< p>1973 year. In Kornitsa, they interrogate and beat people, and the inquisitions in the hall of the community center are filmed with a camera. Kornitsa rebels against the name change. Emilia Milcheva tells the brutal stories of violence and injustice.
"I want to ask you where is the place of the Turks" - the question was asked by a 22-year-old Bulgarian Turkish woman, a student of Turkology at Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski” to Prof. Zeynep Ibrahimova-Zafer, born in the village of Kornitsa, known for the brutally crushed resistance against the forced name change of Pomaks in 1973, today a researcher and university professor from Ankara, who presents her book “The name is my face&rdquo ;. Last year marked the 50th anniversary of the Cornish protests - the fiercest resistance in Bulgaria against the assimilation policy of Todor Zhivkov's regime towards Bulgarian Muslims.
The Rebels
“The place is here, in Bulgaria”, answers student Zeynep Zafer, evicted with her family from Kornitsa and subsequently displaced around Bulgaria, forced to interrupt her studies, sentenced to prison together with her relatives in 1984-85. , a member of the “Independent Society for the Protection of Human Rights” (with chairman Iliya Minev) and elected as its representative for the Varna region. She was invited to the meeting of Bulgarian intellectuals with French President Francois Mitterrand during his visit in January 1989, but was arrested by State Security and expelled from Bulgaria soon after.
“A person with a biography of a rebel against the regime”, as the political scientist Deyan Kyuranov called it... these people are rebels - especially valuable for Bulgaria, they should not talk like victims”. But half a century after the Cornish events and the subsequent waves of violent renaming of the Pomaks and Turks in Bulgaria, including the Roma, a large part of Bulgarian society still ignores what happened, without taking responsibility for the ban on Turkish culture, language and identity.< /p>
The fires
The student of Turkology says that the only slap she received from her father was when she found his school record, but with a different name - and asked him why. The trauma of the events, which the majority of the Bulgarian society knows as a “revival process” - a propaganda term coined in the 1980s, has not yet been experienced by thousands of Bulgarian Muslims. However, their narrative of the forcible Bulgarianization carried out by the totalitarian regime was not integrated into that of Bulgarian society during the same period.
The archives have been destroyed, and what remains of them is closed and inaccessible, the guarantors and torturers do not speak. Studies such as Prof. Zafer's book, in which documentary testimonies of those who survived the repressions are also collected, "create memory because the general public knows nothing," emphasized Mihail Ivanov, the adviser on ethnic issues to President Zhelyu Zhelev (1990-1996). .
Six victims, ten sentenced to prison from 3 to 12 years, dozens more beaten, evicted and injured not only from Kornitsa, but also from the villages of Lazhnitsa and Breznitsa, who joined the rebellion. From January 23 to March 23, 1973, the resistance of the people of Kornica lasted, who, in the worst winter cold, were in the square where they lit fires - there they gathered, as they were afraid to go home. That's how this protest will be remembered, with the fire around which they are on duty around the clock. (”Why are you sitting, what are you sitting for?”Well, we keep our names, we don't want anything else from you”.)
The violence
No one dares to leave Kornica, lest they be captured and tortured. People stock up on food. Children are suspended from school. Women give birth at their homes, as the municipal hospital issues certificates with Bulgarian names for newborns. They refuse state benefits, which are given to children with Bulgarian names, they do not enter into civil marriages. In order to preserve their names, many sick people do not go to the hospital for treatment, suffer or die without medical help, says Prof. Zafer in his book.
On March 28, soldiers, uniformed and civilian militia, cavalry squadron, detachments, volunteers, Bulgarians from Kornitsa and Breznitsa invaded the village. In three places in Kornitsa, people are interrogated and beaten, and the inquisitions in the hall of the community center are filmed with a camera. Where is the filmed material?
"Here I had to forget my ethnicity - am I Bulgarian, am I Turkish..."
Kornitsa rebelled not for the first time - in 1964, the name change in the area was stopped, after protests led by the population from Ribnovo. But after the decision of the Central Committee of the BKP from July 17, 1970 to bulgarize the Pomaks, Kornitsa was raised, and before that delegations from the village tried to complain to the Central Committee of the BKP, the State Council, the embassies of the USSR, the USA, Turkey… In vain.
Policy
In the 1990s of the last century, the issue of the forced assimilation of Bulgarian Muslims was still on the agenda in the parliament. For the first time, the writer and MP from DPS Svilen Kapsazov spoke about the bloody events in Kornitsa in the National Assembly, who named the representatives of the authorities who participated in the suppression of the protests, as well as the number of those killed, convicted, evicted and injured.
When asked by Deutsche Welle whether, after Kapsuzov, who died under strange circumstances, any politician from the DPS or another political force raised the topic, the answer of Mikhail Ivanov and Prof. Zafer was: “No”.
However, Bulgarian politicians apologized. Prime Minister Ivan Kostov first did it in 1998 in Bursa, the same year President Petar Stoyanov also apologized in a meeting with his Turkish counterpart Suleiman Demirel. The Bulgarian Parliament condemned the forcible assimilation of Muslims in January 2012 and defined the expulsion of over 360,000 Bulgarian citizens of Turkish origin in 1989 as a form of ethnic cleansing.
“I am an anesthesiologist, during the name change in Shumensko I treated both Turks and Bulgarians. "A boy, a soldier aged 18-19, shot himself and died in my arms," said Dr. Ilko Asenov. He also said: “Let's live together”.