Word: bulgaria
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Slowly the train of boxcars rolls to a halt at Kapikule, where Bulgaria becomes Turkey, and a flood of humanity spills out. Many kneel to kiss the ground. Others weep as they unload furniture, suitcases and sacks stuffed with possessions and pile them on the station platform. Military marches and battle cries of the Ottoman Empire blare from loudspeakers. A man shakes his fist at the distant Bulgarian hills and shouts, "Long live Turkey! This is the happiest day of my life...
...population -- are descendants of Slavs converted to Islam under the Ottomans, who ruled from the late 14th century to the late 19th century, and it wants them to revert to their origins. But the Turkish minority regards itself as a remnant of the Ottoman Empire. "Our ancestors settled in Bulgaria when it was the empire's Balkan province," explains Huseyin Hafizoglu, 60, a schoolteacher whose home was near Plovdiv. "My family has been there for more than a century. But our country is still Turkey...
Alarmed by the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, Bulgaria launched its toughest drive ever to assimilate the Turks in late 1984, when it tried to force them to adopt Bulgarian customs. Last May violent protests erupted throughout the country; 60 Turks were killed and 200 others injured in clashes with Bulgarian security forces...
Whole segments of the East bloc, once firmly under the thumb of Soviet orthodoxy, are launched in headlong pursuit of a new political and economic order. But not all. In Bulgaria an aging leadership shows no sign of interest in homegrown perestroika. In Czechoslovakia, where leading dissident Vaclav Havel has been sentenced to jail, trials moved into a second month for other activists held on charges ranging from organizing peaceful antigovernment demonstrations to signing political petitions. And in Stalinist Rumania, party leader Nicolae Ceausescu remains the "Idi Amin of Communism," as his neighbors call him. The unregenerate totalitarian, obsessed with...
...just as the specter of an East-West conflict has receded, East-East police actions may also grow harder to justify, and someday perhaps harder to execute. Hungary, Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria have all followed Gorbachev's lead by announcing large cuts in defense spending. The gradual demilitarization of those societies could fuel economic reform by freeing resources for civilian industry...