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Persecution Haunts Bulgaria Muslims: Regime Unleashing A Ruthless Campaign
7 June 2009
(Reuters) A woman and her child walk in the Muslim village of Ribnovo, south of Sofia Twenty years ago, Mustafa Yumer witnessed Bulgaria's then-communist regime unleashing a ruthless campaign against the country's Muslim minority. Today, he is among many who fear the nightmare is coming to haunt Muslims all over again. "We are all very worried," the 65-year-old Muslim philosopher, who led resistance and hunger strikes against the communist regime's a drive to force Muslims to adopt ethnic Bulgarian names in 1989, told Reuters on Monday, June 1. Anti-Muslim rhetoric by both ultranationalist and rightist parties has gained steam in the southeastern European country lately, particularly ahead of the July 5 general polls. "People are scared by far-right parties who preach and want to see Bulgaria becoming a single ethnic nation," said Yumer. Many right-wing politicians are waging fierce xenophobic campaigns targeting the Muslim community, accusing it of aiming at creating autonomous enclaves and that some of their villages are nests for radical Islam. "If we sit and don't work like Bulgarian patriots, one day they will conquer us indeed. They will annex whole regions; Volen Siderov, Bulgaria's most outspoken nationalist, told an election rally recently, referring to Muslims. Experts also fear that the growing anti-Muslim rhetoric is using the old ethnic hatred card all over again, something the country has suffered from decades ago. It seems that the ethnic issues are exploited by two groups mainly," said Boriana Dimitrova of Alpha Research, an independent polling company. The communist regime, which collapsed in 1989, had banned Muslims from practicing their religious rites and forced them to adopt Slavonic names. Bulgaria is the only EU state where Muslims are not recent immigrants but a centuries-old local community. Mostly ethnic Turkish descendants of the Ottoman Empire's reach into Europe, Muslims make up 12 percent of Bulgaria's 7.6 million population. Muslims have lived with Christians of the Orthodox Church in relative harmony for centuries in a culture known as "komshuluk", or neighborly relations. Pandora box Many fear that the anti-Muslim rhetoric would further hurt the minority and open Pandora's box of ethnic and religious strife in the country. "The wounds would have been healed by now if some people had stopped poking them," Fikri Gulistan, 49, a dentist in the ethnic Turkish city of Momchilgrad, fumed. There have been over 100 incidents of vandalized mosques and other Muslim buildings over the past two years. Muslim Girls have been banned from wearing hijab, an obligatory dress code in Islam, in some schools and universities. In March, security services, acting on the complaint of a rightist politician, launched a probe into a local mayor and an Islamic studies teacher from the village of Ribnovo, on suspicion of taking Saudi funds to spread radical Islam. No charges have been filed but the case filled chat rooms of newspapers and other news providers with anti-Muslim messages such as "Bulgaria for the Bulgarians". Religious leaders warn that renewing the 1980s repression and losing civil rights would risk possible repeat of strife and leave some Muslims preys to groups trying to radicalize them. During the communists&# 146; persecution, discrimination against the Muslim minority has led to bomb attacks by ethnic Turks that killed scores. "We are doing our best to stop such processes," Hussein Hafazov, aide to Bulgaria's chief Mufti Mustafa Alish Hadji, told Reuters. "If we are constantly being blamed that we are terrorists and are dangerous for the security in this country, we don't know whether part of the society won't start feeling that way one day." But analysts say the long tradition of good neighborly relations and had so far made it hard for hatred calls and to gain a foothold among Bulgaria Muslims. "The Turks (of Bulgaria) are mostly secular people said Antonina zhelyazkova, head of the Sofia-based International Center for Minority Studies. Any kind of messengers of non-traditional Islam has been sent away so far."
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