UN General Assembly
2010

There are cynics who say that the world cannot live together, that for peace to exist we must build walls of separation between peoples, religions and ethnic communities; cynics who say that civilizations must clash. I come from a country that is in a turbulent part of the world, yet we have managed to prove that people of different religions — Christians, Muslims and Jews, and of different ethnicities — Bulgarians, Turks and Armenians, can live together. Bulgaria has seen stellar moments in its history, for example, when civil society rose during the Second World War and refused to allow its Jewish population to be sent to concentration camps, or when it integrated its Turkish population after the end of communism. But, it has also seen its dark moments — when it failed to save the Jewish populations of occupied Northern Greece and Vardar Macedonia, or when the Communist regime expelled a large part of our Muslim citizens to Turkey. Our history has taught us to be able to distinguish between good and bad. Our history proves