site.btaPresident Radev Urges Prime Minister Borissov to Raise Issue of "Non-interference of Turkey in Bulgaria's Internal Affairs" during Varna EU-Turkey Meeting

Sofia, March 26 (BTA) - Speaking to reporters on Monday, President Rumen Radev said he hopes that at the EU-Turkey meeting in Varna later in the day, Prime Minister Boyko Borissov will raise "the issue of non-interference on the part of Turkey in Bulgaria's internal affairs, in the election process, and in the religious affairs".

Radev said that Bulgaria's position for the meeting in Varna had not been coordinated with him.

Radev also voiced a hope that Erdogan will accept his proposal for a meeting between the two officials during NATO Summit in Brussels in July.

Radev spoke to reporters after attending a solemn ceremony commemorating the Day of Thrace and the 105th anniversary since the Battle of Edirne. The head of State said that the question about the compensation to Thracian refugees should be raised at the EU-Turkey meeting as well.

The matter concerns 52,000 ethnic Bulgarians who were forced to resettle to Bulgaria from Eastern Thrace in Turkey after the 1913 Second Balkan War, leaving behind land properties which, according to an official document prepared by the Bulgarian Foreign Ministry in 1983, were worth over 10,000 million US dollars at that time.

In his address at the ceremony held at the Monument to the Battle of Edirne in Sofia, Radev said that the question of the compensations due for the properties of the Thracian refugees cannot be sidestepped on the basis of any considerations. This is a question of justice and national dignity, he said.

Radev argued that seeking a solution to the question about the compensations "is not an anachronism but part of the contemporary European take on history in the spirit and practice of today's international politics". "The killing, persecution and ruin of the Thracian Bulgarians is a bitter lesson which we must not forget," he said.