ABSTRACT
The initial program of the Movement for Rights and Freedoms (MRF) consisted of the following three main goals: development, participation and rehabilitation. The first goal assumed an improvement in the general level of education and of the standard of living among Bulgaria’s Turks and Muslims so that this level would become equal to that enjoyed by all Bulgarians. Another aim called for the full participation of Turks and Muslims in politics and all other walks of public life in Bulgaria. Last but not least, rehabilitation meant a liquidation of the consequences of the forced assimilation campaign from the latter half of the 1980s and of the 1989 expulsion (Troebst 1994: 34). To this end, on 5 March 1990 the still communist Bulgarian Parliament passed a law returning Turkish and Muslim names and surnames to all whose documents had been ‘Bulgarianized’ and who requested such a reversal. On 1 August 1990, the first officially non-communist government of Bulgaria (de facto still run by an old BCP/BSP apparatchik, Andrei Lukanov) decided that repossessed real estate and property should be returned to the expellees who had come back to Bulgaria. Two years later, this decision was made into a law in August 1992 (Kalinova 2014: 569, 572).
