Turkish Assimilation Campaign in Bulgaria 1984-1985

Between December 1984 and March 1985, all ethnic Turks in Bulgaria were forced to assume Bulgarian names. The effort began in the Turkish villages of the eastern Rhodope region but quickly spread to central and northeastern Bulgaria. The campaign capped a twenty-five-year government effort to assimilate the country's largest minorities, the Macedonians, Pomarks, Gypsies, and Turks. The attempt to change the names of most of Bulgaria's approximately one million Turks, in the course of two weeks in 1984-85, demonstrated both the continuing capacity of the ruling Bulgarian Communist Party, under the longtime leadership of Todor Zhivkov, to engage in large-scale repression and hinted at an increasingly desperate search for legitimacy by pandering to extreme nationalism.

While the official motivation behind the Turkish assimilation campaign of 1984-85 remains unclear; one major factor may have been the disproportion between the birth rates of the Turks and the Bulgarians. The birth rate for Turks was about 2 percent at the time of the campaign, while the Bulgarian rate was barely above zero. The upcoming census, scheduled for December 1985, would have revealed this disparity, which could have been construed as a failure of Zhivkov government policy.

The assimilation program forced all Turks and other Muslims in Bulgaria to adopt Bulgarian (Christian or traditional Slavic) names and renounce all Muslim customs. Bulgaria no longer recognized the Turks as a national minority, explaining that all the Muslims in Bulgaria were descended from Bulgarians who had been forced into the Islamic faith by the Ottoman Turks. The Muslims would therefore "voluntarily" take new names as part of the "rebirth process" by which they would reclaim their Bulgarian identities. During the height of the assimilation campaign, the Turkish government claimed that 1.5 million Turks resided in Bulgaria, while the Bulgarians claimed there were none. (In 1986 Amnesty International estimated that 900,000 ethnic Turks were living in Bulgaria.)

During the name-changing phase of the campaign, Turkish towns and villages were surrounded by army units. Citizens were issued new identity cards with Bulgarian names. Failure to present a new card meant forfeiture of salary, pension payments, and bank withdrawals. Birth or marriage certificates would be issued only in Bulgarian names. Traditional Turkish costumes were banned; homes were searched and all signs of Turkish identity removed. Mosques were closed. State Security (Durzhavna sigurnost, DS), People's Militia, Red Berets, and the army were reported as using violence against ethnic Turks who resisted adopting Bulgarian names in place of their Turkish ones. According to estimates, 300 to 1500 people were killed when they resisted assimilation measures, and thousands of others were tortured, arrested, imprisoned, sent to labor camps or were forcibly resettled for refusing to cooperate with the assimilation measures.

In early March 1985 the government confidently announced that Bulgaria was a homogenous one-nation state. A strong international outcry against Sofia's anti-Turkish policies neutralized the effectiveness of some aspects of the campaign and contributed to an atmosphere of unrest that helped to bring down the Zhikov regime in 1989.

References

Turkish & Other Muslim Minorities of Bulgaria, 8; Bulgaria: The Uneven Transition, 31; History of the Gypsies of Eastern Europe and Russia, 26; Bulgaria - A Country Study.

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