Row between Turkey, Bulgaria Cities Threatens to Cut EU Cross-Border Funding

Three Bulgarian municipalities will have their access to cross-border EU funding cut as Turkey has banned any partnership with them, private bTV station reported.

Haskovo, Burgas and Svilengrad, municipalities whose central cities lie near the border with Turkey, have been barred from cooperating with local authorities in Edirne, the Turkish municipality on the other side of the border, as Ankara has prohibited that they work together.

Edirne Mayor Recep Gürkan has told bTV that the Foreign Ministry of Turkey had explicitly forbidden any interaction with Haskovo due to what it perceives as a controversial position about the mass killings of Armenians in the 20th century. Separately, the local administrations of Haskovo and Burgas earlier adopted statements deploring the "Armenian genocide".

Last April, the sister cities of Haskovo and Edirne froze ties over the decision of Haskovo that the park will bear the name "Armenians".

Local authorities in Haskovo decided to rename the park in the days when Armenians around the world were marking a centenary since the mass killings of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire began (and which lawmakers in Sofia voted to call "mass extermination", but not "genocide").

Mayor Gürkan then called the decision of Haskovo a result of a "unilateral, selective and divisive view of a period that is tragic for the entire population of the Ottoman Empire."

Now he can be heard suggesting in bTV's report that the respective local administrations should reverse their decisions as "Yambol did". Yambol is another municipality located at the Bulgaria-Turkey border with which cooperation was suspended, but then restored.

However, Haskovo Mayor Dobri Belivanov is adamant that "no-one can...