Tomasz Kamusella - The Forgotten 1989 Expulsion of Turks from Communist Bulgaria скачать в хорошем качестве

Tomasz Kamusella - The Forgotten 1989 Expulsion of Turks from Communist Bulgaria

Tomasz Kamusella University of St Andrews The Forgotten 1989 Expulsion of Turks from Communist Bulgaria In 1989 the Bulgarian communist regime seeking to prop up its legitimacy expelled 360,000 Turks and Muslims to Turkey. It was the single largest ethnic cleansing during the Cold War period in Europe after the end of the postwar ‘population transfers’ in the early 1950s. Furthermore, this expulsion of Turks and Muslims from Bulgaria was the sole mass expulsion that ever breached the Iron Curtain. Not only did the 1989 ethnic cleansing triggered the end of communism in Bulgaria, but was also followed by an unprecedented return of almost half of the expellees. Despite the unprecedented character of this 1989 expulsion and its wide-ranging ramifications, not a single research article (let alone a monograph) has been devoted to these events. On the plane of international relations, without remembering about this expulsion, researchers will continue to be astounded why Yugoslav ethnic leaders might think that they could conduct ethnic cleansing with impunity. However, they did know that neither the West nor the East reacted in 1989 in Bulgaria. That is the explanation. Until the 1995 NATO intervention in Bosnia, 'population transfers' were seen as a legal instrument of and for fortifying human rights.