site.btaBulgarian Community in Serbia Receives Scarce, Biased Information

120 LIFESTYLE - BTA - MEDIA MEETING - BOSILEGRAD

Bulgarian Community in Serbia
Receives Scarce,
Biased Information


Bosilegrad, October 21 (BTA) - The Bulgarian community in Serbia
receives insufficient, one-sided and biased information, said
Ivan Nikolov, chair of the Cultural Information Centre in
Bosilegrad on Tuesday. He was speaking at a panel on
communities, institutions and media at the Tenth World Meeting
of Bulgarian Media Abroad here. The meeting is organized by the
Bulgarian News Agency and the Association of Bulgarian Media
Abroad.

Nikolov said that several Bulgarian language newspapers have
ceased publication. Also, radio and newscasts in Bulgarian have
been suspended. Access to Bulgarian broadcast TV stations has
been impaired with digital broadcasting and despite the efforts
of Bulgarian associations in the Western Outlands, no quality
signal is received, said Nikolov.

He singled out education as another major problem. Between 1960
and 1987 Bulgarian classes were phased out of schools and
Bulgarian is taught as a foreign language for two to three hours
weekly. Bulgarian history and culture are not studied in depth
and all subjects and textbooks are in Serbian, he added.

He cited figures by the Serbian statistical institute, showing
that between 1961 and 2011 the number of Bulgarians in Serbia
went down from 61,000 to 18,500. Of these as few as 13,000 speak
Bulgarian as their mother tongue.

Bosilegrad Mayor Vladimir Zahariev said that the media of
minorities cannot survive on their own and should be supported.

Maria Spasova of GRReporter said that Greece is making huge
efforts to preserve the national identity of its diaspora. She
said that Greece sets aside resources for teaching Greek abroad
and maintaining churches as a meeting point of Greek
communities.

Diana Glasnova, a publisher of a Bulgarian literature review in
Croatia, urged participants in the meeting to come up with a
declaration that Bulgaria should condition Serbia's EU
membership on better attitude towards the Bulgarian minority in
the country.

A wreath was laid at the monument to Bulgarian freedom fighter
Vasil Levski in Bosilegrad.

The Tenth World Meeting of Bulgarian Media is supported by CEZ,
Raiffeisenbank, Sopharma and Trace Group Hold. LI/PP