Discrimination against ethnic Macedonians continues in Pirin Macedonia, in Bulgaria, the president of the City Committee of OMO Ilinden from Blagoevgrad, Atanas Kirjakov, informed today.

He reported that he was called twice by phone by a Bulgarian police inspector without being told the reason.

It is an open secret that ethnic Macedonians in Pirin Macedonia are subject to repression and discrimination, and not since yesterday. During the time of Todor Zivkov, ethnic Macedonian men and women, just because they did not renounce their Macedonian nationality, were mistreated in a variety of ways – threats, surveillance, eavesdropping, fired from work, excluded from school and college, recruited into the militia, interrogated, beaten, interned in distant parts of Bulgaria, imprisoned in camps and prisons, killed…

After 1989 the attitude of the Bulgarian authorities towards ethnic Macedonians in Pirin Macedonia has not changed at all. Ethnic Macedonians in Bulgaria do not have any human rights. The Bulgarian court has categorically rejected all attempts to register cultural associations of Ethnic Macedonians in Bulgaria on the grounds that there is no Macedonian minority in Bulgaria.

Todor Zivkov’s motto from 1963, that there are no Macedonians in Bulgaria, there never were and there never will be, is valid today.

In the last year, the tension between the two countries, the Republic of Bulgaria and the Republic of Macedonia has been very high, especially with the opening of the Bulgarian clubs in Ohrid and Bitola, as well as the opening of the Macedonian club in Blagoevgrad, said Kirjakov.