From: lb@cs.man.ac.uk (Luben Boyanov)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.bulgaria
Subject: Some news about settlements of Bessarab Bulgarians
Date: 6 Sep 92 14:57:33 GMT
Organization: Dept Computer Science, University of Manchester, U.K.

Hi,
This is what I've taken from s.c.t. and thought it may be interesting for
this nesgroup:

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    SOFIA (AUG. 29) - "Our ancestors fled to Moldova from
the Turks, now we are returning from Moldova to replace the
Turks in Bulgaria," says Vladimir Dmitrov, a settler in the
southern town of Kurdjaly.
    Dmitrov is one of the several thousand ethnic Bulgarians
who have left the war-stricken regions of eastern Moldova to
seek a better life in their ancient motherland.
    It was at the end of the 18th century, when Bulgaria was
still under Ottoman occupation, that hundreds of thousands
of Bulgarians fled to Russia and settled in Moldova, close
to the border between the two empires.
    For 200 years they have lived in closed communities
surrounded by Moldovans, Ukrainians and Russians. The
"Bessarab Bulgarians" -- named after the region of Moldova
they live in -- resisted assimilation under the Tzars and
Stalin, and managed to preserve their mother language,
culture and traditional lifestyle.
    Most of them inhabit rural districts and used to make
their living on the old Soviet cooperative farms. Now the
cooperatives are falling apart, and the war between Moldovan
and Russian nationalists has made life a bitter struggle for
survival.
    Many of the Bessarab Bulgarians are now looking at
Bulgaria as a possible safe haven and the first groups of
refugees have now begun arriving back.
    Many of them have arrived in Kurdjaly, a major town
close to the Turkish border, with a mixed population of
Bulgarians and Bulgarian ethnic Turks. Yet, as the Bessarab
Bulgarians return home, many of the ethnic Turks in Kurdjaly
are now returning to Turkey.
    "There are no jobs for us here. We have relatives in
Turkey who promised to help us find work. That is why we are
leaving," said one man as he packed his family's belongings.
    "Our region is not very easy to live in. It is not rich
and the economy is in crisis, so I can understand why people
are leaving for Turkey," says Kurdjaly's Mayor Ivo
Saraliski. "Yet I wonder why the people from Moldova choose
Kurdjaly of all places to settle in."
    Saraliski himself is an ethnic Turk, who chose to keep
his Bulgarian name, even though it was forced on his family
by the old communist authorities.
    His decision demonstrates the way the sensitive ethnic
and political atmosphere influences people's lives in
Kurdjaly. Almost every other Turk in the region took back
his original Turkish name when the communist regime
collapsed.
    Saraliski was elected mayor last autumn with the support
of the Movement for Rights and Freedoms, the Turkish
minority political party, beating the pro-communist
candidate by a few votes.
    Yet it is his supporters who are now leaving Bulgaria.
And his political opponents -- Bulgarian nationalists from
the Fatherland Party of Labor (FPL) and the People's
Committee for the Defense of National Interests -- are
helping Bessarab Bulgarians settle down in mixed areas like
Kurdjaly.
    "We did not choose Kurdjaly by chance," says one
settler. "People from the FPL came to Moldova and promised
to help us find a job there."
    There are several thousand jobless in the city -- both
Bulgarians and ethnic Turks -- and many are now beginning to
ask how the refugees are finding jobs, and cheap flats, as
soon as they arrive.
    Some residents are even saying that the Moldovan
refugees are now being used by nationalists in order to
"ethnically purify" regions with a mixed population.
    Bulgarians are in the slight minority in Kurdjaly, and
ethnic tension is easy to create. On many occasions it has
been the center of ethnic confrontation, which has not yet
spilled over into violence.
    The history of the conflict goes back centuries, but was
strengthened between 1984 and 1985 when the communist
authorities forced the Turks to accept Christian Bulgarian
names and stopped them from speaking Turkish in public
places.
    Today, some Bulgarians still believe that was the right
thing to do. "Let them go and do not let them come back
again," said one man of the ethnic Turks leaving for Turkey.
    It was the international criticism of Bulgarian
treatment of its ethnic minorities which partly lead to
regime's isolation in 1989 and finally helped it come to an
end.
    Unlike other Eastern European countries, the democratic
political forces in Bulgaria did not use nationalism as a
means of fighting communism.
    Yet today the Bulgarian struggle for democracy certainly
faces the threat known to every other post communist country
-- militant nationalism -- and its old ethnic divisions may
yet return to haunt it.
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