site.btaMRF Is Exhausted as a Model, Lyutvi Mestan Tells Initiative Committee for Establishing His New DOST Party

MRF Is Exhausted as a Model, Lyutvi Mestan Tells Initiative Committee for Establishing His New DOST Party

Sofia, February 27 (BTA) - The Movement for Rights and Freedoms (MRF) is exhausted as a model and the countdown is starting for this party, said MRF former leader Lyutvi Mestan on Saturday, speaking to the Initiative Committee for the establishment of his new party Democrats for Responsibility, Freedom and Tolerance (DOST).

"This is why all of us, people from different generations, who once believed in the idealistic cause of the rights and freedoms, as whose banner the MRF was presenting itself, have gathered to lay the foundations of a true, authentic, liberal party of Bulgaria," he noted.

"Here I only see patriots, Bulgarian patriots," he noted, adding that among those present are heroes from the resistance against the so-called Regeneration Process (a forcible assimilation campaign against ethnic Turks carried out by the communist regime before 1989), some of MRF's founders, as well as many young people. He said that DOST will count on not just the votes of those disillusioned with the MRF, but also on all Bulgarian citizens.

DOST will be a radical, NATO-oriented and Euro-allied party, Mestan underscored. In his words, the choice for them was never between Turkey and Russia, but "a choice to be a true ally and a pillar of Euro-Atlantic democracy against the lawlessness and arbitrariness".

Commenting the speech of MRF Honorary Chairman Ahmed Dogan from December 17 of last year, Mestan said that the masks fell on that date and the MRF's duplicity and ambivalent nature was revealed. "It was not my declaration, but Mr. Dogan's speech that was a strategic mistake," he said, recalling the MRF's declaration regarding the Russian fighter that was shot down by Turkey, which the party had issued when Mestan was its leader, and over which Dogan criticized him in his speech. "Dogan decided to boil down my pro-NATO position to a pro-Turkish one and to plant doubts about fifth or sixth column politics, thus catering to the pro-Russian attitudes in Bulgarian society," he further noted.