Bulgaria Urges Macedonia to React to Monument Desecration

The Bulgarian Foreign Ministry's headquarters in Sofia, Bulgaria. File photo

Bulgaria's Foreign Ministry has urged Macedonian authorities to distance themselves from the destruction of a memorial plaque placed by Bulgarians on the peak of Kaimakchalan, at the Greek-Macedonian border.

"We are calling on authorities in the Republic of Macedonia... not to allow such disgraceful acts anymore which, regrettably, are not isolated cases and are of particular concern in a moment when the two countries are negotiating for the signing of Neighborhood Agreement."

A travel ban is to be issued for "the person who committed this barbaric act," the ministry has added in a statement, in a possible reference to journalist Milenko Nedelkovski.

Nedelkovski on Thursday claimed that he and a group of volunteers had smashed a Bulgarian memorial plaque into pieces, a day after a Bulgarian delegation payed homage to the fallen Bulgarian soldiers on Kaimakchalan, the scene of a tragic battle with Serbia during the First World War.

However, reports have cast doubts whether it was Nedelkovski who destroyed the plaque.

Focus News Agency, which intensely covered the Kaimakchalan homage (and whose president Krasimir Uzunov attended the ceremony), claimed it had been removed before the arrival of the Serbian delegation last week, on September 16.

"The "merit" of the Skopje citizen Milenko Nedelkovski and the group he took to Kaimakchalan on September 22, 2016 is only and only to throw around and destroy the Bulgarian wreaths and the pile of stones erected to light up candles at the site of the already removed memorial sign," the agency says in a statement.

The Foreign Ministry, for its part, has added:

"For years the Bulgarian state has put in effort to organize joint commemorations of perished soldiers and an appropriate designation of their graves. This is a well-established world practice honouring the momory of perished ones on all sides of military conflicts, symbolizing reconciliation and desire for a peaceful coexistence and is not related to political, national or religious interests." 

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