Massacres of Albanians in the Balkan Wars
The massacres of Albanians in the Balkan Wars were perpetrated on several occasions by the Serbian and Montenegrin armies and paramilitaries during the conflicts that occurred in the region between 1912 and 1913.[1][2] During the 1912–13 First Balkan War, Serbia and Montenegro committed a number of war crimes against the Albanian population after expelling Ottoman Empire forces from present-day Albania, Kosovo, and North Macedonia, which were reported by the European, American and Serbian opposition press.[3] Most of the crimes occurred between October 1912 and the summer of 1913. The goal of the forced expulsions and massacres was statistical manipulation before the London Ambassadors Conference to determine the new Balkan borders.[3][4][5] According to contemporary accounts, around 20,000 to 25,000 Albanians were killed in the Kosovo Vilayet during the first two to four months, before the violence climaxed.[6] The total number of Albanians that were killed in Kosovo and Macedonia or in all Serbian occupied regions during the Balkan Wars is estimated to be at least 120,000.[7][8][9][10][11][12] Most of the victims were children, women and the elderly.[13][14] In addition to the massacres, some civilians had their lips and noses severed.[15] Multiple historians, scholars, and contemporary accounts refer to or characterize the massacres as a genocide of Albanians or the Muslim population in the Balkans as a whole. Further massacres against Albanians occurred during the First World War and continued during the interwar period.
Massacres of Albanians in the Balkan Wars
1912–1913
Ethnic Cleansing:
- 60,000–300,000 Albanians above the age of six expelled from Old Serbia by 1914
- c. 125,000 Albanians became homeless in northern Albania
Kingdom of Serbia, Kingdom of Montenegro, Chetniks, Greek paramilitaries
According to Philip J. Cohen, the Serbian Army generated so much fear that some Albanian women killed their children rather than let them fall into the hands of Serbian soldiers.[16] The Carnegie Commission, an international fact-finding mission, concluded that the Serbian and Montenegrin armies perpetrated large-scale violence for "the entire transformation of the ethnic character of regions inhabited exclusively by Albanians".[17] Cohen, examining the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace report, said that Serbian soldiers cut off the ears, noses and tongues of Albanian civilians and gouged out their eyes.[18] Cohen also cited Durham as saying that Serbian soldiers helped bury people alive in Kosovo.[19]
According to an Albanian imam organization, there were around 21,000 simple graves in Kosovo where Albanians were massacred by the Serbian armies.[20] In August and September 1913, Serbian forces destroyed 140 villages and forced 40,000 Albanians to flee.[21] According to documents from the Serbian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 239,807 Albanians were expelled from Old Serbia between 1912 and early 1914 (not counting children under the age of six); by late 1914, this number increased to 281,747.[22] These figures, however, are controversial and scholarly estimates can be as low as 60,000 or as high as 300,000.[23][24][9] American relief commissioner Willard Howard said in a 1914 Daily Mirror interview that General Carlos Popovitch would shout, "Don't run away, we are brothers and friends. We don't mean to do any harm."[25] Peasants who trusted Popovitch were shot or burned to death, and elderly women unable to leave their homes were also burned. Howard said that the atrocities were committed after the war ended.
According to Leo Freundlich's 1912 report, Popovitch was responsible for many of the Albanian massacres and became captain of the Serb troops in Durrës.[26] Serbian Generals Datidas Arkan and Bozo Jankovic were authorized to kill anyone who blocked Serbian control of Kosovo.[27] Yugoslavia from a Historical Perspective, a 2017 study published in Belgrade by the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia, said that villages were burned to ashes and Albanian Muslims forced to flee when Serbo-Montenegrin forces invaded Kosovo in 1912. Some chronicles cited decapitation as well as mutilation.[28] Leon Trotsky and Leo Freundlich estimated that about 25,000 Albanians died in the Kosovo Vilayet by early 1913.[29][3] Serbian journalist Kosta Novaković, who was a Serbian soldier during the Balkan wars, reported that over 120,000 Albanians were killed in Kosovo and Macedonia, and at least 50,000 were expelled to the Ottoman Empire and Albania.[8][7][9] A 2000 report examining Freundlich's collection of international news stories about the atrocities estimated that about 50,000 were victims within present-day borders of Kosovo.[30]
Background
The Albanian-Serbian conflict has its roots in the expulsion of the Albanians in 1877-1878 from areas which were incorporated into the Principality of Serbia.[31][32] As a result, some Albanian refugees who fled to Kosovo attacked the local Serb population.[33] In May 1901, Albanians pillaged and partially burned the cities of Novi Pazar, Sjenica and Pristina, and massacred Serbs in the area of North Kosovo.[34] Before the outbreak of the First Balkan War, the Albanians were fighting for a nation state. A mid-1912 Albanian revolt resulted in Ottoman recognition of the "14 Points", a list of demands which included the establishment of an Albanian Vilayet.[35] The push for Albanian autonomy and Ottoman weakness were seen by contemporary regional Christian Balkan powers as threatening their Christian population with extermination.[36] According to Albanian scholarship, the realisation of Albanian aspirations was received negatively by Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro and Greece.[35] The Balkan League (Serbia, Montenegro, Greece and Bulgaria) attacked the Ottoman Empire and, during the next few months, partitioned all Ottoman territory inhabited by Albanians.[2] The kingdoms of Serbia and Greece occupied most of present-day Albania and other Albanian-inhabited lands on the Adriatic coast. Montenegro occupied a portion of present-day northern Albania, around Shkodër. According to Dimitrije Tucović, Serbia doubled its territory. Most Albanian historians say that Montenegro, Greece and Serbia did not recognise Albanian autonomy, and the Balkan Wars were fought to stop it on Ottoman lands they claimed.[35]
When the Serbo-Montenegrin forces invaded the Vilayet of Kosovo in 1912, much of the Albanian population fled due to the feared (and actual) violence they experienced at the hands of the invading armies.[37] The Serb military effort to conquer Kosovo had overtones of extermination due to Serb retaliation against Albanians affecting children and women, including the killing of women and men and the destruction of homes.[38] During this period, 235 villages were burned down: 133 by Serb forces and 102 by the Montenegrins.[39] Steven Schwarts writes that during the capture of Durrës, Shkodër and Shengjin, Serbian soldiers massacred and pillaged poor Albanians.[40] According to the Albanian Armend Bekaj, the Serbian invasion of Kosovo was illegal.[41] Anna Di Lellio writes that the Serbian expansion campaign forced Albanians to accept a Serb nationalist ideology which made them feel like a minority in their homeland.[42]
According to a telegram sent from the Serbian consul in Prishtina, dated September 22, 1912, the Albanians were scared of the potential Serbian invasion. Nikola Pašić then ordered that Milan Rakić and Jovan M. Jovanović write a proclamation declaring that "the Serbian army would not act against Albanians but Turkey, and that the army would free the Serbs. The Albanians would not be harmed, and schools and places of worship would be left alone, and that there would be freedom of language."[43]
Belgrade had promised Isa Boletini to act friendly towards the Albanian uprising against the Turks and that the Albanians and Serbs would live in peace.[44]
Vilayet of Manastir
Plasnicë
In the village of Plasnica, 6 people were found killed and 40 others were killed in the month of October. 5 houses were burned. Also, many other villages around Kirçova were burned and the men were killed and massacred. In Kicevo, the imam of the city was among the first to be killed.[109][110]
Manastir
It is estimated that about 80% of the–mainly Albanian–villages in the Manastir region and the Albanian quarters of the city were destroyed by the Serbian army which engaged in indiscriminate massacres of Muslims.[95]
Dibra
On 20 September 1913, the Serbian Army carried off all the cattle in Dibër, Malësia. Although the herdsmen fought back, all were killed. The Serbians also killed two Lumë chieftains (Mehmet Edhemi and Xhaferr Elezi) and pillaged and burned the villages of Peshkopi, Blliçë and Dohoshisht in lower Dibër County and seven other villages in upper Dibër County. Women, children and old people were tortured and killed.[111]
As the army invaded Albania through Dibra, Elbasan and Shkodër, they bombarded cities and villages with artillery. The Albanian government telegraphed their delegates in Paris that Serbia's aim was to suppress the Albanian state and exterminate the Albanian population.[112]
American relief commissioner William Howard said in a 1914 Daily Mirror interview that Serbian troops destroyed 100 villages (with 12,000 houses) in Dibra, and 4,000 to 8,000 Albanians were burned, bayonetted or shot to death.[113] When Serbian troops looted the villages of Dibra, armed Albanians killed the soldiers. The Serbs responded by burning down 24 villages.[114]
Porcasi and Sulp
In the villages, Serbian soldiers took the men out and asked the women to pay for their release. They were put inside a mosque after payment, which was blown up. In Sulp, 73 Albanians were also killed.[116]
Vilayet of Janina
The Greek army sought to take full control of the Vilayet of Janina in the Balkan Wars and as it marched northwards, its campaign was resisted by local Albanians. One of the regions which were captured by the Greek army in the Vilayet of Janina was Chameria (today almost entirely part of Greece). Within a few days after the Greek army secured control of the region, a Cretan Greek paramilitary under commanders Deligiannakis and Spiros Fotis, killed 75 Cham notables of Paramythia who were gathered to pledge allegiance to the Greek state.[117]
As a response to resistance, the Greek forces began executing irregulars and regularly killing prisoners; authorities also encouraged harsher actions against civilians. These measures were common by the time the Greek forces entered Albania. According to an infantry officer, villagers were "mowed down like sparrows" and houses were being burnt down.[118]
The Greek army withdrew from the area after the recognition of the Albanian independence and the delineation of the border.[119] Later, the Greek forces committed multiple atrocities in Southern Albania leading up to and during WWI.[120]
Events which involve the activities of the Greek army in the region were extensively described in works by local Albanian writers who lived in the area. In December 1912, delegates from the regions of Chameria and Delvinë requested that the Albanian Vlora government to ensure the safety of the local Albanian populations from the Greek massacres. In the following month, the Vlora government requested at the London Ambassador's Conferences that all regions inhabited by Albanians should be territories of the Albanian state.[121]
Denial
War crimes committed by Serb troops outraged Serbian officials and historians; despite Serbian, British and German coverage of the atrocities, however, Nikola Pašić tried to present them as an "invention of foreign propaganda".[197] Denial continued, and the atrocities were called "a struggle for freedom" (leading to a popular quip about the "final liberation of the cradle of Serbdoom and occupied brothers").[198]
In January 1913, the Serbian government forwarded a memorandum to British officials in which it denied all accusations of atrocities committed by the Serbian army and referred to the reports as “tendentious rumors” and “untrue”, stating that its troops “paid most scrupulous attention to the rights of humanity”.[199]
In 2003, the Serbian Orthodox Church published a memorandum in which it claimed that “After the liberation of Kosovo and Metohija in 1912-13 there was no expulsion of the Albanian population from this area, nor did the Serbs take their revenge against them”.[200]
Legality
Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907
Although the Kingdom of Serbia signed the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, it did not follow the 1907 treaty; Muslim civilians in Kosovo were ill-treated and subject to excessive violence.[201]