Bulgaria's ethnic Turkish party DPS (Movement for Rights and Freedoms) has accepted the resignation from its leadership of Kasim Dal, who is emerging as a major dissenter.

Last week Dal, a MP who is formerly the right hand of DPS founder and leader Ahmed Dogan, declared he submitted his resignation and slammed Dogan accusing him of authoritarian control of the party, abandonment of its principles, and other sins.

On Tuesday, the Central Operational Bureau of the DPS has accepted Dal's resignation but has also declared that his motives for it were "provocative" and "libelous", and damaging the image of the party.

"The unity of DPS is not threatened," said at a new conference Hristo Biserov, a deputy chair of DPS.

Another deputy chair, Lyutvi Mestan, also stated that Dal's resignation could not create an institutional crisis within the Movement for Rights and Freedoms.

Dal is still a member of DPS and a member of its Parliamentary Group. At a meeting in February, the Central Council of the party will decide whether to expel him from its ranks whatsoever.

Mestan has refuted Dal's claims that DPS lacks internal democracy; he said it was not a party subjugated to its leader, but a party which has a natural leader in the face of Ahmed Dogan.

"He [Dogan] provides total, full freedon of expression of differing opinions," Mestan told journalists.

Dissenter Dal did not show up at Tuesday's meeting of the DPS bureau, but the party leadership still expects him to explain his motives.

On Monday, Dal declared that Dogan must resign from his post as leader. He claimed he did not aspire to become leader, and did not plan to create an alternative party.

There have been reports and rumors about internal rift in the DPS between Dogan and Dal for months.

In October 2010, during a visit in Sofia, Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan refused to meet with the DPS party leader Ahmed Dogan meeting instead with Kasim Dal, a DPS MP and former deputy chair of the party, who also chairs the group for friendship with Turkey in the Bulgarian Parliament. This fact led many, including a detailed article in a major Bulgarian weekly, The Capital, to declare that Ahmed Dogan lost Turkey's backing for some reason.

The Movement for Rights and Freedoms (DPS), a controversial party vastly dominated by its founder and leader Ahmed Dogan, was in power as part of the ruling coalitions in Bulgaria in 2001-2005 and 2005-2009, and once before that – in 1992-1994.