians and Turks,” said Nedjmi Indje, 41, an ethnic Turk on the village council here. “We are their guests and they are our guests.”

Without doubt, most of the people of this predominantly ethnic Turkish village--like many Bulgarians who have seen their living standards decline during a decade of post-Communist economic change--are angry about high unemployment, rising prices, low wages and tiny pensions. Most also suffer the lingering pain of divided families, the result of longtime Communist dictator Todor Zhivkov’s heavy-handed attempts at forced ethnic assimilation, which prompted nearly one-third of the nation’s roughly 1 million ethnic Turks to flee the country in 1989.

But ethnic Turks here blame the economic pain on the changing economy, not ethnicity. And they generally blame the forced name-changing and subsequent exodus either on the Communists in general or on Zhivkov in particular.

Todor Zhivkov Left a Legacy of Bitterness

As Communist rule began to soften here in late 1989, it was by no means clear that Bulgaria would fare so well. Zhivkov’s persecution of the Turkish minority had left a legacy of bitterness, with fear on all sides in this country of 8.2 million people--of whom about 85% are ethnic Bulgarians, 9% are ethnic Turks and 4% are ethnic Roma, or Gypsies.

During the 1984-85 efforts to force Turks to take Slavic names, “the technique was to surround a village using paramilitary units,” recalled Deyan Kiuranov, a scholar at the Center for Liberal Strategies, a think tank based in the capital, Sofia.

“They would use local Communist Party members, teachers, and go home to home, giving you new [internal-use] passports and destroying the old ones,” Kiuranov said. “Of course, there were atrocious things. Minarets were pulled down by tractors, or bulldozed. Medical records were destroyed because they had the old names. We tried to clandestinely do some research in 1986. Our estimate was anything between 100 and 200 persons had been killed.”

In the summer of 1989, emigration controls were lifted on ethnic Turks, and about 310,000 fled the country in what at that time was the biggest movement of refugees in Europe since just after World War II. Then on Nov. 10, 1989, an internal Communist Party coup ended Zhivkov’s 35-year rule.

That winter many ethnic Turks came back, which provoked a nationalist backlash that was manipulated by die-hard supporters of Zhivkov, still in power at the local level. “Bulgaria was on the brink of civil war,” Kiuranov said.

But in the months after Zhivkov was overthrown, reformists within the Communist Party, leaders of the democratic opposition and moderate ethnic Turks worked together to defuse the situation.

A Respect for Individual Rights

Analysts attribute their success to a variety of factors: quick reversal of discriminatory policies; the soothing impact of respect for individual rights; a century-old history of ethnic tolerance that, despite Zhivkov’s moves, retained deep roots; and the lack of an incendiary figure like former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, who stoked Serbian nationalism to boost his own power.

The key was “civil rights and individual liberties” that “helped a lot to ease tensions and re-integrate the Muslim minority,” said Ognyan Minchev, executive director of the Institute for Regional and International Studies in Sofia. “People were immediately given the right to restore their names and their cultural identity in terms of religious activity and everything.”

Yunal Lutfi, vice chairman of the Movement for Rights and Freedom, a party that draws its support from Turks and other Muslims, agreed that in late 1989 “we had every condition for Bulgaria to become a Bosnia or Kosovo.”

“Only a match was needed in order to make an ethnic conflict explode in Bulgaria,” Lutfi said. “We as a party knew that, and we did every necessary thing. We wanted to search for a peaceful and civilized way to restore our rights, and we did that. I don’t want to say we were the only persons who did so much for that. In the dawn of democracy in Bulgaria, many democrats . . . made contributions.”

The country’s minorities also were helped by pressures to respect human rights imposed by the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Lutfi said. Bulgaria wants to join both alliances.

“What happened [to the ethnic Turks] in the 1980s was a big exception inspired by the political leadership that was not accepted by the population,” said Solomon Passy, a former dissident who is president of the Atlantic Club of Bulgaria, a group working in favor of NATO admission. “Bulgaria is a country that has remarkably tolerant people. The first time [this was demonstrated] was when the Armenians were in trouble at the beginning of the century. They were killed in Turkey, and they found shelter in Bulgaria.”

Passy noted that when allied with Germany during World War II, the Bulgarian government refused to send the country’s Jews to extermination camps despite Nazi demands. “Bulgaria had the remarkable record of saving 50,000 Jews who were living here,” Passy said. “It was a heroic act inspired by leading politicians.”

Memories of Centuries of Ottoman Rule

Ethnic peace in the 1990s was achieved despite Bulgarians’ resentful memories of nearly five centuries of direct Ottoman rule, Lutfi said.

“This domination by the Ottoman Empire, in the textbooks, literature and history is written as if it were slavery--like it was five very dark centuries for the Bulgarian people, and Turks are to be blamed for this,” he explained.

Efforts at better relations have been reflected in at least some textbook modifications.

“Fifteen years ago, the [Ottoman] period was dubbed as a ‘Turkish yoke,’ ” said Sofia University student Assia Traytcheva. “Now it is described as a ‘Turkish occupation.’ But I think what is described under those terms hasn’t changed. We have Bulgarian national writers who have written a lot of things about the Turkish occupation using words like ‘atrocities.’ That is the way they felt about the Turkish occupation.”

But that doesn’t mean young people have to grow up with prejudice, Traytcheva added.

“We have to know what happened, but we don’t need to be hostages to the past,” she said. “Even though I have read all the things our national writers have written, I do not have a negative attitude to the Turks, because I am conscious that the Turks who live here now are not the Turks who lived 150 years ago.”

Selim Mumun Mehmed, 40, who last fall became chief mufti, the highest Muslim religious leader in Bulgaria, said he is pushing hard to redress continuing injustices left from the Communist era while keeping good relations with the country’s current leaders.

“During the Communist regime, we suffered a lot,” Mehmed said. “Despite these very serious things done against the Muslim population, and despite the great expulsion [of 1989], the Muslims in Bulgaria don’t hate the Bulgarians at all, because the Muslims feel this wasn’t done by Bulgarian citizens but by world communism.”

Mehmed added, however, that he wants to see the state either drop controls on the content of religious education at private Muslim schools or start subsidizing Muslim activities the same way it subsidizes the Bulgarian Orthodox Church. Also, in several cities across the country, he is seeking the return to Muslim control of mosques that were seized by the state during the Communist era.

Still, “Bulgaria is going in the right direction, and we are very happy for that,” Mehmed said. “If we keep on this direction in Bulgaria, on the path of democracy, we won’t have any problems between our people. I personally have lived with Bulgarian neighbors for 35 years. Between our families there have never been insulting words. Not even once.”