Some say with irony that people in North Macedonia usually acquire Bulgarian citizenship for self-serving purposes. In the last official census in the neighbouring country just 3504 people were registered as Bulgarians. However, demographer Associate Professor Spas Tashev is sure that this is not the real number.

"I say with utmost responsibility that the census in North Macedonia was manipulated with flagrant violations of the principles of European statistics and trampling on human rights,” the scientist said in an interview with Radio Bulgaria. "During the census, only persons of Bulgarian origin were required to show evidence in order to be registered as Bulgarians. What did the people who did not have proof do? They took out their Bulgarian identity cards and showed them to the census enumerators. The enumerators then registered them as Bulgarian citizens. Where is the manipulation? People presented their Bulgarian identity cards in order to be registered as persons of Bulgarian ethnicity, but they were registered as persons with dual North Macedonian and Bulgarian citizenship. I ask what was the real motive of these people to show their Bulgarian identity cards? No one in Bulgaria asked this question", the demographer says.

The data referred to by Assoc. Prof. Spas Tashev, head of the Demography Department of the Institute for Population and Human Studies at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, have been officially published on the website of the State Statistical Office in North Macedonia.

"In addition, there were lists of persons who openly said before the census that they would declare themselves Bulgarians,” the researcher claims. “The Agency for National Security of North Macedonia created these lists. They called the enumerators and suggested not to visit such households. According to the official data from the State Statistical Office, about 120,000 citizens of the country have not been visited by the census enumerators. The data for these people were filled in by the officials and not by the respondents. So, we have 3,504 people who declared themselves Bulgarian, as well as 20,000 Bulgarians with dual citizenship. There are also 120,000 people who have not been visited by the census enumerators. When we presented these data, many Bulgarians from North Macedonia contacted me and confirmed they were not visited by the enumerators. So, I have concrete examples of this. Therefore, we call for the creation of a European commission of inquiry to visit these people and see that there really are drastic violations of modern European principles and examples of trampling on human rights. This is a really big problem and we have to continue work to prove the rightness of our claims", the scientist says.

According to Tashev, 2.5 years ago, Turkey did not recognize officially the results of the census in North Macedonia. Bulgaria should have done the same thing and presented these facts to the Euro-Atlantic partners, he says.

The researcher also told us about the result of a letter published by the Association of the Descendants of Refugees and Migrants from the Territory of the Republic of North Macedonia and Friends, of which he is co-chairman, to the Albanian parties in North Macedonia. Information about the letter was also published by Radio Bulgaria.

• Bulgarian association sends an open letter to the Albanian community in North Macedonia

"We asked the question why do they support a government that is against Corridor No. 8. We directly asked if they were serving the interests of Serbia, which caused so much misery to the Albanians in Kosovo, and I would also say to the Albanians in North Macedonia, as well,” Tashev says. “I need to say that despite the fact that the major information sites in Albanian language are controlled by these parties in North Macedonia, there are also independent sites in the Albanian language that responded to the letter. They used the publication of Radio Bulgaria in Albanian and I want to thank your institution for this, as our message reached them. Just a few weeks later, the president of the Albanian parliament visited North Macedonia and it was reported in all the media in North Macedonia that Albania has expressed its dissatisfaction with the fact that Skopje refuses to build Corridor no. 8. In fact this was one of our main questions – why do the Albanian parties in North Macedonia support such a policy that is against the connection of Bulgaria and North Macedonia, Albania, the Adriatic and Italy? Here, we saw that Albania practically supported our demands," Spas Tashev tells Radio Bulgaria.

Publication in English: Al. Markov

Photos: BGNES, EPA/BGNES, BTA