ABSTRACT
The discussion on an act of ethnic cleansing cannot skirt the burning question of who bears responsibility for the 1989 expulsion. Odiously, so far no one has been really accused, let alone tried, for the crimes against humanity which the 1989 ethnic cleansing and the 1984–1985 campaign of forced assimilation indubitably were. The 1992 suspended sentence for Milko Balev, Secretary of the BCP Central Committee (1979–1989) hardly counts as justice for the hundreds of thousands who suffered forced assimilation and expulsion (Poulton 1991: 166). In this way, the political program of Todor Zhivkov’s ideological turbo-acceleration for the swift completion of the over a century-long Bulgarian national revolution of ethnolinguistic and ethnoconfessional homogenization of the Bulgarian nation-state remains tacitly unchallenged. Mainstream parties and politicians in Bulgaria do not (usually) act upon this program’s illiberal ideals, but the program itself remains in the sociocultural offing, ready to be reactivated, whenever an opportune moment comes. No Bulgarian party dares to criticize the national revolution’s program directly, and most political groupings accept some of its tenets, including the MRF, which for instance has never really pressed for the re-establishment of a fully fledged Turkish-medium minority educational system in postcommunist Bulgaria (Marushiakova and Popov 2015). This tacit acceptance of the unacceptable is the real danger to ethnic peace and stability in today’s Bulgaria, a (relatively) successful European state in the European Union, and a (somewhat reluctant) NATO member.
