The World - News from May 31, 1989

Bulgaria took the offensive at the opening session of an international human rights conference in Paris by blaming Turkey for recent violence involving Bulgaria’s ethnic Turks. The monthlong conference, the first of three mandated by the Vienna review committee of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, is to review human rights progress among the 35 signatories of the 1975 Helsinki accords. In one of the first speeches, Bulgarian Foreign Minister Petur T. Mladenov accused “foreign circles”--a reference to Turkey--of being behind recent disturbances in his country in which ethnic Turks reportedly have been killed. Bulgaria has recently deported an estimated 300 ethnic Turks.