The Bulgarians Know How Wonderful turks Are

[Gavur]

Armenia and Bulgaria Signed Memorandum on Cooperation in Euro-Atlantic Structures

08.12.2005 20:10 GMT+04:00
/PanARMENIAN.Net/ Armenian FM Vartan Oskanian continues his visit to European structures, reported the Press Service of the Armenian MFA. December 7 Mr. Oskanian and Bulgarian FM Ivailo Kalfin signed a memorandum on cooperation between the Armenian and Bulgarian Governments in European integration and within Euro-Atlantic structures. By means of the memorandum the parties express their readiness to continue active cooperation within the OSCE and strengthen the role of the organization as a conflict settlement tool in the OSCE region, including the South Caucasus. The parties also bind themselves to encourage mutual cooperation in European integration, aimed at successful development of cooperation between Armenia and the EU and promote Armenia's efforts to develop cooperation with the NATO. The memorandum also provides for establishment of cooperation within the European Neighborhood Policy, aimed at development of actions for full use of Armenia's potential.

[Gavur]

Bulgaria Marks April Uprising 130th Anniversary

http://www.novinite.com/view_news.php?id=62802

[ScythianVizier]

The Bulgaria deported more than one million muslims and Turks to Turkey after 1923. In 1878, they did ally with the Russians and Cossacks, and killed unknown thousands of Ottoman muslims there. The numbers range from one source to another but many argue that muslim people who were killed or deported from Bulgaria exceeded millions in the last decades of the 19th Century.

"1. Turks

After Bulgaria’s liberation in 1878, there was an initial period during which the authorities launched a policy of ethnic cleansing. This resulted in mass either forced or voluntary departure of Turkish-Muslim population from Bulgaria to Turkey, which appeared the natural successor of the Ottoman Empire. The first official census conducted in 1881 in the Principality of Bulgaria revealed that the ethnic Turks—the dominant ethos until recently—constituted only 26,96% (or 2,007,919 persons) of the Principality’s total population, and the Turkish population in Eastern Romelia enumerated 240,053 people, or 34,5 % of the entire population of the province.

The emigration waves of Turks from Bulgaria continued intensively in the following years as well under the pressure of hostile nationalism in the state. Thus, from 26% in 1881, the Turks dwindled to 19% in 1887, and to a mere 4% of the total population in 1900. According to foreign sources, the number of Turkish-Muslim emigrants that left Bulgaria only in the period 1878-1912 varies between 1-1,5 million people. This figure is incomparably lower according to Bulgarian sources – 350,000 persons. Thus, it is hard to argue on what the true number of Muslim emigrants at the time was. However, it remains a fact that for a comparatively short period of time in the newest Bulgarian history the Turkish-Muslim population in the country was dramatically reduced.

Further statistics show that 70,603 Turks/Muslims departed from Bulgaria between 1893 and 1902; 198,688 - in the period 1923–1939; and 21,353 – between 1940 and 1944. By 1934, the Turkish minority in Bulgaria constituted less that 10% of the country’s total population, which percentage remains unchanged at present.

During the Communist regime the Turks in Bulgaria experienced three other emigration waves over a period of time, namely: 1950-1951, 1969-1978, and in 1989 and onwards. Before the start of the first one, the then First Party Secretary and Prime Minister, Todor Zhivkov, handed a note to the Turkish government in which he demanded that Turkey accepts 250,000 Turks from Bulgaria within a three-month period. A total of 212,150 entry visas to Turkey were issued by the Turkish consulate in Bulgaria between 1 January, 1950 and 30 September, 1951, but only 154,393 of the Turkish-Muslim migrants are able to leave for Turkey. Simsir informs that every month approximately 5,000 Turkish-Muslim families (or 20,000 people) striped of property entered Turkey only during the months of December, January and February 1950-1951. Being financially unprepared to meet such an influx of poor Bulgarian migrants, Turkey closed its borders on 8 November 1951, and as a response, the Bulgarian government banned migration and in November 1951 started a campaign of passport confiscation.

The second wave started in 1969 (and continued actively by 1978) as a result of the conscious fear of the Bulgarian Turks of forced assimilation, a process that was already launched against the Pomak Muslims in the early 1970s and brought to an end shortly afterwards (1970-1974). However, the 1969-1978 wave is known as the “emigration of close relatives”, because the suddenly interrupted inflow of Turks/Muslims in November 1951 left many families divided. Thus, about 70,000 of the persons who received migrant visa remained in Bulgaria without being able to leave. These and other people (with at least one family member in Turkey) started to collect and submit petitions in which they requested the Bulgarian authorities to allow them to migrate. Thus, by March 1964 the number of Bulgarian Turks and other Muslims who had singed the petitions reached 400,000 persons. Finally, due to this pressure the Bulgarian and Turkish authorities met in Ankara and signed a migration agreement on 22 March, 1968. According to this agreement only very close relatives were eligible for immigration: spouses, parents, grandparents, children/grandchildren and their spouses and children, as well as unmarried siblings (married siblings were excluded). The agreement included providing opportunities for potential migrants to take their possessions with them or sell them and keep the money. The Turkish authorities expected an inflow of about 25-30,000 Bulgarian Turks/Muslims, who – in accordance with the agreement – would bring their property with them. However, as Bulgaria started to break away from the 1968 agreement, it almost expelled its Turks with no property at all. More than 130,000 persons emigrated from Bulgaria in the course of 10 years (between 1969 and 1979).

The third and most frustrating emigration wave for the Bulgarian Turks—the so-called “Big Excursion” (summer of 1989)—was a direct consequence of the so called “Revival Process” against them, when they were forcedly deprived of their names and identity (1984-1985). Declassified archive documents from that time reveal that the then Communist authorities planned to get rid of 200-300,000 Turks by expelling them from the their home country. More than 350,000 Bulgarian Turks left the country in the summer of 1989, about 100,000 of which later returned.

The emigration of ethnic Turkish population (and not only ethnic Turkish) in and out of Bulgaria continues to this day, however, this movement is now economically motivated and in most cases temporary in nature."

2. Pomaks

"While no sharp controversy exists in Bulgaria as to the roots of the Turks or the Roma Muslims, there is such a phenomenon in respect to the Bulgarian-speaking Muslims (or Pomaks). The complexity of the problem related to their origins is generated primarily by the fact that three countries--Bulgaria, Turkey and Greece--have historically had their own theories on the matter, promoted in unison with their national interests. In Bulgaria the Pomak population is referred to as both “Bulgarian Mohammedans” and “Pomaks” (the second is used in pejorative terms). Bulgaria’s body politic prefers the name Bulgarian Mohammedans (or rarer Bulgarian Muslims), partly due to cherished nationalistic convictions. The name “Bulgarian Mohammedans” is meant to reflect the thesis that the Pomak Muslims used to be Bulgarians Christians subjected in the past to forced Islamisation.

The “forced Islamisation” thesis promotes the idea that the population of the Rhodopes—the primary area of settlement of the Pomak Muslims—was exposed to violent “Turkisation” undertaken in different periods during the 500-year “Ottoman yoke”. It is stated that “[i]n the earliest period of the Ottoman conquest, … conversion took place through the institution of slavery and through the so-called “natural Islamisation.” The pointed forms of “natural Islamisation” were different. It is said that “the Ottomans kidnapped people from the indigenous population and turned them into slaves, [which] were either forced to convert, or were “attracted” to the new faith by their masters’ promoting them to the status of “free people”--[a practice called atik, or muatik]. Former slaves were given land and relative freedom … [provided that] they converted to Islam.” Other forms of “forced Islamisation” were said to have been kidnapping women from the local population, who were later converted to Islam, as well as practising the so-called devshirme, i.e. recruiting Christian boys to the military Ottoman janissary troops.

There is also a “voluntary Islamisation” thesis, accepted by some Bulgarian historiographers, which, however, is far less promoted, although it is more firmly grounded both logically and scientifically. This thesis premises that factors like “poverty and … [desire] for higher social status were the normal reasons for the adoption of Islam [as] Muslims had … [many] financial advantages in comparison to the rest of the population. [For example they] did not pay the cizie tax, …[which is said to have been as high as to provide for] a third to a half of the Ottoman state budget.” Moreover, as mentioned above, Muslims in the Ottoman Empire were allowed to join the military which opened opportunities for high-ranked and financially profitable positions, while the non-Muslims were prevented from doing so.

Turkey’s version of the Pomak Muslims’ origin took quite another direction. Some Turkish scholars claimed that that population has nothing to do with the Bulgarians, but were descendants of the “Cumano-Cupchag Turks”, which started to invade and settle into the Balkans around 1065 AD, during the reign of the Byzantian emperor Kantakouzin. The first settlers were said to have come from today’s Turkish area of Konya, led by Chaka Beg and Gazzi Omur Beg, and to have occupied the territories of the Rhodopes, Macedonia and Tessalia. During the following centuries compact masses of Yuruks (from Salhan and Manissa), as well as Avars, Huns, Pechenegs, and Cumano-Pecenegs—coming from different parts of Eastern Europe into the Balkans after the collapse of the “Turkic Cumano-Peceneg Union” in XI century—arrived in the area and after settling among the local population gave birth to the “Pomak Turks.” Thus, when the Ottoman Turks invaded the Balkans in 1358, they encountered the Muslim-Turkic-Cumano-Peceneg population of the Rhodopes.

Greece, whose northern territories were inhabited by compact masses of Pomak Muslims, has its own explanation. It argues that the Bulgarian-speaking Muslims “were descendants of the Thracians and the Ancient Greeks.” Thus, the claim goes that the native population was first Hellenised, then Latinised, Slavicised, Christianised and finally Islamised. However, part of it, which lived isolated in the mountainous area of the Rhodopes, remained almost untouched, and these people are “the purest” descendants of the Ancients.

Considering the above and other theories on the origin of the Pomak Muslims, it seems impossible to reach whatever consensus in the midst of such controversy. As a result, gross speculations infringing upon the image and the basic human rights of this community are spread and promoted at present. For example, the majority of ethnic Bulgarians who share the belief that the Pomak Muslims are Turkicised Bulgarians tends to look down on them conceiving them as “traitors of the faith”, “apostates”, and others. The result is ethnic tension, prejudice and discrimination against this population. The artificial maintenance of this situation is deeply at odds with international norms for minority rights protection and non-discrimination and thus all attempts to impose an ethnic identity on the community in question (on any community) are to be avoided as unauthorised. As the Bulgarian-speaking Muslims think of themselves first and foremost as Muslims, this will be the basic feature of reference in the course of this paper. The name “Pomak” in the report is used, above all, to emphasise the distinctness of the Bulgarian-speaking Muslims as a group, and is preferred, because it is the only name currently spread, which is capable of reflecting that distinctness."

3. Roma Muslims

"According to the Ottoman tax register from 1522–1523, there were 10,294 Christian and 2,694 Muslim Romani households in the Empire (these numbers refer only to the settled tax-paying households), and an additional 2,694 Muslim households accompanying the army. Calculations made on the basis of this register showed the following allocation of the Romani households on the Balkans by countries: Turkey – 3,195; Greece – 2,512; Albania – 374; former Yugoslavia – 4,382; and Bulgaria – 5,701, which forms a total of 16,591 households. It is interesting to note that the number of Romani families in Bulgaria is incomparably greater that the one in the other Balkan countries in the early XVI century.

After Bulgaria’s independence (1878), more regular population censuses started to be conducted and thus the number of Roma in the country became more regularly recorded. The first censuses in the Principality of Bulgaria and Eastern Roumelia, undertaken in 1881 and 1885 respectively, revealed that there were 37,600 Roma in the Principality (which constituted 1,87% of its total population) and 26,724—in Roumelia (or 2,83% of the Province’s population). The next several censuses depicted the following results: 1905 census—99,004 Roma; 1910—122,296 Roma; 1921—98,451 Roma; and 1926—134,844 Roma. About 2/3 of all Roma at the time lived entirely in villages, and only 1/3--in segregated Romani neighbourhoods in smaller towns around Bulgaria. That situation remained unchanged by the time of the Communists’ coming into power and their initial years of ruling, when more Roma had the opportunity to settle in big cities.

As all other Muslims (except for the majority of Turks, which avoided that by the early 1980s) in Bulgaria, Roma Muslims also experienced several forced assimilation campaigns against them. Their names and religion were repeatedly changed in pre-Communist Bulgaria.

4. The Muslim community in the post-Ottoman period (1878-1944)

"The legal and political framework of the attitude of the Bulgarian authorities towards the Muslim community on the whole and in the period from the 1878 Liberation to the Second World War can best be described with the word inconsistency. On one hand, the post-Ottoman time was a time when the Muslims in Bulgaria enjoyed the necessary rights and privileges of autonomous religious existence, but on the other hand, the moments of genuine human rights upheaval were often short–lived. Freedom was frequently replaced by periods of tightened state control and reduced to vanishing-point minority rights in accordance with the government-of-the-day’s interests and moods. The Bulgarian historian, Georgeta Nazarska, reckons that this unstable attitude towards the Bulgarian Muslims was prompted by the fact that after the Liberation, the Bulgarians, more than ever before, “identif[ied] themselves as Christians and Orthodox Christians, [and took] a hostile position towards all that is non-Bulgarian, non-Christian, and non-Orthodox.” Thus, the Muslim community, represented mainly by Turks, was exposed to treatment inconsistent and controversial in its nature, dependent on the state policies, which were often marked by nationalistic hostility.

The status of the Muslim community in Bulgaria after the 1878 independence from Ottoman rule was regulated by an array of unilateral and multilateral treaties, as well as a number of relevant domestic documents. The most significant among those instruments were the Treaty of Berlin (13 July 1878); Treaty of Neuilly (27 November 1919), Provisional Regulations for the Spiritual Administration of Christians, Muslims and Jews (9 July 1980); Provisional Regulations for the Spiritual Administration of Muslims (26 September 1885); and Agreement of Constantinople (6 April 1909); Statute on the Spiritual Administration of the Muslims in the Kingdom of Bulgaria (26 June 1919); Statute on the Restriction of Shari’a Courts’ Jurisdiction (20 July 1938); etc. Due to the frequent confrontation between treaties--imposing on Bulgaria one kind of obligations related to minority rights protection, and the domestic legislation—which was often aimed at limiting the privileges of the Muslims, a precarious environment was created where the Muslim community either enjoyed considerable autonomy, or was tightly controlled and manipulated by the state."

Extracted from: http://bghelsinki.org/special/en/2003_Muslims_fm.doc

[yigitp91]

lol just block everybody yeah??* dont be jealous of turks...We had the great ottoman empire and we owned armenians... If you kill turks, u die like this!! End of the conversation...

[Joseph]

lol just block everybody yeah??* dont be jealous of turks...We had the great ottoman empire and we owned armenians... If you kill turks, u die like this!! End of the conversation...

yigitp91 sounds like a very reasonable person, see if all the Turks were like him, it just proves that they would never commit genocide. They are all about peace and love.

[ScythianVizier]

The Armenian Genocide is sometimes wrongly referred to as ‘the first European genocide of the twentieth century’. Yet in the Balkan wars of 1912-1913, the Christian states of Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece and Montenegro partitioned the Ottoman territories in Europe and slaughtered or expelled much of the Muslim population in the process. As the journalist Leon Trotsky, who reported on the Balkan Wars, wrote at the time, ‘the Bulgars in Macedonia, the Serbs in Old Serbia, in their national endeavour to correct data in the ethnographical statistics that are not quite favourable to them, are engaged quite simply in systematic extermination of the Muslim population in the villages, towns and districts[.]’ The ethnic cleansing practised by the Christian Balkan states acted as a decisive influence on the CUP to adopt similar methods. The Armenian rebels who fought alongside the Russians against the Ottomans in World War I, and the Greeks who invaded Anatolia under Lloyd George’s guidance, carried out systematic atrocities against Turkish Muslims. Yet neither Greece nor Bulgaria has been pressed to acknowledge these crimes as the price of membership of the EU; nor have European parliamentary resolutions recognised them.

http://zope06.v.servelocity.net/hjs/sections/greater_europe/document.2005-09-29.8090352715

[Joseph]

The Armenian Genocide is sometimes wrongly referred to as ‘the first European genocide of the twentieth century’. Yet in the Balkan wars of 1912-1913, the Christian states of Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece and Montenegro partitioned the Ottoman territories in Europe and slaughtered or expelled much of the Muslim population in the process. As the journalist Leon Trotsky, who reported on the Balkan Wars, wrote at the time, ‘the Bulgars in Macedonia, the Serbs in Old Serbia, in their national endeavour to correct data in the ethnographical statistics that are not quite favourable to them, are engaged quite simply in systematic extermination of the Muslim population in the villages, towns and districts[.]’ The ethnic cleansing practised by the Christian Balkan states acted as a decisive influence on the CUP to adopt similar methods. The Armenian rebels who fought alongside the Russians against the Ottomans in World War I, and the Greeks who invaded Anatolia under Lloyd George’s guidance, carried out systematic atrocities against Turkish Muslims. Yet neither Greece nor Bulgaria has been pressed to acknowledge these crimes as the price of membership of the EU; nor have European parliamentary resolutions recognised them.

http://zope06.v.servelocity.net/hjs/...-29.8090352715

There's the U.N. definition of genocide and then the Turkish one.
By using the Turkish definition of genocide, I'm going to prove that no genocides have every occured.

1. If any member of the victim group rebels, fights back, defends himself, etc. than it can no longer been defined as a genocide. To considered as a genocide victim, one group of people must willingly submit to slaughter wholesale:

This means that Warsaw uprising omits the Jews from being genocide victims. Bosnians fought back so there were not genocide victims. Algerians were then rebelling (and look, many of them now live in France!)

2. Since the term genocide was coined in 1948, any genocidal events prior to the terms institution cannot be considered genocide.

This omits the African slavery, the genocide of native americans. Not only that, the massacre of the American Indians was not well-documented. How are we to believe the victims accounts?

[ScythianVizier]

There's the U.N. definition of genocide and then the Turkish one.
By using the Turkish definition of genocide, I'm going to prove that no genocides have every occured.

1. If any member of the victim group rebels, fights back, defends himself, etc. than it can no longer been defined as a genocide. To considered as a genocide victim, one group of people must willingly submit to slaughter wholesale:

This means that Warsaw uprising omits the Jews from being genocide victims. Bosnians fought back so there were not genocide victims. Algerians were then rebelling (and look, many of them now live in France!)

2. Since the term genocide was coined in 1948, any genocidal events prior to the terms institution cannot be considered genocide.

This omits the African slavery, the genocide of native americans. Not only that, the massacre of the American Indians was not well-documented. How are we to believe the victims accounts?

Well, if you wish to deny them, then do it openly. However, your denial (as well as the western ones) will also result in identical reaction to the problems (as witnessed until today).

[Joseph]

Well, if you wish to deny them, then do it openly. However, your denial (as well as the western ones) will also result in identical reaction to the problems (as witnessed until today).

I was being sarcastic. I do not deny those genocides. What I was doing is using the official Turkish logic criteria to deny the Armeian Genocide versus others to show the that official Turkish arguements are erroneous

[ScythianVizier]

I was being sarcastic. I do not deny those genocides. What I was doing is using the official Turkish logic criteria to deny the Armeian Genocide versus others to show the that official Turkish arguements are erroneous

Ok...