Batak massacre media controversy in 2007

In May 2007, a public conference was scheduled in Bulgaria, aiming to present research, held by Martina Baleva and Ulf Brunnbauer, on the formation of national memory for the Batak massacre. Bulgarian media reported that the authors are denying the massacre, which was the rising of a substantial media controversy. Finally, the conference was cancelled, and several eminent Bulgarian historians (including Georgi Markov, head of the Institute of History of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and Bozhidar Dimitrov, director of the National Museum of History in Sofia) qualified Baleva and Brunnbauer's research as "grandiose falsification".^[1] Other historians claimed that the principle of academic freedom is violated.

Before the media controversy beginning

The conference was scheduled to be held in Batak on May 18, 2007 as part of a project entitled „Feindbild Islam – Geschichte und Gegenwart antiislamischer Stereotype in Bulgarien am Beispiel des Mythos vom Massaker in Batak“ ("The Image of the Islamic Enemy - the Past and Present of Anti-Islamic stereotypes in Bulgaria as exemplified by the Myth of the Batak Massacre"). The project was led by Ulf Brunnbauer and Martina Baleva from the Institute of Eastern European Studies at the University of Berlin, who were also expected to read papers at the conference.^[2]

Reaction in media

Bulgarian media reported that the scientists were denying that a massacre had occurred.^[3] There was a public outcry, widespread protests and immediate reactions on the part of the Mayor of Batak, Prime minister Sergei Stanishev, and President Georgi Parvanov.^[4] The Bulgarian Academy of Sciences rejected the possibility of providing a place for the conference, stating that there is a huge amount of material proof and documents for the massacres at Batak and Perushtitsa.^[5] Ulf Brunnbauer and Martina Baleva apologized and asserted that the outcry was based on a misunderstanding and incorrect information.^[6] They stated that their intention had been not to deny the massacre, but to critically look at some paintings and photographs related to it^[7] - an issue that Baleva had published an article on a year earlier.^[8] They also explained that the term "myth" in a culturological context does not qualify the veracity of an event, but rather refers to the way it is represented and used as a social construct.^[9] Some Bulgarian intellectuals criticized what they said was censorship and an encroachment upon the independence of scholarship^[10] and a petition was started in protest against the campaign.^[11]

Kaychev-Baleva debate

An important point in Baleva's paper that had been supposed to be read at the conference was that Polish artist Antoni Piotrowski's painting titled "The Batak Massacre" was an important factor for the formation of a national memory of the massacre. Naum Kaychev, assistant professor at Sofia University's Faculty of History, criticized this view in an article seeking to point out certain contradictions and factual errors in Baleva's paper that had been supposed to be read at the cancelled conference.^[12] One point of Kaychev's article was to show that national memory of the massacre existed long before Piotrowski's painting - for example, the massacre is described in a school history book in 1881, while Piotrowski's painting only appeared in 1892. In response, Baleva conceded that she had been wrong in claiming that Batak had been entirely forgotten before the painting was created. She nevertheless argued, among other things, that Piotrowski's work did have a significant influence on subsequent national memory of the massacre and on the form of the Batak memorial in particular.^[13]

References

External links

• Batak massacre: Provocation Against Bulgarian National History