Bulgaria Numerous Southern Villages Are Converted to Islam by
Force
Novinite.com
Sofia News Agency
3 March 2009, Tuesday
Despite Bulgaria's European Union
membership, some regions of the country need a second liberation from Ottoman
yoke, the Bulgarian Member of the Parliament (MP), Yane
Yanev, stated, cited by the Bulgarian news agency,
BGNES.
Yanev, who is the leader of the opposition
"Order, Law, Justice" Party (RZS) spoke Monday in Blagoevgrad
as reported by the local BGNES correspondent.
The leaders of RZS visited Monday several villages in Southern
Bulgaria to meet with alarmed teachers and parents, who have
presented concrete evidence of the imposed conversion to fundamentalist Islam
in the region.
The example of the village
of Ribnovo,
in the Gurmen municipality, has been presented as the
most striking one. In Ribnovo, the school principal, Feim Issa, had imposed full
dictatorship on the teaching staff, forcing them to wear traditional Muslim
clothes, and encouraging female student to the same. Issa
has been illegally appointed as principal with help of the local mosque's
leaders and is actively supporting the religion teacher at the school, Murat Boshnak. Boshnak is, reportedly,
an individual with suspicious past and unclear educational background. He is
not holding even a Bulgarian high school diploma, but has graduated from a
religious school in Skopje,
Macedonia. Ribnovo residents allege that Boshnak
has specialized in Saudi
Arabia and is forcefully making parents to
sign requests for their children to study the Islam. He is also demanding that
children address him as "aga' instead of "gospodin" (Mister), had prohibited girls from
attending the last prom in civil attire and issued a ban on celebrations. Boshnak later organized a trip to Turkey with
funds from an Arab foundation. Only one girl had attended the prom. Parents,
who refuse to follow the fundamentalist rules, are being cursed during services
in the local mosque.
Yanev had established similar examples in the village of Satovcha,
where the school principal regularly attended classes in radical Islamism in an
illegal local fundamentalist school. The principal was currently on maternity
leave and, in order to keep the school under control, had appointed her own
husband to replace her.
The residents of the villages visited by Yanev are
not Turks; they are all Bulgarian-Muslims, speaking only Bulgarian language.
The RZS leader stated he was appalled by the extreme violations of the rights
and freedoms of Bulgarian citizens, embedded in the Constitution. RZS
distributed to the media video postcards, showing how radical Islam is quickly
taking roots in the country, under the courteous watch of the ruling tri-party
Coalition.
Yanev and his colleague Dimitar
Abadzhiev vowed to signal the State Agency for
National Security (DANS) about the citizens' rights violations in the region,
which, they say, are sabotaging European values and leading the way of Islam in
Europe.