Ethnic Macedonians in Bulgaria
[6] In 2006, per the personal evaluation of a leading local ethnic Macedonian activist Stojko Stojkov, they counted already between 5,000 and 10,000 people.
During this period there was a surge of Macedonistic policies, the government went as far as to declare the newly codified Macedonian an official language of the Pirin region.
There are clear indications that the majority of the population from Blagoevgrad Province then was listed as ethnic Macedonians ex officio by order of the authorities.
[6] In October 1925 the Slavic population in the Bulgarian part of Macedonia repulsed a brief invasion by Greece, fighting alongside the Bulgarian army, and at the referendum held 3 years before to try those responsible for the Second Balkan and First World Wars lost by Bulgaria and which leads to the full accession of Macedonia, they voted "no" en masse because of the pro-Yugoslav line of the ruling BZNS and the accusation against its leaders for the defeat of Bulgaria in the last war due to their leadership military mutiny, while the rest of the country voted mostly for outside several cities strongly opposed to the ruling Agrarianist government and with weaker communist opposition.
[17] During World War II, most parts of Yugoslav and Greek Macedonia were annexed by Bulgaria, and the local Slavic-speakers were regarded and self-identified as Macedonian Bulgarians.
The local Slavic population was proclaimed to be ethnically Macedonian - a new nationality meant to be different from the Bulgarians or Serbs.
In November 1947, pressured by the Yugoslavs, Bulgaria also signed a treaty of friendship with Yugoslavia, and teachers were sent from the Socialist Republic of Macedonia to Blagoevgrad Province to teach the newly codified Macedonian language.
[23][9][10] At the same time, the organisation of the old nationalist movement the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO) in Bulgaria was suppressed by the Bulgarian communist authorities.
Hürriyet claimed that Macedonians in Bulgaria wishing to join Yugoslavia reportedly conducted guerilla warfare in 1951.
[28][29] However, other modern sources clarify, such people were in fact not ethnic Macedonians who wish to join Yugoslavia, but IMRO right-wing activists, supporters of the idea about an Independent Macedonia.
[30][31][32][33][34] At that time in the Pirin region didn't crystallize such significant collective identity, which may be qualified as a Macedonian minority.
[9][10] At the plenum of the Bulgarian Communist Party held the same year, the decision was made that the Macedonian nation and language did not exist.
[22] The March Plenum of the Central Committee of the BCP openly denounces any notion of "a separate Macedonian nation" in Bulgaria.
"[49] This issue was confirmed by the ex-president of the Republic of Bulgaria Petar Stoyanov[50] and Veselin Angelov [bg] (аssoc scientist, Ph.D. in history), from the Regional Historical Museum of Blagoevgrad - where the document with the order is kept.
[citation needed] The change in the population came in 1965 census, when the people in the province declared free as Bulgarians, within ten years the 187,789 strong Macedonian minority fell to just 9,632 individuals.
[55] According to the President of the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee Krasimir Kanev, the real number of Macedonians in Bulgaria varies from 15,000 to 25,000.
[56] As regards self-identification, a total of 1,654 people officially declared themselves to be ethnic Macedonians in the latest Bulgarian census in 2011 (0,02%) and 561 of them are in Blagoevgrad Province (0,2%).
On 25 November, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg condemned Bulgaria because of violations of the UMO Ilinden–Pirin's freedom of organizing meetings.
[65][66] During the opening a verbal incident occurred, and delegations were blocked laying wreaths on the Gotse Delchev monument in Blagoevgrad by members of VMRO-BND.
[69] The perpetrators say that this is in response to the arrests and beatings of Bulgarian citizens who came to worship in front of the remains of Gotse Delchev in Skopje on the occasion of the 151st anniversary of his birth at the border posts of North Macedonia and Bulgaria that afternoon.
"[76] In November 2006, the members of the European Parliament Milan Horáček, Joost Lagendijk, Angelika Beer and Elly de Groen-Kouwenhoven introduced an amendment to the accession of Bulgaria to the European Union protocol calling "on the Bulgarian authorities to prevent any further obstruction to the registration of the political party of the ethnic Macedonians (OMO-Ilinden PIRIN) and to put an end to all forms of discrimination and harassment vis-à-vis that minority.
