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Bulgaria is threatening to scupper Turkey’s accession to the EU, euobserver.com reveals. The former Communist state is seeking “billions of euros in compensation” for ethnic Bulgarians expelled from their lands on the western side of the Bosphorus by the Ottoman Empire in 1913. Turkey, founded in 1923 from the empire’s remnants, recognised the rights of the displaced Bulgarians in a 1925 treaty, but Bulgaria complains that the treaty was never implemented. Cabinet minister Bojidar Dimitrov, head of Agency for Bulgarians Abroad, has declared that one of the conditions for “Turkey's full membership of the EU is solving the problem". Conjuring up the figure of €14 billion, the minister with a long memory remarked that “Turkey is surely able to pay this sum, after all, it's the 16th largest economic power in the world".
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