Fwd: The Boston Globe on Bulgaria and the Balkans

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Date: Wed, 14 Apr 1999 09:31:33 +0300 (EET DST)
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Subject: Fwd: The Boston Globe on Bulgaria and the Balkans

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Original sender: Pavel Antonov <[email protected]>

Fwd: The Boston Globe on Bulgaria and the Balkans


Dear Friends,

Please, find an interesting comparative article on Bulgaria and the
Balkans.

All the best.

===
Pavel P Antonov
Editor and Project Co-ordinator
BlueLink Information Network
tel. 359 2 313 409
fax 359 2 466 062
http://www.bluelink.net/
 
-------------------------------------------------------------
 
Bulgaria avoided the bombs of hate
 
By Elizabeth Pond, 04/10/99
 
Serbia and Bulgaria are twins.
 
Both have grand imperial histories that hark back to medieval times.
As everyone knows, the cradle of Serbian identity, religion, and
statehood was Kosovo. As hardly anyone knows, the cradle of Bulgarian
identity, religion, and statehood was Macedonia.
 
Both of these great nations were subjugated by the Ottoman Empire in
the 14th century, Serbia at the Ravens Field in Kosovo. And if
Bulgaria had not been conquered in Macedonia but on the Danube, it was
only because Macedonia had already fallen to the Serbian empire. Both
broke free from the Turks only half a millennium later.
 
Yet today the twins react utterly differently. Serbs are rallying to
defend their honor and pride in Kosovo by exterminating Kosovar
Albanian men and driving out women and children. Bulgarians are
defending their honor and pride by renouncing old-fashioned ethnic
hatred and achieving reconciliation with hallowed but independent
Macedonia for the first time after 86 successive years of hostility.
 
Why the difference?
 
For the Serbs the answer is simple: Yugoslav President Slobodan
Milosevic. Beginning in the late 1980s he worked assiduously over two
years to destroy Belgrade's liberal tolerance and sophistication and
replace it with the atavistic thirst for revenge of the 19th-century
Balkan village.
 
For the Bulgarians the answer is more complex and more hopeful.
Despite all the solemn pronouncements about age-old Balkan feuds, the
Bulgarian example suggests that the Serbs' war reflex was not
preordained - no fatal gene condemns the Balkans to perpetuate
barbarity forever. As Bulgarian Deputy Foreign Minister Georgi
Dimitrov puts it, it is possible to demythologize the past and show
that "southeastern Europe is not accursed."
 
The Bulgarian demythologizing of history did not follow a straight
line. Indeed, at the same time that Serbian Communist leader Milosevic
was fanning Serbian xenophobia, the old Communist leadership in Sofia
was doing the same thing in Bulgaria. It began persecuting ethnic
Turks whose families had lived in Bulgaria for generations. It forced
them to slavicize their names. In an early example of ethnic
cleansing, it eventually expelled some 350,000 of them, about half of
the whole community. For good measure, it closed mosques and stopped
Turkish-language instruction in schools.
 
Many Bulgarians initially responded to this populism with as much
fervor as Serbs did to Milosevic. When the Communists fell and the
successor government welcomed back Turks who had been exiled, there
were daily anti-Turkish demonstrations outside the Education Ministry.
Violence was threatened against returnees, especially by those
Bulgarians who had taken over neighbors' houses or shops during the
earlier campaign and feared retaliation.
 
Yet the bombs of hate never exploded in Bulgaria the way they did in
Serbia, for two reasons. First, astonishingly, an infant civil society
mounted a courageous crusade against xenophobia and won.
 
Second, there was a democratic backlash against the ex-Communists, who
ruled without real reform from the early 1990s until 1997 and ruined
the Bulgarian economy with hyperinflation. Mass protests forced early
elections, and the vote gave the center right a stable majority two
years ago. That government, besides instituting tough economic reform,
deliberately mended fences with Turkey after six centuries and, as of
a month ago, with the old foe of Macedonia.
 
Antonina Zhelyazkova, chairman of the International Center for
Minority Studies and Intercultural Relations in Sofia, explains how
the activists helped pull the public mood back from the verge of
bloodshed. She and her colleagues, despite receiving death threats and
being branded traitors, traveled throughout the country to calm people
down. They managed to get onto Bulgarian television prime time and to
set up telephone hot lines. Appealing to the more positive tradition
of Bulgarian generosity, the peacemakers preached that Bulgaria had
saved its Jews in the Nazi era and sheltered Armenians half a century
before that. Bulgarians should be proud of this reputation and not
squander it, they urged.
 
The appeal worked, Zhelyazkova relates. Today's opinion polls "show
how negative stereotypes are disappearing." In the 1990s "for the
first time, Bulgarians are concluding that the Turks are part of the
Bulgarian nation and are entitled to equality and participation in
political and economic life."
 
The present government then translated the growing domestic tolerance
into a new foreign tolerance. Two years ago the Bulgarian president
apologized in Turkey for Sofia's earlier persecution of ethnic Turks.
Last year the prime minister struck up a warm friendship with his
Turkish counterpart and solicited Turkish investment in Bulgaria.
Sofia also took the initiative to establish periodic pan-Balkan
consultations and even a joint peacekeeping brigade that as of
September will include both Turks and Greeks, as well as Bulgarians,
Romanians, and others.
 
Psychologically, the reconciliation with Macedonia was even harder
than the Bulgarian-Turkish reconciliation, of course. But last
February, Sofia finally recognized Macedonian de facto as a language
of its own, and not just a dialect of Bulgarian, while Skopje finally
waived all claim to speak for a Macedonian minority in Bulgaria. As a
good-will gesture, Sofia presented several hundred decommissioned
tanks and artillery pieces to Skopje's ill-equipped army.
 
Significantly, this moderation is popular in Bulgaria. A
standing-room-only crowd of 2,000 in Sofia applauded the Bulgarian and
Macedonian prime ministers after they signed their agreements. Voters
regard the reconciliation not as a betrayal of Bulgaria's honor - as
many Serbs seem to view any compromise with the Kosovar Albanians -
but rather as a sign that they too have entered the modern world.
 
The Bulgarians proudly call this new mentality civilized, European, or
even trans-Atlantic. The Serbs do not.
 
Elizabeth Pond is a journalist based in Germany.
This story ran on page A23 of the Boston Globe on 04/10/99.
Copyright 1999 Globe Newspaper Company.

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