ZAMIR SHTYLLA Senior Scientific Researcher

One of the main goals of this policy, initially of Serbia and Montenegro, and later of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, (1) was the forced deportation of Albanians. Its aim was to drive Albanians away from Kosova and other regions and to create favourable circumstances for settling hundreds of thousands of Slav colonists who must definitively fill the vacuum.

The results of Albanian expulsion from Toplica (Prokuplje, Kurshumli, Leskovc,Nis and Vranja) in 1878 and the progress of its colonization in the closing decade of the 19th century persuaded the rulers in Belgrade and those of Cetinje in 1912 to revive that policy with optimism. In preparing for it, first they established a special authority in the occupied zones with an Albanian population; this power had all the features of a military administration (2) and was sanctioned juridically by the so-called decree on the regulation of liberated zones. Promulgated with the signature of the King in 1912, this decree was a word-for-word copy of ”the Provisional Law on the Regulation of Liberated Regions” brought out after the annexation of Toplica and other regions in 1878, (3) under which the police and military operators received a free hand to oppress and persecute the Albanians who opposed the new state.

From 1912 on, the military administration became for Belgrade one of the most preferred state and juridical forms in Kosova, especially in the first period after each occupation or reoccupation of the Province. Its main purpose was to maintain and strengthen the occupation regime and to bring about a gradual change in the ethnic balance of the places inhabited by an Albanian majority, by means of physical liquidation, oppression, terror, and mass expulsion.

On October 24, 1912, before the military occupation had been extended to the whole of Kosova, the Staff of the General Command of the Serbian army ordered its units to continue the military actions and to ”disarm” the Albanian population, while at the same time arming the Serbians. Meanwhile, the commander of the Serbian 3rd Army and chief of Narodne Odbrana, (4) General Boza Jankovic, insisted that Belgrade give him special authority to repress Albanians in Kosova so that they would give up any resistance. (5)

A Serbian social-democrat paper, Radnica novine, listed blood-curdling examples of the terror and violence against Albanians, the plunder of their shops, homes and granaries, and the devastation of villages; it pointed out that no one had felt the fury of ”liberators” so strongly as the innocent Albanians. (6) Apart from being the victims of large-scale massacres, the Albanians were given insulting and humiliating epithets by the Belgrade press, which painted them as backward and savage plunderers who did not accept progress and who must be ruled and kept down. (7)

Apart from killings and imprisonments, the occupiers also forced people to change their names and surnames and the names of their villages. They also compelled the overwhelmingly Moslem Albanians to convert to the Serbian Orthodox religion. (8) Edith Durham gives an eye-witness account of this bloody terror, ”From the conquered districts came piteous reports of the hideous cruelties which Serb and Montenegrin alike were committing on the Albanian populations. Far from concealing their deeds, the conquerors boasted of them. A Serb officer nearly choked with laughter as he told how his men had bayoneted the women and children of l.juma. And one of the Petrovitches boasted to me that in two years no one in the conquered lands would dare speak ’that dirty language’ (Albanian). Moslem men were given the choice of baptism or death, and shot down. The women were unveiled, and they and the children driven to church and baptized. ’On one generation we shall thus Serbize the lot! ’ they said. And later evidence proved that these reports were true.”(9)

The rate of deportation increased especially after the introduction of a completely arbitary fiscal system. At the beginning of 1914, the Serbian social-democratic press stated, among other things, that the military-police rule deliberately imposed, on Albanians, intolerable taxes and levies which were heavier than those under the Ottoman Empire before 1912. Faced with this situation, some Albanians decided that they had no choice but to abandon their own territories (10) and go to the interior of independent Albania. or especially to Turkey. During 1913 alone, hundreds of families had to leave Plava and Gucia, Peja and Gjakova for Albania. (1 1) Thousands from the districts of Dibra were driven out by the terror and violence that erupted after the suppression of the uprising of September 1913 and settled in the Central Albanian districts of Tirana and Elbasan. (12) Besides encouraging departure for regions in independent Albania, the military authorities also sent scores of Albanian families deep into regions with a compact Slav population. The families of insurgents who fought in geta against foreign occupation were special targets. In many cases, the villagers who gave aid and shelter to the fighters of geta were also deported. In this way the military tried to quell the Albanian armed resistance against the occupiers.

The years 1912 to 1915 mark the beginning of Serbian and Montenegrin efforts to disperse Albanians wherever they lived in compact groups. Because of their religion, the most suitable country for Albanian deportees was Turkey. Serbia and Montenegro tried to negotiate with Turkey for the removal of a maximum number of Albanians. From April to June 1914, according to figures from Montenegrin sources, more than 12 000 people had been deported to Turkey through the port of Tivar from the regions occupied by Montenegro alone. Meanwhile, the Austro-Hungarian counsellor reports for the same period put the number of deportees to Turkey from Montenegro at about 16 500. (13)

From the Serbian occupied regions, until the end of April 1914, according to incomplete figures. more than 40 000 persons (14) emigrated through Shkup. In April 1914, the newspaper Radnicke novine wrote that the trains leaving Shkup every day for Turkey were packed with Albanian refugees who had to shift mainly because of the insecurity of their lives. (15) The Serbian government imagined that the number of Albanians removed from regions it had occupied in 1912 should reach tens of thousands more than the number of those who had moved up till that time; thus, it hoped to create suitable economic and political conditions for a rapid colonization by Slav inhabitants of the areas vacated by the deportees. In March 1914, Nikola Pasic, prime minister and foreign minister of Serbia, admitted that the Serbian government foresaw the settling of 250 000 Serbian economic emigrants returning from America. (16) The government agencies supervising the deportation of Albanians to Turkey had special instructions for completing the documentation for deportation in the shortest possible time. This was done to avoid even the slightest prolongation of the procedure of deportation, especially in cases involving tens of families. One such example was that of 31 Albanian families from Buzovik village of Vitica district. when the documents for more than 200 people going to Turkey were issued within a few days. (17) The same thing occurred in other districts, tOO.

Up to the start of the First World War based on the figures of Yugoslav writers estimates show that, for these causes, the Albanian population of Kosova had suffered an appreciable reduction in numbers, amounting to more than 60 000 people this does not include the thousands lost during the terror and mass killings. Meanwhile many Kosovar scholars claim that the change in population in Kosova alone for the ten-year period, 1910-1920, was much greater than this. From about 475 000 inhabitants in Kosova in 1910, there was a total of 439 000 in 1920. Taking into account the natural increase, it means that the total had been reduced by about 150 000. Analysing this reduction in Kosova. these scholars note that the main reason for this diminution was deportation. (18)

The First World War up to 1918 temporarily interrupted the mass emigration of Albanians to Turkey. However, immediately after 1918, the newly formed Serbo-Croat-Slovene state placed expulsion on the agenda again. The Serbians in the key positions in the new kingdom hoped to achieve within a relatively short period the denationalization and Slavization of Albanians. Nikola Pasic, prime minister and best-known representative of the Kingdom. declared that, in the first decades of the 20th century, the problem of Albanians in the state of the southern Slavs could be easily solved in about 20-25 years through their assimilation, ”from both the cultural and national stand-points”, provided that the necessary peace existed within the state. and international relations.(19)

The reoccupation of Kosova and other Albanian regions by the Serbian army in the autumn of 1918 brought about the revival of a special political-administrative apparatus controlled and supervised directly by the military. The military administration applied open and continuous pressure to drive out the Albanians through the open terror and blondy massacres committed by the military detachments, the gendarmerie and the cetnik hands.

Under the pretext of pursuing Albanian fighters opposed to the occupation and the denial of national rights. the army tortured and killed thousands of innocent Albanian men, women, and children. looted and burned their homes, and stole their livestock in scores of villages. According to secret reports of the police of the Serho-Croat-Slovene Kingdom, between 1919 and 1924, about 2 000 Albanian patriots had been killed in Kosova. while, from 1924 to 1927, this figure rose to 3 000. The cetnik bands of Milic Krstic, Kosta Pecanc and Sava Lazarevic and others perpetrated massive massacres and hidious crimes in the region of Llap, in Peja and Ferizaj, in Shtimje, and in Dumnica, Plava, Gucia to force Albanians to leave. (20) In February 1919, the newspaper Populli, organ of the ”Committee for the National Defence of Defence of Kosova”, remarked that in the districts of Plava and Gucia the repeated attacks on Albanian villagers had been stepped up by the cetnik bands of Serbian and Montenegrin chauvinists who equipped even with heavy armaments, had burned villages and executed the inhabitants. (21) In a report drawn up in the early 1920s about the activity of the police, the prefect of the region of Prizren commented, among other things, that ”the gendarmes beat the Albanians with the aim of making them leave...’(22)

A direct consequence of this genocide was the forced emigration of thousands of Albanians. In the vicinity of Shkodra alone, at the beginning of February l919 and some time afterwards, about 5 000 Albanians had fled from Rugova, Plava and Gucia, while in the early 20s, about 2 000 others hed left the regions of Gjakova and Peja. Up till May 1923, some tens of thousands of Albanians had shifted from Kosova, Tetova,Kumanova and Shkup, and. as reports of the time stated, ”the wave of emigration is continually increasing ...”(26) According to the estimates of the Turkish consulate in Salonica, the number of escapees from the territories of the Serbo-Croat-Slovene Kingdom to Turkey, between the years 1918-1923. amounted to 30 or 40 thousand. The overwhelming majority was peasants from parts inhabited by Albanians. (27)

Along with the ”disarming” operations against the Albanian population, the military administration in Kosova and other places took measures to arm Serbs and Montenegrins. especially the colonists who, under special decrees, had begun to pour into the Albanian regions. According to the secret order of the special commissar for the so-called southern Serbia. an area in which Belgrade also included places with an Albanian population, by June 30, l 920. all the male Serbs from 18 to 45 years of age had been armed. The army organized bands from their ranks and put them under the command of its officers and the gendarmerie in each region or district. (28) At the same time, the command of the military division in Kosova, through a top-secret circular, ordered the prefects of the districts to concern themselves with the arming of the Slav nationals along with the disarming of the Albanians. The circular also stressed that the military commands of each district had to create special units to carry out beatings and tortures and, thus, to incite intra-national conflicts and create pretexts to exercise the most savage terror against Albanians. (29) Involved in the massacres against the Albanians were also chauvinists from the colonists, who collaborated with the military detachments and planned secret meetings with the representatives of the army and the gendarmerie. At these conspiratorial meetings, held mainly in the barracks of the gendarmerie, as the newspaper Proleter pointed out, plans were made to intensify the deportation and to eliminate the Albanians with more authority, who had become obstacles to the realization of Belgrade’s plans. (30)

This propaganda in the press and other forms was intended also to generate among the Albanians a state of continuous tension, the result of which would be an increase in the numbers of those who left. The state circles and the propaganda of Belgrade presented all the Moslem Albanians as Turks. (31) The Kingdom’s assistant secretary of Internal Affairs, Marko Cemovic, delcared to the Belgrade press that in Gostivar. Tetova, Dibra, Kercova and other regions around them, where the Albanians really constituted an overwhelming majority, there were no members of national minorities with the exception of ”a handful of colonised Turks...’ (32) Supporting this platform, the Serbian press demanded the removal, at all costs, of Albanians from what they called ”southern Serbia” and supported had justified any means and methods in serve these aims. The Belgrade newspapers praised this policy by arguing that the state had to colonize these regions ”with its own Christian elements who were in surplus in other parts of the country...”(33) The Serbian press stressed that one of the way~ to guarantee the successful and complete removal of the Albanians would be to regulate as quickly as possible the question of ”their emigration to Anatolia...”(34) The Belgrade newspaper Politika, the main organ for articles with an anti-Albanian content, in an excess of unrestrained hysteria, urged all levels of state administration to complete precisely the task with which they had been charged: the expulsion of all the Albanians, a thing which would constitute a ”patriotic merit.”(35)

In these circumstances of hatred against the Albanians among the Slav public, especially that of Serbia, it was not at all difficult to manipulate public opinion and arouse fanatical Serbian and Montenegrin colonises in Kosova to hold meetings, rallies and demonstrations, where the removal of the Albanians was demanded under the slogal ”Down with the Albanians , traitors of the state! We must drive them from here!” These rallies were followed by organized attacks on Albanians’ homes, by mass beatings, and, finally, by the intervention of the gendarmerie which arrested, tortured and sentenced the Albanians to imprisonment and frequently even kiHed them. (36)

The Serbian ruling circles gave special attention to the composition of the government administration in Kosova and other Albanian parts. To the leading posts at all military, administrative and political levels Belgrade appointed its most trusted chauvinist elements, most of whom were corrupt individuals. notorious in the past for their anti-Albanian activity. The functionaries and state officials in Kosova like the prefect of Mitrovica, Petar Kunovcic, the prefect of Rahovec, Zaharia Preglevic and scores of others like them, boasted to their superiors of their exploits in eliminating the Albanians; they bragged about their contribution to the exercise of a pressure to deport thousands of people from their homes and to colonize Kosova with Slav settlers.(37)

The anti-Albanian undertaking of the administrative apparatus in Kosova and other places was helped by the open arbitrariness of the judical organs; the judges and advocates were Serbs and Montenegrins who were active members of the notorious Serbian terrorist organizations ”Narodna Odbrana”, ”Bela ruka”, and others with their branches in different regions.(38) Not only did they never defend the Albanians who were oppressed, imprisoned and murdered, but on the contrary, they did everything they could to ensure that all trials went against them, especially in those cases when the question before the court related to factors which might lead to the deportation of the Albanian element. A significant mediation of the anti-Albanian and chauvinist character of the juridical institutions in Kosova was the trials over blood feuds among the Albanians, which were dealt with in a way to keep up and even to increase the feuds and to encourage them to move away.

During 1918-1941, an entire apparatus with selected officials was created both to organize the so-called colonizing agrarian reform and to supervise the process of deportation. With branches in all the regions inhabited by Albanians, the centre of this agency was in Shkup. It is one of the main factors which, between the two world wars, made Shkup a transit centre from which the endless chain of tens of thousands of emigrants took the road for Turkey, mainly over the Shkup - Salonica railway and thereafter by ship or again by train to their destination. In direct contact with the state administration for sending Albanians to Turkey, a number of semi-private agencies operated, too. They had spread their network through the small and large towns of Kosova and other Albanian parts. The best known of them was that called Sima Garma. (39) The agents of these companies carried their activities according to a special assignment and division of their tasks. Some engaged in propaganda to encourage emigration (by exploiting the difficult situation which the state apparatus created for the Albanian population Others engaged in the formalities of the emigration and accompanied caravans of emigrants on the journey; still others took up the problem of the final settlement of emigrants after their arrival in Turkey. (40) The agencies engaged in the dispatch of the Albanians to Turkey turned into a real business and increased their profits from the unscrupulous robbery of the Albanians, involved in it were state and military officials, politicians. and in some cases, also members of the Yugoslav information service, ”which strove to ensure that the deportation would continue at all costs...”(41) In order to facilitate and accelerate the work of agents involved directly in emigration, special dispositions were added to the state legislation so that Moslems could be granted their passport visas within 24 hours. These dispositions were utilized ”especially in regard to the deportation to Turkey of members of the Albanian population in Yugoslavia.”(42)

In these general circumstances of national oppression, political and social discrimination. and economic exploitation, tens of thousands of Albanian families had emigrated far from their nativ.-- territory by the first half of the 1930s. Although complete and accurate figures about displaced Albanians have not been published, reports from various sources say that the number sent to Turkey up to the mid 1930s varied from,” ’120000 to 150 000, (43) not including the more than 3 000 Kosovar families totalling about 12 000 persons who had to leave their ancestral lands and settle in Albania.(44)

Nevertheless, up till the mid 1930s, Belgrade had not achieved its goal to denationalize Kosova and other Albanian inhabited regions. At the same time, because of the high birth-rate, the absolute number of the Albanian population in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia steadily increased.

This was the main reason why circles in Belgrade began to seek new ways and means to attacks and, finally, wipe out the Albanians in the Kingdom. The task of drafting new programs and plans for this purpose was entrusted to the so-called ”Serbian Club of Culture”.(45) Included in this semi-state institution were elements of various strata and professions of Serbian society - politicians, top officials, military men, historians, economists. sociologists, publicists, who by comparing individual ideas and proposals, would work out a unified platform on which the state apparatus would base itself in its anti-Albanian policy. The most right-wing organs of the Serbian press such as Srpski glas and Nova Srbija became the public mouthpieces of the ”Serbian Club of Culture”. By continually issuing chauvinist calls like ”Serbs unite!” they tried to further incite the spirit of their hegemony in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. The ”Serbian Club of Culture” became an agency of Great-Serb chauvinism in Yugoslavia: its projects were accompanied with many articles and writings singing hymns of praise to the past of Serbia and preaching the superiority of Serbs over the others with a pronounced doze of racism. In all the projects and ideas presented in the ”Serbian Club of Culture”, including those of Borivoje Panjevac, a top state official, Vasa Cubrilovic, Gjoka Perina, Orestije Krstic, Atanasije Uroseic, Milosav Jelic and many others, the stress was on stepping up the oppression and terror against the Albanian population as the main means to accomplish the denationalization of Albanian regions and their Slavization.

Those who discussed the reports in the ”Serbian Club of Culture” also demanded that violent deportations of Albanians should continue in a more organized way and with greater intensity. and, along with it, large masses of Slav settlers should colonize Albanian lands.(46) The importance of this platform for the realization of the hegemonic aims of the Serbian circles emerges clearly from the conclusion which Gjoka Perina, one of their most fiery advocates. draws in his proposal. He stressed that, regardless of the means and methods used. the success of the final elimination of the Albanians in Yugoslavia would constitute ”an immortal work t’or our people (the Serbs - Z.Sh.)...”(47)

The discussions of the anti-Albanian programs in the ”Serbian Club of Culture” went simultaneously with the Yugoslav government holding a series of meetings of the ministries involved in the Albanian problem. At these meetings the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, attended by main representatives of that ministry, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Ministry of the Army and Navy, the Ministry of the Agrarian Reform, and the Ministries of Education. Health and Social Policy, it was decided that all these central bodies should operate in closest collaboration with one another while utilizing all their levers to hasten the removal of Albanians to Turkey. To intensify deportation, concrete tasks were entrusted to the General Staff of the Yugoslav Army which used for its guideline one of the reports presented in the ”Serbian Club of Culture”. It was the report of doc. Vasa Cubrilovic, entitled The Expulsion of the Albanians, delivered on March 7, 1937, and government circles considered it the most complete material and the most suited to be put into practice.(48)

The ideas and proposals of Cubrilovic became the platform of the ruling circles of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia up to 1941. Pointing out their significance, the officials and functionaries of the Yugoslav state stressed that the economic, national and military danger to Serbia from the Albanians of Kosova and other parts had been analysed brilliantly in the studies a number of ideologists of the ”Serbian Our of Culture” had done for several years on end, and one of the most outstanding of them was that of Vasa Cubrilovic.(49)

The value Belgrade placed on the Cubrilovic platform, as well as its special care to apply it as quickly as possible became quite clear after 1937, when the efforts of Yugoslav diplomacy over many years for a state agreement on the deportation of Albanians were finally concretized.

In the summer of 1938, Turkey and Yugoslavia signed a bilateral agreement in Istanbul, which opened the way for the removal of several hundred thousand ”Moslems” from the Kingdom of Yugoslavia to Turkey.(50) As a top-secret report of the Yugoslav representation in Ankara to the Foreign Ministry in Belgrade pointed out, its true aim was to deport the Albanian population. (Sl) The agreement defines the regions where the deportation would be applied. They were almost the same regions with Albanian population that Cubrilovic had described in his report as ”the dangerous Albanian triangie”.

While the public was being informed about this agreement, the propaganda and press in Belgrade was protesting that the number of deportees should not be 25O000, as the Yugoslav representatives were declaring, (52) but 400000, and these should all be Albanians. (53)

The top military brass of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia considered the presence of a small Turkish minority in Yugoslavia as a very favourable opportunity to justify the expulsion of the Albanian population, regardless of the extremely small number of Turkish elements in Kosova-only a few hundred people. In this connection, the Zone Command of 3rd Army pointed out, in a proposal for action for 1938 it had made to superior organs, that the deportees to Turkey should include first of all ”the Albanians of the border zone” with the Albanian state and then those of other regions, while the expulsion of a small Turkish group would be needed only ”to facilitate the deportation of the Albanians...”(S4) General Cemerkic, the zone commander of the 3rd Army, at the same time proposed that in regions like Rahovec, Suhareka, Podujeva, Vuchiterna, Gjilan and Kachanik, where Albanians constituted a majority of 80 or 90 per cent, new military garrisons should be created to accomplish further the deportation of Albanians and the Slav colonization. This proposal stressed: ”In regard to the deportation, this constitutes one of our very important problems ... We must try to break up the strong compact masses of Albanians as quickly as possible by introducing at least 50 per cent of our (Slav - Z.Sh.) population amongst them; without this the deportation cannot be considered to have been performed effectively...”(55)

In response to these proposals, in October 1938, the Yugoslav Ministry of the Army and Navy ordered that deportation should be carried on rapidly. Likewise, 150 stations of gendarmerie were set up in regions with a compact Albanian population and they, together with the regular army, operated against the Albanians with the harshest brutality and terror. especially during the winters of 1938-1939, and 1939-1940. Under the pretext that Albanian uprisings against Yugoslavia were being prepared in Kosova and other places, actions for the seizure of weapons were planned, with large-scale massacres being committed against Albanians to compel them to emigrate to Turkey. Mobile detachments of the gendarmerie roved from village to village. imprisoning, beating and torturing innocent Albanians and leaving many of them, after being tortured, in the streets; they warned the people ”this is what will happen to all of you if you don’t hand in your weapons and don’t go to Turkey...”(56)

As a result of the systematic violence and terror by the state and the military detachments and the gendarmeries, from the second half of the 1930s to the last day of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, the size of emigration increased rapidly. As secret reports of the government administration admitted, during 1936 alone, more than 2 000 Albanian families moved to Turkey. while in the following years, this number tended to increase because of the ever greater pressure that was exerted. Figures from official Yugoslav government sources show that, between the two world wars, from 1918 to 1941, the number of Albanians from Kosova and other regions going to Turkey was about 240 000, and, as well-informed people say ”the number of Albanian emigrants from Yugoslavia to Turkey at that time was much greater.”(57) If we add here the figure of Albanians who emigrated in 1912-1915, we can say that from the establishment of Serbian and Montenegrin rule in Kosova and other Albanian regions in 1912 to the capitulation of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in April 1941, at least 300 000 Albanians were forced to abandon their homes.

The consequences of the expulsion of Albanians were extremely grave and left their mark on the subsequent periods, too. The appreciable numerical diminution of the Albanian population in Yugoslavia was accompanied by the ruin and abandonment of hundreds of agricultural units and scores of villages. Traditional branches of the economy of the towns of Kosova and Albanian areas were hard hit. However, the most notable consequence the Belgrade regime brought about with full awareness, was the further widening of the gulf in intra-national relations in Kosova and other regions.