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claimed the deleterious effects of foreign circles on Bulgaria and reiterated the claim that there were no
Turks in Bulgaria, only an Islamicized part of the population (Shafir 1990, 209). He even went as far as to
challenge Turkey to open up its borders in order to see how few of the Bulgarian Turks were truly
disconnected with life in Bulgaria (Bell 1990, 419).
The economic results of this exodus were an acute loss of agricultural personnel during harvest
time, which prompted the then Agriculture Secretary to announce that even schoolchildren and pensioners
would have to be involved in the collection of the harvest. Similarly, the party daily on July 7, 1989
published a joint communiqué from the Council of Ministers and from the Bulgarian Council of Trade
Unions that stressed the need for workers to contribute extra days of labor in a national mobilization
campaign to bring in the crops (Curtis 1993, 82). For the Turks, the economic effects of this mass exodus,
even for the two thirds who eventually returned, were far more long-term because, as Tzvetkov points
out, those who returned found out that “the authorities had given most of their houses and apartments to
Bulgarians who had been waiting for a home for years, or that their homes had been demolished under the
pretext of carrying out city reconstruction plans “(Tzvetkov 1992, 40). Unlike, the British colonial
experience which had tried to deal with the multi-ethnic fact of a unitary Sri Lanka, the Bulgarian
communist-era relations were marked by an acute sense of ethnic discrimination. The Communist regime
had tried to erase the existence of a multi-ethnic Bulgarian identity, something that the British had at
times cultivated.
In sum, what the various Bulgarization drives of the Communist regime succeeded in doing was
the politicization of the Turkish identity along particularly “vivid” ethnic lines. In essence, as Bates
argues, the 1984-85 and 1989 experiences, primarily as well as the previous history of Bulgarization,
provided the Turks
with a shared interest, the security of person and property ; religion, language, and a sense of
shared experience of exclusion furnished the affect. The result has been the emergence of a
highly politicized, ethnically constructed opposition ; just like the “nation,” Turkish and Moslem
minorities have come to see themselves as a community, to call up shared symbols and texts, set
limits to their identity, and use appeals to shared history and struggle to mobilize politically
(Bates 1994, 203).
However, unlike the Tamils, this process eliminated mobilizational resources for the Turks. Existing
social networks, often created around mosques, were destroyed because of the exodus process since most
of the religious leaders refused to return to Bulgaria. Additionally, most of the Turks who were capable of
finding employment in Turkey because of their skills chose to stay rather than return. For the aspiring
consciousness of some of them might still be blurred, they are of the same flesh and blood ; they are the children of the Bulgarian
nation ; they were forcibly torn away and now they are coming back home. There are no Turks in Bulgaria “ (Eminov 1997, 16).
Convention