The Real Bulgaria

...interestingly, emigration levels were not high until the Communist takeover...

...Under such conditions, television coverage has been ruled out and the volume of newspaper attention unimpressive...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1987 19 studies," based on a putative examination of human skulls unearthed in Turkish regions of the country, have concluded that the original inhabitants of these regions were not Ottoman Turks, but something called "protoBulgarians...

...As for the regime's explanations of policies which are, to say the least, uncharacteristic of Communist regimes in the era of Gorbachevian "liberalism," they can only be described as typical products, of the tried-and-true Big Lie technique...

...T his still leaves open the question of the motives for a policy that appears to clash sharply with the current drive of other Soviet bloc nations for acceptance as normal members of the international community...

...The state's monopoly on economic power rendered strikes or boycotts futile...

...In fact, however, relations between Bulgarians and ethnic Turks have been relatively free of tension since Bulgaria won its freedom from the Ottoman Empire in 1878...

...This is also the situation in Bulgaria, where the Turks and other Moslem groups enjoy markedly higher reproduction rates than ethnic Bulgarians...

...This is a hostile, anti-Bulgarian and anti-social act, whose perpetrators must be punished according to the full strictness of our country's laws...

...Those who refused usually would be assigned new names...

...Otherwise, the sources of information have been limited to diplomatic circles in Sofia or Washington, or to Bulgarian Turks who have fled abroad...

...Brigades of soldiersand police would arrive, unannounced, at a village or town...

...However, ethnic Turks living in different villages or regions were not allowed to communicate with one another...

...All Turks would then be assembled in the main square, where they would be informed of the new policies...

...A modest start was made in a program to resettle Turks in non Turkish regions...

...Periods of repression have alternated with periods of tolerance...

...There have been no harsh accusations, no tantrums at the U.N., no threats of retaliation...

...Marx and Engels, the founders of scientific atheism, pointed out that religious customs, rites and traditions are a "great bother and a force of inertia throughout history...

...Yet it could not be said that the Turks suffered any more than the rest of the Bulgarian people...

...Although Lenin and other Bolshevik icons can be cited to support just about any position on the nationalities question, as a utopian theory Communism is generally hostile to national distinctiveness...

...Whatever the reason, the Turks were generally left alone by successive Bulgarian governments...

...In 1876 Turkish irregular forces slaughtered thousands of Bulgarian peasants in reprisal for Bulgarian efforts to achieve independence...

...Subsequently, the authorities submitted a hastily revised report—with all mention of the Turks expunged...

...But Moslem countries have addressed the Bulgarian question with uncharacteristic politeness...

...There would be lists of Bulgarian names, and Turks would be given the opportunity to make their own selection...

...even today, party officials acknowledge that many Turks cannot speak Bulgarian fluently...

...Ibishev's name was changed from Halil Ahmedov Ibishev to Lubomir Alekseev Avdjiev...

...Among the steps taken as part of forced assimilation were the elimination of separate Turkish cemeteries, complete with the smashing of tombstones, and the prohibition of Moslem funeral rites...

...Today, the most persuasive justification for forced assimilation within Bulgaria is the argument that Bulgarians are only doing to the Turks what the Turks once did to Bulgarians...

...Amnesty International has placed the number killed at between 300 and 1,500...

...Indeed, perhaps the most telling evidence of the absence of the rule of law is the refusal of the party leaders to publish the various secret decrees on forced assimilation...

...The state could also punish dissenters with economic sanctions: those who maintained a Turkish name could not be paid by state enterprises or receive a pension...

...As added insult to Bulgarian Moslems, the party periodically trots out leading Islamic clerics to acclaim government actions and denounce the critics, particularly those from abroad...

...One possibility is an eventual Turkish demand for some form of national autonomy, say, a separate Turkish republic within a larger Bulgarian confederation...

...B something changed with the .1...

...Nor is the situation likely to improve...

...During the 1970s, Turks were pressured to accept Bulgarian names during the periodic issuance of internal identity cards...

...The Koran is not being published, and its importation is banned...

...All points of entry and exit would be barricaded, and telephone links with the outside world severed...

...Birth certificates would no longer be issued unless the child had a Bulgarian name, and marriages could not be registered if either party had failed to have its name Bulgarized...

...Another presumed interested party, the Moslem world, has not ignored the unpleasant situation of Islamic Bulgarians...

...But few Turks took this option, and the amount of coercion was relatively mild, especially in light of what was to follow...

...Collectivization was unpopular among the Turks, as among all peasant groups, and for a brief time in 1950 Bulgarian authorities were aggressively encouraging Turkish emigration (some accused Bulgaria of deporting them outright) in order to make land available for a massive collectivization project with which the government was enamored...

...On this occasion, at least, the restraint of the Islamic countries is regrettable...

...Initially, to be sure, the party went out of its way to win the support of the Turks through promises of autonomy and cultural liberties...

...As Interior Minister Dimitar Stoyanov announced: "There are no Turks in Bulgaria...

...It took but three months to impose Bulgarian names on all ethnic Turks, with scarcely a murmur of protest from outside the country's borders...

...Yet right up until the final offensive against Turkish distinctiveness, Bulgaria's external propaganda continued to brag about the rights and freedoms enjoyed by its national minorities, the Turks most of all...

...Yet Turkey's attempts at the United Nations and other forums to raise the question of Bulgaria's racial policies have met with minimal success...

...The authorities have effectively sealed off those areas with large concentrations of ethnic Turks...

...But these dramatic changes have been largely limited to Europeans...

...Indeed, the regime's claims to racial fairness created some embarrassing moments once the assimilation drive got underway...

...Speaking Turkish, dressing in traditional Turkish clothing, practicing Turkish (or in some cases Moslem) customs, and most importantly, maintaining a Turkish name—all have been declared illegal, and the decrees are rigorously enforced, to the point where men have been murdered for refusing to have their names changed from Turkish to, Bulgarian...

...Since Bulgarization was launched, several "archaeological In Bulgaria we are witnessing one of the purest examples of what black radicals in the United States once referred to as "cultural genocide...

...The party leadership may well have concluded that full assimilation would never be realized unless the prevailing policies of moderate coercion were replaced by outright terror...

...Under certain conditions, Communist regimes have demonstrated a breathtakingly cynical willingness to exploit national differences when it suited their purposes...

...The prospect of a shift in the population balance holds a number of implications for the party leadership, none of them pleasant...

...This applies with a special force to the barbarous Islamic rite of circumcision . . . [which] is a crucial unit in the arsenal of imperialism's ideological diversion, aimed at differentiating and disuniting our country's working people, and alienating a part of them from the Socialist Motherland...

...The authorities also banned thespeaking of Turkish in public, a rule enforced by the deployment of massive numbers of police in villages which had previously required a single constable to keep the peace...

...The issue is closed...

...The authorities demanded that all names be Bulgarized: first, middle, and family...

...Over the years a number of the concessions made in the name of cultural distinctiveness—Turkish language newspapers, special schools—were gradually withdrawn...

...Turkey, unfortunately, has its own image problem in Europe and the United States, somewhat unjustified to be sure, but a reality nonetheless...

...If indeed the issue is closed it is largely due to the outside world's having done little beyond raising the occasional discreet eyebrow during the period when the worst atrocities were being committed...

...Ultimately, Communists believed that national differences would inevitably evaporate, overwhelmed by the combined power of socialism, secularism, and industrialization...

...Emigration to Turkey was not restricted...

...Bulgaria's rubber stamp parliament, believes that the decision on forced assimilation was made by the Politburo several years before its implementation...

...The Turks' plight was further obscured by the lack of an internal democratic opposition of the kind which endures, with varying degrees of influence, in Poland, East Germany, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia...

...Moreover, according to Ibishev, the authorities extended the name change policy to the dead as well as the living by assigning new names to deceased relatives of ethnic Turks (and even to living relatives who had emigrated to Turkey...

...The whole affair has been conducted with a crude, Stalinist competence reminiscent most recently of the Polish military's awe-inspiring efficiency during the imposition of martial law...

...The absence of competing political parties and, probably more important for a Muslim minority, a truly independent clergy, left the Turks without effective leadership, and the authorities made sure that no indigenous leaders would emerge by placing potential dissenters in preventive detention at the beginning of the assimilation drive...

...The universal adoption of Bulgarian names has been a party objective for some time...

...There remains the question of Communist ideology...

...however, it is a passive force and therefore must die...

...This research is frequently cited by party spokesmen to bolster the argument that Turks never existed as a distinct ethnic group in Bulgaria, and that Bulgarization thus represents nothing more than a return to one's historical roots...

...Another possible concern is a surge in Moslem fundamentalism...

...If even the lowest estimate is accurate, it would place Bulgarization among the bloodiest episodes in postwar Eastern Europe that did not involve foreign troops...

...In case anyone was overlooked in the initial dragnet, the authorities had in reserve other, more bureaucratic methods to ensure compliance...

...Although several hundred Turks at minimum have died in this "Bulgarization" campaign, physical elimination is not the regime's goal...

...Although the term has grown out of favor in the U.S., and rightly so, cultural genocide is an accurate description of the Bulgarian authorities' intentions...

...An anti-Turkish bias could be detected in the official media, with Turkish cultural and religious practices disdained as archaic and reactionary...

...Given the Soviet Union's keen interest in cultivating improved relations with Saudi Arabia and other Arab nations, a noisy protest directed at Sofia might conceivably convince an embarrassed Kremlin to take a more active interest in the internal policies of its smaller, and traditionally obedient, neighbor...

...Perhaps most ominously, statistical surveys began omitting tallies for the Turkish subgroup...

...The campaign was planned in military fashion, with the secrecy and swiftness of execution which that implies...

...no one, after all, enjoyed cultural freedom in Communist Bulgaria...

...The first problems arose over collectivization, not cultural rights...

...Beginning in January 1985, a new, much more determined, and often violent effort was launched to compel the Turks to adopt Bulgarian names...

...As a result, a family consisting of a father and three grown sons—all living in different villages—might be assigned four different family names...

...Halil Ibishev, an ethnic Turk who served ten years in...

...The most common theory stresses Bulgarian apprehensions over a Turkish-Moslem population bomb...

...ne of the ugliest—and most obscure—chapters in the history of Communist Eastern Europe is currently being played out in Bulgaria...

...Through a strange combination of crash industrialization, urbanization, Improved education, easy access to abortion, and an extreme shortage of decent housing, Soviet-style Communism has unwittingly fulfilled much of the agenda of the population control movement, and without the draconian controls imposed by the Chinese...

...Among the more absurd consequences of the name change was its effect on family members who lived in different parts of the country...

...In Poland, where the underground press gives detailed accounts of every act of official misconduct, the successful cover-up of state repression is practically impossible...

...Thus an article, published in Nova Svetlina and entitled "Circumcision—Form of Spiritual and Physical Disunity of the People," proclaimed: The practice of circumcision is an antisocial and anti-state deed on the part of the parents and the person performing the circumcision...

...20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1987...

...There was, however, a distinct shift in attitude during the 1970s...

...One can even imagine that the Bulgarization drive was undertaken with a genuine sense of ideological mission—no previous Communist government, after all, has "solved" its nationality problem by simply decreeing the nonexistence of an entire people...

...Turks who put up stronger opposition were sometimes shot...

...Arch Puddington is on the staff of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in New York and a frequent contributor to Commentary and The American Spectator...

...The few inquiries that have been made at the U.N...

...The Turkish minority fared much better during pre-Communist times, perhaps because the Turks, mostly land-hungry peasants, were not perceived as an economic threat by ethnic Bulgarians...

...Despite decades of pressure against their culture and religion, the Turks obstinately resisted full integration in Communist Bulgaria...

...Very occasionally, groups of Western reporters have been given brief, and carefully chaperoned, tours of villages where Bulgarization was implemented...

...Yet neither he nor other ethnic Turks within the party were aware of the leadership's plans until the Bulgarization offensive actually got under way...

...At the heart of the forced assimila- tion drive is the demand that traditional Turkish names be abandoned for Bulgarian ones...

...Mosques have been closed, on the curious ground that they contained violations of the housing code, and religious schools have been shut down, leading to a serious shortage of imams...

...At the time the name change was prosecuted, the authorities conducted examinations of all male children of ethnic Turks to determine who had and had not been circumcised...

...Oddly enough, much of what was accomplished by force could have been achieved through bureaucratic methods, the state holding total control over jobs, pensions, travel, marriage, and other basic rights of the sort we take for granted...

...The tactics of the campaign were relatively simple...

...Gerrymandering was used to limit the political representation of the ethnic Turks in governmental bodies...

...Those who resisted would be beaten or taken away to special prison camps...

...In an excellent report on the persecution of the Bulgarian Turks, the human rights organization Helsinki Watch published a bibliography which listed nine articles from the American press for the year 1985, when most of the violence associated with the Bulgarization drive occurred...

...A Chicago Tribune reporter who was permitted to spend a few hours in an ethnic Turkish town one year after the climax of the Bulgarization offensive wrote of "grim faced men in leather jackets . . . spaced every few yards" whose "sole task was to listen for anyone speaking Turkish...

...Right now, population growth for ethnic Bulgarians is hovering near zero, a trend shared by European nationalities throughout the Communist world (Poland excepted...

...Failure to comply could result in a fine or imprisonment for the child's father, for the person who carried out the circumcision, and for anyone who had helped to arrange the ritual...

...have been ignored by the Bulgarians, who refused to permit an Islamic Conference delegation to conduct a fact-finding mission...

...the 1965 census was the last to list figures for Turks and other minority groups...

...nother target was the ritual practice of circumcision...

...the Soviets, for example, concocted an entire ethnic group, the Moldavians, to justify the seizure of territory from Romania after World War II...

...Those who prefer the latter explanation can point to countless instances of national and religious strife throughout Balkan history, especially in those areas once controlled by the Ottoman Empire...

...As Interior Minister Dimitar Stoyanov announced: "There are no Turks in Bulgaria...

...A key question is whether Bulgarization is a uniquely Communist phenomenon or a natural outgrowth of the fractionalized racial history of the Balkan peninsula...

...From that time hence, circumcision was banned, and those children who had not been circumcised were reexamined every few months to ensure that the edict had been obeyed...

...While the conditions facing religious leaders in Communist societies are never easy, it nevertheless would appear that the hierarchy of Bulgarian Islam has been more than usually pliant in accepting the regime's policies...

...The first three months of Bulgarization claimed more victims than did the 1953 uprising in East Germany, the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, or the imposition of martial law in Poland...

...In the name of a "unitary, socialist nation," the party leadership has undertaken nothing less than the cultural extermination of the country's largest national minority, the Turks, who make up roughly ten percent of Bulgaria's nine million people...

...This of course has not happened, in Bulgaria or any other Communist society...

...Through the years, Communist regimes have used a variety of techniques to encourage the full assimilation of minority groups...

...Whatever the role of Communism as an ideology in Bulgaria's anti-Turk policies, it is clear that the totalitarianstructure of the state was essential to the successful prosecution of forced assimilation...

...Instead, recent years have brought a steady deterioration of Islam in Bulgaria...

...The short-term costs—a moderate degree of internal disorder and a few words of opprobrium from the free world—will have been more than offset if in a generation or so the very, fact that a Turkish nationality ever existed will have slipped down the memory hole...

...Instead, in Bulgaria we are witnessing one of the purest examples of what black radicals in the United States once referred to as "cultural genocide...

...Here, the absence of sustained press attention has been crucial, a situation for which the media cannot entirely be blamed...

...Bulgaria, by contrast, has no tradition of underground or samizdat literature, something which is even more pronounced among the 18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1987 Turkish minority, which is made up largely of laborers and agricultural workers...

...For example, a Bulgarian report submitted to the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination just a few months before the name change campaign was launched made frequent reference to the cultural rights guaranteed minority nationalities, most prominently the Turks...

...Officially, it seems, nothing unusual has happened in Bulgaria...

...An attitude of cooperation might be understandable if it helped to advance the status of the religion...

...Yet here the Bulgarians appear to have been as successful as the Soviets in smothering nascent fervor for Islam, and there is no evidence that the country's Moslem inhabitants are vulnerable to the siren call of religious fanaticism...

...Typically, the whole disgraceful policy had to be given an ideological rationale...

...The issue is closed...

...More to the point, as a practical matter national differences complicate the task of political and social control...

...in the Soviet Union, the various Asian nationalities continue to reproduce at relatively high levels...

...The party has not only cited God's representatives as sanction for its policies, it has claimed the support of history as well...

...Thus the burden of defending the political and cultural rights of Bulgaria's Turkish minority has largely fallen to the government in Ankara...

...coming of Communism...

...A further testimony to Bulgaria's tolerance was the country's eschewal of the strident anti-Semitism that marked other European countries in the interwar years, and its refusal to cooperate with German demands for delivery of Jews to the death camps...