site.btaVazrazhdane Floor Leader Alerts SANS to Statements Made by President, Socialist Leader on Holocaust Remembrance Day

Vazrazhdane Floor Leader Kostadin Kostadinov has alerted the State Agency for National Security (SANS) to statements made by President Iliana Iotova and BSP - United Left Floor Leader Nataliya Kiselova on Wednesday, on the Holocaust Remembrance Day. Speaking to journalists in Parliament on Wednesday, he said that “in practice he does not expect SANS to do anything.”

“Yesterday we witnessed something unprecedented in the history of this parliament, if I am not mistaken – and in the past several decades in the history of Bulgaria. A simultaneous coordinated action – both President Iliana Iotova and BSP - United Left Floor Leader Nataliya Kiselova made statements which in practice constituted treason, by accusing the Bulgarian State of the deportation of Jews from territories that were temporarily liberated and partially administered by the Bulgarian administration during the Second World War in what was then Yugoslavia and the then Kingdom of Greece,” Kostadinov said.

On Tuesday, Kostadinov reacted from the parliamentary rostrum to the declaration read by Kiselova. He also said that on Tuesday he had called Bulgarian Socialist Party Chair Krum Zarkov to ask whether this was also the party’s position, but Zarkov did not answer the call nor return it.

The Vazrazhdane Floor Leader read out a declaration adopted by the 41st National Assembly in 2013 on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the rescue of Bulgarian Jews and the commemoration of the victims of the Holocaust, quoting a specific paragraph related to the deported Jews from Yugoslavia and Greece. “It states that the fact that 11,343 Jews were deported from Northern Greece and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, which at the time were under German jurisdiction, cannot be disputed. While condemning this criminal act carried out by the Hitlerite command, we express regret that it was beyond the capacity of the local Bulgarian administration to stop it. Nevertheless, attempts were made by Bulgarian citizens, public organizations and clergy, which ultimately remained unsuccessful.” This is the declaration of the Bulgarian parliament of March 8, 2013 and it has the force of law, Kostadinov argued. Bulgarian state policy has not changed; it does not recognize any responsibility for the deportation of those Jews because they were not Bulgarian citizens, he stressed.