Bulgaria's Parliament saw a rather heated debate Wednesday morning as the nationalist party "Ataka" proposed a draft declaration to denounce the so called genocide over Bulgarians in the Ottoman Empire – which was eventually rejected due to the high number of abstaining MPs, Novinite.com reported.
A total of 39 MPs voted in favor of the motion, 26 voted against, and 50 abstained, with less than half of the total of 240 MPs taking part in the vote.
A total of 18 Ataka MPs together with 17 MPs from the ruling center-right party GERB and 4 from the right-wing Blue Coalition voted in favor. The rest of theGERB and Blue Coalition deputies abstained, while the ethnic Turkish party DPSand Bulgarian Socialist Party voted against.
The motion refers to the period from 1396 – when the Second Bulgarian Empire fell to the Ottoman Turks – until 1913 – when the First Balkan War technically freed the Balkan Christians from the Ottoman Empire. (The autonomous Bulgarian state was restored in 1878 on a part of the Bulgarian populated territories, and became independent in 1908.)
The motion of the nationalist party Ataka to condemn so called “genocide” over Bulgarians in the Ottoman Empire was vigorously opposed by members of the ethnic Turkishparty DPS (Movement for Rights and Freedoms) as well as by Professor Andrey Pantev, a renowned historian, currently a MP from the Bulgarian Socialist Party.
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