Pirin part of Macedonia
Pirin Macedonia came under Bulgarian occupation after the Balkan Wars in 1913. Macedonians were denied their human rights, the right to speak their own language, and the ability to openly express their Macedonian identity. These human rights violations continue today. Bulgarians also claim that Macedonians are "really Bulgarians" and that they speak "a Western Bulgarian dialect." This despite the fact that Macedonian is spoken by millions of people throughout the world and is an internationally recognized language and taught at dozens of universities worldwide.
In Bulgaria, in Pirin Macedonia, there was in 1919 a compact Macedonian population of about 250,000. Official Bulgarian policy and statistics following the Second World War showed different figures in different periods concerning the number of ethnic Macedonians in the country. The encyclopedic handbook Ethnic Minorities in Europe quotes data from the official censuses. In 1946 there were 300,000 people enumerated as Macedonians and in 1956 - 188,000.
According to the sources quoted, in 1990 there were about 250,000 Macedonians living in Bulgaria. It is important to note that according to the 1956 census, when 187,789 inhabitants declared themselves as Macedonians, they constituted a majority in a large part of Pirin Macedonia. In the Blagoevgrad District alone, which comprised 281,015 inhabitants, 178,862, or 63.7% declared themselves as Macedonians. There are also many Macedonians living in Sofia and other parts of Bulgaria. In spite of all claims by Bulgaria to European orientation and the acceptance of European democratic values, during the 1992 population census the Macedonians were not allowed to declare their ethnic affiliation under a separate heading.
In a short period after 1947, the Macedonians living in Pirin Macedonia had schools in their mother tongue and their own theatre. More recently, Amnesty International, the Organization for International Human Rights, and Human Rights Watch/Helsinki have given documentary evidence about the situation there and about the violation of the individual and minority rights of the Macedonians.
In 1994 and 1995, the periodicals of the Macedonian organizations in Pirin Macedonia came under attack from the Public Prosecutor of Bulgaria. Several periodicals, including Makedonska Volja, however, continue to write openly on the discrimination against ethnic Macedonians in Bulgaria. An illustration of the extent of this discrimination is the expulsion from the Bulgarian Writer's Association of the writer Slave Makedonski, whose works have been translated into several world languages, owing to the fact that he has publicly declared his Macedonian ethnic affiliation.
The Macedonian Minority
Just as with Greece, Bulgaria officially denies the existence of a Macedonian minority within its borders. The logic of this assertion required, ludicrously, the Bulgarian government to recognize the newly independent Republic of Macedonia in 1991 but with the explicit reservation that it did not recognize the Macedonian ethnic identity of the people who reside there. Just as in Greece, the official policy of denial of ethnic identity of the Macedonians leads to a pervasive atmosphere of intolerance and discrimination against those who choose to assert their identity.