/ world today news/ Turks in Bulgaria are subjected to assimilation and this is state policy, the chairman of the parliamentary commission on human rights in Ankara, Mustafa Yeneroglu, said in a written statement distributed to the media.
Yeneroglu points out that over 585,000 Turks live in Bulgaria, but their real number exceeds 1 million people, as not all of them were included in the census and registers.
“These compatriots of ours are subjected to separatism, they lose their mother tongue, their mosques are often attacked. In schools, the Turkish language is an optional subject and its lessons are deliberately held late in the school day. This situation means belittling and humiliating the mother tongue. On the other hand, the state power does not provide an opportunity to broadcast news in Turkish and blocks the creation of a Turkish radio, which proves that the policy of assimilation in Bulgaria continues. Another big problem is the pressure and attacks on mosques and imams. Turks in Bulgaria are excluded from representation in state structures and this is so, despite their serious presence in the general population of the country,” Yeneroglu believes.
According to him, the participation of far-right parties in the governance of Bulgaria is a guarantee of new future problems for Turks and Muslims, and thus the country is seriously moving away from European norms and criteria.
“Unfortunately, 28 years after the forcible removal of their birth names, the Turks in Bulgaria cannot heal their wounds. Turkey did everything possible to help them. Now it is our duty to excavate these bitter facts from memory and pass them on to future generations so that they will not be forgotten. This will help to realize the consequences of the tension experienced by the community in the recent past, as well as the events before it, which are the result of the assimilation policy,” the chairman of the Human Rights Committee of the Turkish Parliament emphasizes in his statement.
He recalled the resistance of the Turks to the “revival process” of May 1989, when the border was opened to the flow of refugees.
“Thousands of families were then separated, and over 350,000 people were torn from their land, which they have inhabited for hundreds of years. The fascist government of the time implemented its assimilation policy because it was worried about the strength of the Turkish-Muslim population and decided to melt down the ethnic minorities by grossly trampling on their human rights. In that difficult period, a ban was imposed on the use and teaching of the Turkish language, on Islamic rites at funerals and weddings, sunnets (boy circumcision) and clothing were banned. But the people chose the right path to Turkey,” Yeneroglu emphasizes.
Ankara / Turkey
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