Word: bulgarias
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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...
With the cost of the relief operation mounting, Ankara has been pressing Bulgaria to allow ethnic Turks to dispose of their property before departing and to take their liquid assets with them. So far, the departing Turks have had to leave their homes and most of their belongings behind. According to their new Bulgarian passports, they are merely going on vacation. Not so, says Miemin Durmusev, whom the Bulgarians renamed Ana Ivanovna Dimitrova. "We're never going back...
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...