site.btaIvan Mihailov Centre – Bitola Rejects Census Results as Manipulated

The Ivan Mihailov Cultural Center- Bitola, the Republic of North Macedonia, issued a declaration stating that they do not acknowledge the population census results which were released on March 30. According to these, 3,504 people in the Republic of North Macedonia have identified as Bulgarians.

The declaration states that the fact that there are “allegedly only 3,500 Bulgarians in (North) Macedonia” had been “imposed brutally and arrogantly” and is entirely untrue, which is quite obvious. Over 120,000 members of this community personally took their documents to Sofia to prove their Bulgarian origin. No one forced them.(...) They went of their own accord, well aware that upon their return they would even have to deny they had wanted to acquire Bulgarian citizenship because of their origin. They also queued in front of the Bulgarian diplomatic missions in North Macedonia. And all at once, in their homeland, they seem to have disappeared from the census,” the document says further.

Hate speech, psychological terror politically sponsored by the authorities, denial of identity rights are among the factors that may have led to such a ridiculous figure “served” by the State Statistical Office, the declaration states. But it also affirms that the census was brutally manipulated, about which Macedonian Bulgarians had warned from the very beginning. It had been manipulated for Macedonian Bulgarians, Turks, and others too, says the document, signed by Ivan Mihailov Center – Bitola Chairman Ljupco Georgievski.

The document yet again asserts that Bulgarians should be inscribed in the Constitution of the Republic of North Macedonia, the historical truth be included in textbooks and the Goodneighbourliness Treaty with Bulgaria be among the conditions for beginning talks for North Macedonia’s EU membership.