Balkaninsight: The ethnic Macedonians of Bulgaria

https://balkaninsight.com/2021/03/29...s-long-shadow/

Accusations of assimilation

While the upcoming census has focused attention on Bulgarians in North Macedonia, on the other side of the border those in Bulgaria who identify as Macedonians say they have long been forgotten, despite waging a decades-long fight for recognition.

“After six decades of assimilation and discrimination, during which time hundreds of people ended up in jail, and thousands emigrated, were beaten, sacked from work or from schools, today the number of Macedonians is in serious decline,” said history professor Stojko Stojkov, a veteran Macedonian activist in Bulgaria.

Stojkov is a member of OMO Ilinden Pirin, a Macedonian association in Bulgaria that was denied the right to register as a political party by the Bulgarian Constitutional Court in 2000.

To this day, OMO Ilinden Pirin is not officially registered in Bulgaria, on the official grounds that it represents a threat to the Bulgarian state and constitution.

“This is not the case only with OMO Ilinden, but with all other Macedonian associations in Bulgaria bar one,” Stojkov said. “They are not officially registered, despite the fact that [the European Court of Human Rights, ECHR, in] Strasbourg has ruled against Bulgaria on this issue in 14 instances.”

On May 28 last year, the ECHR ruled against Bulgaria for refusing to register another association, ‘Macedonian club for ethnic tolerance of Bulgaria’, citing the right to association under Article 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

Stojkov said that Macedonians in Bulgaria had suffered for decades and that Bulgaria’s accession to the EU in 2007 had brought no improvement.

In Stojkov’s hometown of Sandanski, which carries the name of another Ottoman-era revolutionary fought over by Bulgaria and North Macedonia, Jane Sandanski, BIRN managed to track down a second Macedonian willing to talk on condition he be identified only by his first name, Angel.

“We are Macedonians, my wife and my children as well. My grandad was Macedonian, my dad … But for the Bulgarian state we do not exist. We are Bulgarians,” Angel told BIRN via phone.

Identifying officially as Bulgarians, Angel said he and his family “keep our Macedonian identity to ourselves.”

“We share it only with relatives and close friends,” he said. “That’s the way it has always been for us, because we’re scared of what’s gone on in the past.”

Asked to elaborate, Angel said his ancestors had suffered consequences as a result of their Macedonian identity.

“I remember when I was growing up in communist times my father was regularly summoned by the police. He had trouble finding employment, they were asking him about his other relatives, about his national sentiment and he was forced in a way to become a Bulgarian, just to blend in,” he said.

“We were always loyal to our country [Bulgaria], but the Bulgarian state accepts only that Macedonians are in fact Bulgarians from the [geographic] region of Macedonia and not people of a different identity,” he said.

Sandanski is full of such cases, he said.

“Many people shy away from publically declaring their ethnicity. They are cautious and weary. Some people nowadays declare as Bulgarians, explaining simply that if they live in Bulgaria they ought to be Bulgarians…. And the young, some of them now truly feel Bulgarian because they grew up in this environment in which they never became familiar with the Macedonian language or culture.”

Stojkov said the issue of the Macedonian minority in Bulgaria should be resolved by the Bulgarian state, but that there is no political will.

“We have simple demands,” he said. “Acknowledgment of our existence, of our feelings and the right to express our culture. And in this regard we would like equal freedoms to be enjoyed both in Bulgaria and in North Macedonia.”

Statistics disputed

According to official Bulgarian statistics, 1,654 people declared themselves Macedonian in the last national census held in 2011, or roughly 0.02 per cent of the population.

This was a significant drop on the previous census a decade earlier when 5,071 identified as Macedonian.

The scale of the decline is far more obvious, however, when one looks at the 1946 census, right after WWII, when 160,541 identified as Macedonian, concentrated mainly in western parts of Bulgaria known as Pirin Macedonia.

Many Bulgarian historians dispute the 1946 figure, arguing it was the result of intense pressure on Bulgaria by Yugoslavia. Macedonian activists in Bulgaria say it is clear evidence of a programme of assimilation that they say has brought their community to the verge of extinction.

Data concerning the number of ethnic Bulgarians in North Macedonia has been relatively steady, ranging from 920 in 1953 to 3,334 in 1971 and 1,417 in 2002, or roughly 0.07 per cent of the total population of just over two million people.

These numbers are also disputed: since Bulgaria became a member of the EU in 2007, the country has handed out more than 100,000 passports to citizens of North Macedonia who had to declare they were of Bulgarian descent in order to qualify.

While it was widely accepted in both countries that most of those who took the passports did so out of a desire to take advantage of the perks of EU citizenship, rather than any deeply-held need to become ‘Bulgarian’, that has not stopped Sofia from exploiting it, regularly expressing concern that the many Bulgarian passport-holders in North Macedonia are being oppressed.

April’s census looks unlikely to resolve anything.