Tomasz Kamusella: Ethnic Cleansing During the Cold War. The Forgotten 1989 Expulsion of Turks from Communist Bulgaria

Tomasz Kamusella’s book offers an interpretation of socialist Bulgaria’s assimilation policies and practices towards its Turkish minority in the mid-1980s (also known under euphemisms such as “Revival Process”, “Rebirth Process”, among others), with a special focus on the resulting forced mass migration of Turks from Bulgaria to Turkey in the summer of 1989. This topic has received significant scholarly attention in postsocialist Bulgaria ever since the emergent fields of minority and migration studies opened up new and promising horizons for research. Transborder research and academic exchange, facilitated by institutional and border control liberalization after the Cold War, enriched the field as well with new theoretical perspectives, primary sources, and methodologies. Thus the last three decades have witnessed the emergence of an impressive body of academic literature in various disciplines, in Turkish, Bulgarian, and other languages. The existing research takes as its subject the brutality of the Bulgarian state’s policies and practices against its own citizens, as well as the traumatic individual and collective experiences and painful memories related to the forced assimilation campaign, the organized repressions, the oppression directed against the Turks’ ethnic and religious identity and—as a result—the mass expulsion. Today, it is rare to find a study on Muslim and Turkish communities in/from Bulgaria that does not focus on or at least mention their assimilation in (but also before) the 1980s and the forced migration. Instead of being “forgotten” or “consigned to oblivion by deepening public amnesia” (74) and contrary to the alleged “continuing lack of research” (115) as claimed by Kamusella, this problem has become the sine qua non subject in the field’s scholarly literature. The book’s impressive bibliography provides evidence of such centrality. Given the enormous academic interest in the topic, it is surprising that there has not yet been a comprehensive historical monograph written in English for a broader international audience. In this sense, Kamusella’s book is a pioneering and valuable study.

One major contribution here is an extensive chronological reconstruction of events from the 1980s and the ensuing debates on their aftermath in political, social, economic, and cultural terms. Based primarily on secondary sources (analysis of published sources, literature, and media coverage), Kamusella’s study reveals a picture of the brutal measures taken by the late communist government to assimilate Muslim and Turkish minority groups and to homogenize its territory along ethnic and cultural lines. Attention is paid to domestic and (mainly) international coverage and responses; the question of responsibility (or lack thereof) is raised. The latter is discussed in relation to Bulgarian nationalism and the fundamental elements that construct and maintain the country’s national identity project as a “liberation” from the Ottoman Empire, presented in the popular discourse as the “Turkish yoke”. The book’s main argument is that the attempt at forced assimilation and the subsequent mass expulsion of the Turkish population from Bulgaria in the 1980s should be interpreted as a form of ethnic cleansing carried out by the Bulgarian authorities and the country’s Communist Party leaders. Kamusella’s monograph has provoked intensive academic debate on the importance of the concepts we use to describe these events and has encouraged (re-)considerations of scholarly responsibility and positionality. To continue the discussion, this review poses questions about the interpretative potential of the term “ethnic cleansing” and asks whether its application to these events supports historical understanding and critical analysis.

“Ethnic cleansing” emerged as a concept in the early 1990s in the context of the Yugoslav Wars as an explanatory tool (141). It reflected the international efforts in the political sphere and in the media to normatively declare the forced permanent removal of ethnic, racial, and religious groups for the purpose of the ethnic homogenization of a given area as a crime against humanity. Since that time, it has been applied retroactively in scholarly literature to characterize various forms of twentieth-century political violence. As a “category of practice” (to borrow Brubaker and Cooper’s famous distinction) the concept has gained wide circulation in governmental, nongovernmental, and media discourses to express concerns over flagrant human rights violations, but has also served to justify the adoption of certain measures, responses, and interventions. In the collective imagination the term immediately evokes a rationally planned military and administrative operation, replete with deportations and expulsions of the civilian population; it is a picture of murders and assaults, of perpetrators and victims, of suffering and loss, of human tragedy. The term is also used as a tool to officially condemn political regimes, as the Bulgarian Parliament did when declaring that “the assimilation policy of the [Bulgarian] totalitarian communist regime against the Muslim minority” was “an act of ethnic cleansing” (115–6). Problems with the term begin to surface when the concept leaves the sphere of politics and is employed in academia as a “category of analysis”. The theoretical definition of “ethnic cleansing” lacks scholarly consensus. Potential definitions vary widely, ranging from a narrow understanding centred on an ethnic group’s purposeful forcible displacement from the area they inhabit to a very broad interpretation that regards cleansing as an effort to permanently obliterate the group via a spectrum of politically violent means, including murders, assaults, tortures, assimilation, deportations, and forced removal from a given territory organized from the top down. This conceptual flexibility causes the blurring of boundaries separating concepts such as ethnic cleansing, genocide, ethnocide, and population exchange, and it is therefore challenging for scholars to critically analyse historical events within precise theoretical frameworks. Thus ethnic cleansing is one of many possible interpretative perspectives amongst others through which one might study the coercive assimilation and consequent displacement of Turkish populations from Bulgaria in the 1980s.

However, due to its dual function as a category of both practice and analysis, the term might fulfil scientific as well as normative purposes. In other words, one should ask: Does the label “ethnic cleansing” advance in-depth assessment, or does it preclude this sort of analysis by oversimplifying historical reality? Does the term contribute to the existing literature, or does it hinder a deeper understanding of the complexity of particular relevant experiences? If the violent events in this case are acknowledged as instances of ethnic cleansing, how are “the unprecedented return of a third of the expellees” (169) to be explained, given that “the communists-recently-turned-socialists” (94) remained in power after the regime collapsed and 15% of the expellees had already returned beforehand? How, too, to diagnose the symptoms of postsocialist nostalgia amongst the Turkish and Muslim communities in Bulgaria (152–5)? If the concept of ethnic cleansing is understood simply according to the United Nations’ definition as the organised permanent forced mass removal of persons or groups based on their ethnicity (141–2), why not include, in a study such as Kamusella’s, earlier Muslim migration waves from Bulgaria to Turkey that had resulted from intergovernmental negotiations and agreements over de facto population transfers and permanent resettlements? Can such migration be defined as entirely voluntary, or had return been an option?

Instead of focusing exclusively on a single tragic event (the most brutal by any standard), we might also explore the systematic continuous state efforts to achieve ethnic homogenization. A longue durée approach could reveal a broader picture of the nation-state’s policies and practices of population management and demographic engineering (in both Bulgaria and Turkey). Thus, on the one hand, the forced assimilation and the displacement of Turks in the second half of the 1980s could be examined in the context of Bulgaria’s minority policies and in parallel with very similar assimilation practices targeting other (non-Turkish) Muslim groups (e. g., Roma in the 1960s, and Pomaks in the 1970s). On the other hand, such an approach could trace comparatively the migration waves of Turkish and Muslim populations to Turkey during the course of the twentieth century and presumably locate the points of intersection. The mass resettlement of people due to their ethnicity and as a tool of ethnic homogenization and nation-building in Bulgaria, the Balkans, and Europe more widely began long before the 1980s, driven by push-and-pull factors and even sometimes favoured by the international community. Broadening the perspective would not underestimate the importance of the events discussed in Kamusella’s book. Rather, these events would be incorporated into a more comprehensive interpretive schema, allowing for more subtle historical contextualization and theoretical rationalization.

Kamusella’s monograph invites readers to take a trip back in time and experience the repressions of a minority group’s ethnic, religious, and cultural identity as well as the tragedy of displacement. It also demonstrates the level of public acceptance, or rather non-acceptance, of the Turkish minority in Bulgaria that continues up to this day and, ultimately, questions the nationalist attitudes in the country, which are still hostile to ethnic and religious minorities. In times of rising populism, nationalism, and Islamophobia throughout Europe, the questions addressed by Kamusella are currently of even greater significance than they would be otherwise.

Finally, this review aims to open up spaces for further academic discussion about one of the dark episodes in modern Bulgarian history. Such discussion is only possible if we move beyond normative implications, moral judgements, and polarised politicization—unfortunate tendencies which often characterize research on socialist and postsocialist contexts.