Forced Migrants or Voluntary Exiles: Ethnic Turks of Bulgaria in Turkey

Abstract

Turkey has been experiencing various types of migration flows since the foundation of the Republic in 1923. Migration of ethnic Turks of Bulgaria in 1989 is one of the important immigration waves in size and in nature as well. More than 350,000 Bulgarian Turks refusing to assimilation policies of the Bulgarian Communist Party (BCP) fled to Turkey in 1989. Behind this triggering political reason, there were deeper sources of this migration, such as economic, social, institutional and cultural exclusion/inclusion problems in Bulgaria. Furthermore, most of the Turks of Bulgaria kept the idea of migrating to their “imagined motherland’ someday. The same migrants have been experiencing integration/exclusion problems where they settled in Turkey, too. This paper attempts to open a conceptual debate by using concepts of ‘mixed migration”, ‘accidental diaspora’ and ‘voluntary exiles’ to overcome the ‘forced and voluntary’ dichotomy in this literature, rather than analysing all the dimensions in detail. Hence, the multiple dimensions of this migration will be tried to be understood via the perceptions of migrants.