Anger erupted after top officials from Sofia attended the opening of a Bulgarian cultural club in North Macedonia that is named after controversial Nazi collaborator Ivan Mihailov. Saturday’s opening of a Bulgarian cultural club in the North Macedonia town of Bitola named after Ivan Mihailov, a controversial 20th Century nationalist movement leader who became a Nazi collaborator, has been criticised as a threat to ongoing attempts to achieve a breakthrough in the two countries’ dispute over history. The opening of the cultural club named after Mihailov, which was attended by top Bulgarian politicians, “does not contribute to rapprochement between the two peoples”, North Macedonia’s President Stevo Pendarovski said at the weekend. The event in Bitola was attended, in an unofficial capacity, by a spectrum of top Bulgarian politicians, including Prime Minister Kiril Petkov, Vice-President Iliyana Yotova and Foreign Minister Teodora Genchovska. Bulgarian Socialist Party member and MP Dragomir Stoynev, MP Andrei Gyurov and former defence minister and leader of the right-wing VMRO-BND party, Krasimir Karakachanov, were also present, as well as former foreign minister Ekaterina Zaharieva. The event was held amid an increased police presence and a nearby protest by outraged locals. Dragi Gjorgiev, co-chair of the joint North Macedonia-Bulgaria Commission for Historical and Educational Affairs, said it was nothing short of a “deliberate provocation”. (…) During the World War II, Mihailov lived for a period in Zagreb, as the guest of Ante Pavelic, the founder and head of the fascist organization known as the Ustasa and later the leader of the Independent State of Croatia, NDH, Nazi puppet state. Before the end of the war, in September 1944, Mihailov returned to Skopje, where he tried but failed to establish a Nazi puppet state similar to the NDH in Croatia. After World War II, he was living in exile, regarded as an enemy of the state and Nazi collaborator by Socialist Yugoslavia, of which Macedonia was part. He died in Rome in 1990.
via balkaninsight: Bulgarian Club Named After Nazi Ally Outrages North Macedonia