/ world today news/ There is a country in which the protection of its minorities in neighboring countries is considered a shameful job. In this country, the first job of every prime minister, president and foreign minister is to promise their neighbors that they will not bother them about the minorities in question.
The country I am talking about is Bulgaria. And judging by the protection of our minority in the Western outskirts, this is not a state, but a territory with diminishing functions.
I am writing these lines because of the still fresh treaty with Macedonia, which turned out to be another fiasco of our Balkan diplomacy. The fanfare was still ringing in Sofia, and the agreement was contested by the Macedonian president Gheorghe Ivanov with his statement that there is no force that will refuse Skopje from Macedonianism.
On the day that Ivanov said out loud what Prime Minister Zoran Zaev did not dare to do, the chairman of the Democratic Union of Bulgarians in the Western Suburbs, Dragolyub Ivanchov, welcomed the treaty. And he wished it to be followed by a similar agreement with the Republic of Serbia.
My poor Ivanchov, as much as the agreement with Macedonia will eradicate Macedonianism and revise the anti-Bulgarian textbooks, a similar agreement with Serbia will make the Western outskirts happy!
But the laudatory declaration also presents facts that cry out for the International Court of Justice in The Hague. From it we learn about “anti-Bulgarian actions of certain political and scientific circles, of the Serbian Orthodox Church, the judiciary and the police”. The brutal behavior of the local authorities, which thwarted the commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the Topli Uprising and the Bosilegrad pogrom of the Serbian army against the local population in these ancient Bulgarian lands, stings in the eyes.
The declaration ends with an unspoken sentence: “The anti-Bulgarian propaganda in Macedonia and the anti-Bulgarian policy in the Western outskirts have been directed and directed by the same center for decades…”
Who is this anti-Bulgarian center? Belgrade, of course, where, in the middle of the 19th century, the “Preliminaries” of the great Serbian strategist Ilija Garašanin, foreseeing the expansion of the Kingdom of Serbia to the Bulgarian lands, were forged.
It is understandable that the Bulgarians in Serbia are afraid to speak out the historical truths. But why are they flinching at the treaty with Macedonia, with which we recognized the Macedonian language printed on a Serbian typewriter, and with it the Macedonian nation invented in the Comintern and its history written in Belgrade?
In fact, the declaration wants to combine two mutually exclusive things – to appease Borissov and the Serbian authorities, but also to remind of the forgotten Western outskirts, which have been under foreign oppression for almost a hundred years. I am referring to the Neue Treaty, which allowed Serbia to occupy the Western outskirts. But both in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and in Tito’s Yugoslavia, national assimilation took place, which reduced the Bulgarians from 160,000 (1919) to 25,000 (2017).
I say all this with pain, because 15 years of my work in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the NRS were dedicated to our cause in Macedonia and the Western outskirts. Fifteen years, during which the few enthusiasts in intelligence and diplomacy supported the Bulgarians in Serbia and internationalized the issue at the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva.
I am sharing this once closely guarded secret because the Dossier Commission received the work files of the Yugoslav Department of PGU-DS and everyone can verify the truth of what is written here. If they dig into these files, the enemies of the cops will sprinkle their heads with ashes, and maybe they will take off the hats of officers from the 17th department of PGU and NRS, now called informers.
I’ll say it straight – from 1985 to 1995, our scorned intelligence did a terrible job (often without sanction from the Central Committee of the BKP and the governments of Lukanov and Berov) to awaken the Bulgarian spirit in the Western outskirts. This mission was cut short in 1996 when Jean Videnov rebuked the nationalists, saying that the correct name for the Western outskirts was “Eastern Serbia”.
After the prime minister’s retort with the rank of a directive, the “Yugoslav Department” in the NRS quietly lowered the flags and dismissed the nationalists with epaulettes, and the Balkan Sector in the Foreign Office simply capitulated. Taking advantage of our nihilism, in 1995, the Serbian ambassador in Geneva submitted a note to the UN requesting the recognition of a Serbian-Shop minority in Bulgaria. As the height of impudence, a textbook on… the Shopian language was attached to the note.
That was twenty years ago. What’s different today?
In the first management mandate of GERB, Prime Minister Borisov, Speaker of the National Assembly Tsetska Tsacheva and Foreign Minister Nikolay Mladenov declared that they support Serbia’s European path.
On March 1, 2012, the Prime Minister gave his consent for Serbia to start negotiations for membership in the European Union. At the EU summit, Borissov announced this decision without ever raising the issue of the discriminated Bulgarians in the Western suburbs. The next day, Serbian President Boris Tadic had a telephone conversation with Borisov and thanked him for his unconditional support.
But on April 15 this year Vice President Margarita Popova visited Bosilegrad and delivered a speech that shocked the Serbian authorities. Without considering GERB, Popova declared: “Serbia cannot become a member of the European Union, has it not taken care of the Bulgarian community in the Western outskirts!”
The Serbian ambassador in Sofia quickly visited the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and nervously asked: Should we believe your prime minister, who promised President Tadic unreserved support, or your vice president?
Foreign officials reassured him: Foreign policy is not driven by the presidency, but by Minister Mladenov, and he remains your friend!
In three separate resolutions, the European Parliament warned Serbia, Montenegro and Kosovo that they would only enter the European Union if they respected the rights of minority groups On 17 April 2012, MEPs reminded the Serbian government that EU accession negotiations were impossible if discriminates against minorities. Instead of immediately setting conditions for the Western outskirts, Sofia remained silent.
In 2013, Serbian President Tomislav Nikolic visited us and received a free gift from the hosts. The president and the prime minister competed to promise him EU membership, with Plevneliev childishly guaranteeing that “we will fight for Serbian European integration…”
A week before Nikolic embraced Plevneliev, the Bulgarian Cultural and Information Center in Bosilegrad reported something monstrous. On the occasion of the centenary of the Inter-Allied War, the restoration of graves of Bulgarian soldiers began in Bosilegrad. Dimitar Dimitrov cleared of rubbish the graves of officers shot by the Serbian army: colonel Hilarion Tanev, lieutenant Stefan Stefanov, sanitary lieutenant Stefan Kotev, non-commissioned officer Hristo Vladev, lieutenant Asen Binkov…
Two Serbian police officers arrest him and hand him a summons for questioning – for a crime under Art. 354, para. 1, of the Criminal Code of Serbia (damaging a grave). At the same time, the Serbian Orthodox Church expelled the Bulgarian priest from Bosilegrad and appointed in his place a Serbian priest from Nis to lead church services in Serbian.
Again, out of brotherly and Orthodox love, every September 8, declared “Day of the liberation of Bosilegrad from the Bulgarian fascist occupation”, the local communist organization celebrates “the great date in the history of the city”.
But that’s not all. At the beginning of the last school year, two new classes were closed in Bosilegrad, in which the teaching was conducted in Bulgarian. The reason – lack of Bulgarian textbooks.
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After the Bosilegrad ultimatum of Margarita Popova, the NFSB issued a declaration in which it announced: Serbia cannot become a member of the EU if the Bulgarians in the Western outskirts do not receive the minority rights of the Hungarians in Vojvodina!
Five years after this declaration, which was included in the election program of the Patriotic Front in 2014, the NFSB is in power, and its chairman is the deputy prime minister. From then until today, the situation in the Western suburbs has not changed at all, it has even worsened.
I know that the authorities will not listen to me. But I am obliged to warn: If we sign with Belgrade the same “historical treaty” with which we capitulated to the Macedonians in Skopje, the Serbs in the Western suburbs will be the new minority in Serbia!
Weekend newspaper
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