Post by zloca on Mar 17, 2008 4:57:27 GMT -5
Kosovo's Nazi Past: The Untold Story
By Carl Savich
1. Introduction: Genocide in Kosovo
During World War II and the Holocaust, Kosovar Albanians killed 10,000 Kosovo Serbs and expelled 100,000. Kosovo-Metohija was made a part of*greater Albania by Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. Hitler and Mussolini realized the Greater Albania ideology established by the 1878 League of Prizren. Albanian-settled areas of the Balkans---Kosovo-Metohija, western Macedonia, southern Montenegro---were incorporated in a Greater Albania. The Greater Albania Kosovar Albanian nationalist movement murdered Kosovo Serb civilians and took over their lands and houses. Kosovo Serb women were raped. Kosovo Serb Orthodox priests were arrested, tortured, and murdered. Serbian Orthodox churches and monasteries were attacked and destroyed. Serbian monuments, cemeteries, and gravestones were desecrated and demolished. The Greater Albania nationalist movement formed the Balli Kombetar, the Albanian Kosovo Committee, and the Skanderbeg Nazi SS Division, two-thirds of whose members were Kosovar Albanian Muslims. Kosovar Albanian Muslims played a major role in the Holocaust, the murder of European Jews. Kosovar Albanian Nazi SS troops participated in the roundup of Kosovo Jews who were later killed at Bergen-Belsen. What occurred in Kosovo during World War II was genocide. The mainstream accounts of World War II have censored and covered up the Kosovar Albanian role in the genocide against Kosovo Serbs and the role of Kosovar Albanians in the Holocaust. The Nazi past of Kosovo remains an untold story.
2. Fascist Italy and Kosovo
Albania was peremptorily and hurriedly recognized as an independent nation by the Great Powers in 1912 as a reaction to the First Balkan War to prevent Serbia from acquiring access to the Adriatic Sea and to prevent Montenegro from annexing Albanian territory settled by Montenegrins. Albania had never existed as a united and independent nation before.
The London Peace Conference of July 29, 1913 established international recognition of Kosovo as part of Serbia and also recognized the borders of Albania as an independent state. Under the April 26, 1915 Treaty of London, the Allied Powers sought to induce Italy under prime minister Antonio Salandra to enter World War I on the side of the Allies by granting Italy Albanian territory as well as German-settled territory from Austria, the Southern Tyrol, and the Dalmatian coast. Under the Treaty, Italy was granted "sovereignty" over the major Albanian port of Valona, the island of Saseno, and the surrounding territory.
Italy thus had expansionist goals in Albania and the Dalmatian coast of Yugoslavia. On October 31, 1922, King Victor Emmanuel III asked fascist political leader Benito Mussolini to come to Rome to form a new government after fascist leaders marched on Rome demanding that power be given to them. Mussolini became prime minister of a coalition government and established a fascist regime in Italy. In May, 1925, the new fascist Italian government signed a treaty with Albania that granted Italy the right to exploit the mineral resources in Albania, established the Albanian National Bank under Italian control, and gave Italian shipping companies a monopoly.
On December 13, 1924, Ahmed Beg Zogu, who was backed by Yugoslavia, seized power in Albania by overthrowing the regime of Fan Noli. On January 31, 1925, Zogu was elected president of Albania for a seven year term. In 1928, Zogu established a monarchy and emerged as King Zog I, "the King of the Albanians".
Benito Mussolini's fascist regime in Italy sought economic and political control of Albania and to establish a sphere of influence in the Adriatic Sea region throughout the 1920s and 1930s.
By 1937, Count Galeazzo Ciano, the Italian foreign minister, sought to bring Albania under direct Italian control. Ciano orchestrated the Italian foreign policy with regard to Albania in particular and the Balkans in general.
Following World War I, Italy and Albania supported Albanian terrorist activity against Yugoslavia, particularly the kachak guerrillas who were based in Albania but operated in Kosovo and Metohija. The kachak guerrillas engaged in a terrorist war against Yugoslavia to make Kosovo a part of Albania. The kachak movement was thus a secessionist conflict, a conflict to change the borders of Yugoslavia and Serbia and Montenegro. The Serbian-Albanian conflict in Kosovo-Metohija was always motivated by secession, about making Kosovo a part of Albania. This was the Greater Albania nationalist ideology established by the 1878 League of Prizren. Because Albania itself was politically, economically, and militarily weak and powerless, however, this nationalist ideology meant, in practical terms, not the takeover of Kosovo by Tirana by military force, but the takeover of Kosovo by Kosovar Albanians who would make Kosovo an Albanian land. Whether Kosova was formally or legally united to Albania proper was moot and irrelevant. What was foremost was to establish ethnic Albanian control of the Kosovo region. When all the Orthodox Serbs had been killed or expelled from Kosovo and their Orthodox churches and cemeteries destroyed, the practical realization of*greater Albania would result, whether legally recognized or not. In other words, what Albanian nationalists sought was a Kosovo taken over by ethnic Albanian Muslims who would expel the Serbian Orthodox and other non-Albanian populations and eradicate any non-Albanian cultural or religious monuments or symbols. It entailed the total and complete extermination and eradication of any non-Albanian population or culture or religion in Kosovo. The Greater Albania nationalist ideology presupposed genocide, biological and cultural and religious.
Kosovo was used by fascist Italy and Nazi Germany to destabilize Yugoslavia. Ciano wrote: "We must lull the Yugoslavs. But later, our politics must energetically deal with Kosovo. This will keep the irredentist problem alive in the Balkans, engage the attention of the Albanians and be a knife aimed at the back of Yugoslavia."
Ciano was determined to occupy, annex, or acquire Albania for Italy. Albania was always an object of fascist Italian expansion and influence. Ciano even proposed to Yugoslav prime minister Milan Stojadinovic to partition Albania between Italy and Yugoslavia. Prince Paul, however, refused: "We already have so many Albanians inside our frontiers and they cause us so much trouble, that I have no wish to increase their number."
On March 25, 1939, Italy issued an ultimatum to Albania demanding the right to occupy the country. On April 7, following the rejection of the ultimatum, Italy invaded and occupied Albania and made it an "autonomous" possession of Italy, joined in a "personal union" with Italy under Italian King Victor Immanuel III. The Albanian National Assembly voted to unite Albania with Italy. King Zog and his wife Queen Geraldine fled with the newly born Crown Prince Leka to Greece, then to London. Queen Geraldine later said in an interview that the reason Zog fled was because Yugoslavia would not allow Albania to establish guerrilla bases or supply lines on Yugoslavian territory. To justify the invasion, the Italian news accounts of the time manufactured a propaganda story that Zog had invited Italian troops to safeguard his regime. Zog allegedly planned to use the forces to invade Kosovo according to these accounts. The Italian occupation forces installed Shefket Verlaci as the new Albanian prime minister.
Mustafa Kruja replaced Verlaci as prime minister at the end of 1941. In January, 1943, Kruja resigned. He was replaced by the Eqrem Bey Libohova government, which lasted for three weeks. The Maliq Bushati government, which replaced it, lasted three weeks itself. The Italian "lieutenant-general" or governor, Francesco Jacomoni, was dismissed and replaced as well at this time. In May, 1943, Libohova was appointed for a second time to head the Albanian fascist government.
When Italy surrendered to the Allies on September 8, 1943, there were 7 to 8 Italian garrison divisions in Albania, consisting of 100,000 troops. Nazi Germany then occupied Albania and established a new "national committee". The new Albanian prime minister under German sponsorship was Rexhep Mitrovica.
In June, 1944, Fiqri Dine replaced Mitrovica, who had resigned.
In August, 1944, following Fikri's resignation, Ibrahim Bicaku was the last Axis-installed prime minister of Albania, before the German evacuation of the country.
Following the surrender of Yugoslavia on April 16, 1941 to the Axis Powers, the bulk of Kosovo and Metohija was immediately annexed to Albania. The western part of Macedonia, known as Illirida in the Greater Albania nationalist lexicon, was similarly annexed to Albania, as was territory from Montenegro. What emerged was a Greater Albania as envisaged by the 1878 League of Prizren made possible by the military intervention of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.
3. Greater Albania Emerges
Following the annexation of Kosovo and Metohija, known as New Albania, by Albania, Albanian political leaders sought to integrate the Serbian province by establishing Albanian control over the region and by expelling or killing the Serbian Orthodox population. Albanian political leaders advocated the genocide of the indigenous Serbian population of Kosovo. Albanian prime minister Mustafa Kruja, in a June, 1942 speech made in Kosovo, then called the "New Albania", stated:
The Serbian population of Kosovo should be removed as soon as possible�All indigenous Serbs should be qualified as colonists and as such, via the Albanian and Italian government, be sent to concentration camps in Albania. Serbian settlers should be killed.
The pre-war Muslim Jemiet party founded a new political organization with an irredentist orientation called the Lidhja Kombetare Shquiptare, which sought to Albanize and Islamicize the province.
Ferat-bey Draga, a prominent Kosovo Albanian leader, stated that the "time has come to exterminate the Serbs" and that "there will be no Serbs under the Kosovo sun."
Austrian diplomat Hermann Neubacher, the Third Reich's plenipotentiary for southeastern Europe and Balkans diplomatic troubleshooter for Nazi Germany, noted the policy of genocide by Kosovar Albanian political leaders: "Shqiptars were in a hurry to expel as many Serbs as possible from the country. From those expelled local tyrants often took a gift in gold for permission to emigrate."
In a speech on the subject of Greater Albania before the Italian Royal Academy on May 30, 1941, Kruja stated that "with the victory of the axis powers and establishment of the new world order, Mussolini and Hitler will ensure the Albanian people a national state that will cover its broadest ethnic borders and be indissolubly linked with fascist Italy."
The Italian diplomat Carlo Umilta, the civilian aide to the commander of the Italian military occupation forces, stated that the Italian forces intervened on many occasions to prevent massacres of Kosovo Serbs by Albanians. Umilta stated that "the Albanians are out to exterminate the Slavs." An Italian army report stated that the Albanians are "hunting down Serbs" and that the "Serbian minority are living in conditions that are truly disgraceful, constantly harassed by the brutality of the Albanians, who are whipping up racial hatred."
Kachak irregulars or guerrillas from Albania poured into Kosovo-Metohija with the Italian occupation forces. The Italian fascist authorities created a local Albanian police in Kosovo, the Vulnetari. Albanian language schools were established, Albanian or Shqip was made the official language, the Albanian Lek became the official currency, the civil administration and governmental offices were staffed by Albanians, and Albanian newspaper and radio stations were established. Pec, Djakovica, Istok, and Orahovac were annexed to Albania at the start of the occupation. Kosovo and Metohija, known as New Albania, became incorporated into a Greater Albania.
Kosovo and Metohija were politically integrated into Albania, Shqiperia or Shqipnija. Albanian political representatives from Kosovo and Metohija met at the Albanian parliament in Tirana and were made part of the Tirana regime. Kosovo was now Kosova/Kosove, an Albanian district of northern Albania.
In April, 1941, the first week after the attack on Yugoslavia, Kosovo Serbs were immediately attacked. Retreating and withdrawing Yugoslav army units were attacked by Albanians who were not disarmed and who seized weapons from military depots and weapons warehouses or armories. Yugoslav troops were robbed or killed and their houses were burned and destroyed and were left empty and deserted.
The entire Albanian population joined in the attacks against Kosovo Serbs. According to Gavril Kovijanic, a professor in Pec, in 1941, Albanians destroyed 65% of the Serbian houses in Pec and 95% in other areas of Metohija. Serbian cemeteries and gravestones were desecrated and destroyed, trees and crops were cut down, and fields were destroyed, meant to starve out the Serbian population to force them to flee. The Albanians looted, robbed, burned Serbian houses and property; there were mass executions of Kosovo Serbs; Serbs were tortured, beaten, and humiliated; and there was the torture and killing of Serbian children and the rape of Kosovo Serb women.
Dimitrije Sekularac, a Kosovo Serb refugee from the Drenica parish, described on July 20, 1941 how he fled from Kosovo with his wife and children to escape the mass murders and genocide. Sekularac stated that as the Yugoslav armed forces and civilian administrative authorities were retreating from Kacanik in southern Kosovo, they were attacked by Albanian deserters of the Yugoslav army who used their weapons against the Yugoslav forces. These Albanian deserters burned houses and killed Serbian civilians.
Kosovar Albanians began killing Serbian civilians in the villages around Pec, where Sekularac and his family fled from. He appealed to the German occupation forces, who occupied the region at that time, for protection of the Serbian population but the German commander told him that he didn't have enough troops.
Prizren was under Italian military control at that time. The police was entirely made up of Italian members for a year following the occupation. Then a mixed Italian and Albanian police force was created. Around Prizren, new Serbian settlements and houses were uprooted and destroyed and the Serbs were expelled to Serbia and Montenegro. The Serbian land and properties were taken over by ethnic Albanians.
Kosovo Serbs were killed in the villages around Prizren in the first months of the war. Kosovo Serb Djordje Jovanovic, who had been the former president of the Damjanska district, was known to have been killed at this time.
Branislav Leskovac, 23, and Zivota Jovanovic, 24, gave eyewitness accounts of the occupation of Prizren in the early stages of the war and occupation. On April 17, 1941, Italian forces entered Prizren following the surrender of the Yugoslav army. The fascist Italian troops were greeted enthusiastically by the Albanian population because Ciano had promised them the creation of an ethnically pure, Albanian Kosova, incorporated into Greater Albania.
On about April 20, 1941, the first mass arrests and roundups of the Serbian population occurred when 20-30 Serbs were arrested and taken into custody. They had been part of the Yugoslav civil administration. They were imprisoned in the Prizren administrative/municipal/city hall building where they were beaten with guns and hoes. After a few days passed, five were led out and summarily executed. Those murdered were two brothers named Marjanovic, Andrija Fisic, Samardzija and Popovic, and one other person named Kokolja. Kokolja and Fisic were killed with knives and before they died their eyes were gouged out.
Kosovo Serbs were interned in prisons and concentration camps in Tirana and other sites in Albania. In March, 1942, about 40 Serbs were interned in Prizren.
Arrests of Serbs intensified when Albanian leaders visited Kosovo. When the fascist prime minister of Albania, Mustafa Kruja, made an official visit to Prizren in June, 1942, 30 Serbs were arrested.
Kol Bib Mirakaja, the secretary of the fascist party of Albania, made a visit in July, 1942, along with Italian governor Francesco Jacomoni, when more arrests of Serbs occurred and when they intensified.
In the summer of 1942, Serbs were rounded up and deported to internment camps in Tirana, Albania, where one Serb prisoner is known to have died.
In November, 1942, a fourth roundup of Kosovo Serbs occurred in Prizren when 25 Serbs were arrested and held in prison for five and a half months, until May 31, 1943. They were beaten and abused during this time.
On April 1, 1943, 25 Kosovo Serbs were taken to the Italian prison at Porte Romano near Draca. There were 900 Serbs in this prison camp, 600 of whom were from Gnjilane alone. The rest of the prisoners were from Prizren, Pec, Urosevac, Pristina, and Lipljan. The prisoners stayed at the Porto Romano prison until September 16, 1943 when the prisoners were released following the Italian surrender. Those from Gnjilane were transported by boat for Trieste. The boat sank, however, in the Adriatic Sea and almost all the prisoners were killed or drowned. Several survivors recounted this story in the middle of March, 1944 when they were in Urosevac.
When the Germans occupied Kosovo in 1943, they unleashed the Albanian police against the Kosovo Serb population. Murders and expulsions of Kosovo Serbs were intensified. While the Italians restrained the Albanians, the German policy was to turn the Albanians loose on the Serbian population to murder, rob, and loot Serbian settlements. The German occupation forces sought to gain favor with the Albanian population in this way.
Following the Italian surrender on September 8, 1943, Albanian interior minister Dzafer Deva came to Kosovo and reorganized the police force which was made up of balists, Greater Albania nationalists of the Balli Kombetar (BK, National Union).
On December 9, 1943, in Prizren, Kosovo Serb Stevan Bacetovic, a cafe owner, was taken from his house and he was murdered and his body was thrown in a garbage dump. Serbian houses and settlements around Prizren were torched and burned. Serbian women were raped in their houses. In 1944, the two sisters named Berzanovic were known to have been raped by Albanian attackers.
In September, 1943, Serbian houses had been robbed and looted and Serbs were murdered, while 800 were imprisoned.
In the Istok parish in Metohija, 102 Serbs are known to have been murdered by Albanians, as recorded by iguman Sava. Andrija Popovic, the Serbian Orthodox priest of the Istok parish, was murdered, as were priests Vladeta Popovic and Nikodim Radosavljevic of the Gorioca monastery. These are the names of the Kosovo and Metohija Serbs killed by Albanians as recorded in the parish record: [names listed]
In the Lipljan parish, the priest Borislav Kevkic, recorded the names of 62 Serbs who were murdered by Kosovar Albanians in the Lipljan and Donja Gusterica region: [names listed]
The German occupation forces were brutal towards the Serbian population of Kosovo, aiding and abetting the murders and expulsions carried out by their Albanian Kosovar proxies. The Italian forces were more sympathetic to the plight of the Serbian population.
In 1942, the Italians interned a large group of Kosovo Serbs. Facing imminent military collapse, in the summer of 1943, the Italians began transferring the civil administration in Kosovo to local Albanian Muslims. When Italy surrendered on September 8, 1943, a military and political vacuum resulted in Albania proper and Kosova. German forces poured into Kosovo and Albania from Serbia proper to occupy the area and to safeguard the fascist Greater Albania statelet founded by Benito Mussolini.
By Carl Savich
1. Introduction: Genocide in Kosovo
During World War II and the Holocaust, Kosovar Albanians killed 10,000 Kosovo Serbs and expelled 100,000. Kosovo-Metohija was made a part of*greater Albania by Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. Hitler and Mussolini realized the Greater Albania ideology established by the 1878 League of Prizren. Albanian-settled areas of the Balkans---Kosovo-Metohija, western Macedonia, southern Montenegro---were incorporated in a Greater Albania. The Greater Albania Kosovar Albanian nationalist movement murdered Kosovo Serb civilians and took over their lands and houses. Kosovo Serb women were raped. Kosovo Serb Orthodox priests were arrested, tortured, and murdered. Serbian Orthodox churches and monasteries were attacked and destroyed. Serbian monuments, cemeteries, and gravestones were desecrated and demolished. The Greater Albania nationalist movement formed the Balli Kombetar, the Albanian Kosovo Committee, and the Skanderbeg Nazi SS Division, two-thirds of whose members were Kosovar Albanian Muslims. Kosovar Albanian Muslims played a major role in the Holocaust, the murder of European Jews. Kosovar Albanian Nazi SS troops participated in the roundup of Kosovo Jews who were later killed at Bergen-Belsen. What occurred in Kosovo during World War II was genocide. The mainstream accounts of World War II have censored and covered up the Kosovar Albanian role in the genocide against Kosovo Serbs and the role of Kosovar Albanians in the Holocaust. The Nazi past of Kosovo remains an untold story.
2. Fascist Italy and Kosovo
Albania was peremptorily and hurriedly recognized as an independent nation by the Great Powers in 1912 as a reaction to the First Balkan War to prevent Serbia from acquiring access to the Adriatic Sea and to prevent Montenegro from annexing Albanian territory settled by Montenegrins. Albania had never existed as a united and independent nation before.
The London Peace Conference of July 29, 1913 established international recognition of Kosovo as part of Serbia and also recognized the borders of Albania as an independent state. Under the April 26, 1915 Treaty of London, the Allied Powers sought to induce Italy under prime minister Antonio Salandra to enter World War I on the side of the Allies by granting Italy Albanian territory as well as German-settled territory from Austria, the Southern Tyrol, and the Dalmatian coast. Under the Treaty, Italy was granted "sovereignty" over the major Albanian port of Valona, the island of Saseno, and the surrounding territory.
Italy thus had expansionist goals in Albania and the Dalmatian coast of Yugoslavia. On October 31, 1922, King Victor Emmanuel III asked fascist political leader Benito Mussolini to come to Rome to form a new government after fascist leaders marched on Rome demanding that power be given to them. Mussolini became prime minister of a coalition government and established a fascist regime in Italy. In May, 1925, the new fascist Italian government signed a treaty with Albania that granted Italy the right to exploit the mineral resources in Albania, established the Albanian National Bank under Italian control, and gave Italian shipping companies a monopoly.
On December 13, 1924, Ahmed Beg Zogu, who was backed by Yugoslavia, seized power in Albania by overthrowing the regime of Fan Noli. On January 31, 1925, Zogu was elected president of Albania for a seven year term. In 1928, Zogu established a monarchy and emerged as King Zog I, "the King of the Albanians".
Benito Mussolini's fascist regime in Italy sought economic and political control of Albania and to establish a sphere of influence in the Adriatic Sea region throughout the 1920s and 1930s.
By 1937, Count Galeazzo Ciano, the Italian foreign minister, sought to bring Albania under direct Italian control. Ciano orchestrated the Italian foreign policy with regard to Albania in particular and the Balkans in general.
Following World War I, Italy and Albania supported Albanian terrorist activity against Yugoslavia, particularly the kachak guerrillas who were based in Albania but operated in Kosovo and Metohija. The kachak guerrillas engaged in a terrorist war against Yugoslavia to make Kosovo a part of Albania. The kachak movement was thus a secessionist conflict, a conflict to change the borders of Yugoslavia and Serbia and Montenegro. The Serbian-Albanian conflict in Kosovo-Metohija was always motivated by secession, about making Kosovo a part of Albania. This was the Greater Albania nationalist ideology established by the 1878 League of Prizren. Because Albania itself was politically, economically, and militarily weak and powerless, however, this nationalist ideology meant, in practical terms, not the takeover of Kosovo by Tirana by military force, but the takeover of Kosovo by Kosovar Albanians who would make Kosovo an Albanian land. Whether Kosova was formally or legally united to Albania proper was moot and irrelevant. What was foremost was to establish ethnic Albanian control of the Kosovo region. When all the Orthodox Serbs had been killed or expelled from Kosovo and their Orthodox churches and cemeteries destroyed, the practical realization of*greater Albania would result, whether legally recognized or not. In other words, what Albanian nationalists sought was a Kosovo taken over by ethnic Albanian Muslims who would expel the Serbian Orthodox and other non-Albanian populations and eradicate any non-Albanian cultural or religious monuments or symbols. It entailed the total and complete extermination and eradication of any non-Albanian population or culture or religion in Kosovo. The Greater Albania nationalist ideology presupposed genocide, biological and cultural and religious.
Kosovo was used by fascist Italy and Nazi Germany to destabilize Yugoslavia. Ciano wrote: "We must lull the Yugoslavs. But later, our politics must energetically deal with Kosovo. This will keep the irredentist problem alive in the Balkans, engage the attention of the Albanians and be a knife aimed at the back of Yugoslavia."
Ciano was determined to occupy, annex, or acquire Albania for Italy. Albania was always an object of fascist Italian expansion and influence. Ciano even proposed to Yugoslav prime minister Milan Stojadinovic to partition Albania between Italy and Yugoslavia. Prince Paul, however, refused: "We already have so many Albanians inside our frontiers and they cause us so much trouble, that I have no wish to increase their number."
On March 25, 1939, Italy issued an ultimatum to Albania demanding the right to occupy the country. On April 7, following the rejection of the ultimatum, Italy invaded and occupied Albania and made it an "autonomous" possession of Italy, joined in a "personal union" with Italy under Italian King Victor Immanuel III. The Albanian National Assembly voted to unite Albania with Italy. King Zog and his wife Queen Geraldine fled with the newly born Crown Prince Leka to Greece, then to London. Queen Geraldine later said in an interview that the reason Zog fled was because Yugoslavia would not allow Albania to establish guerrilla bases or supply lines on Yugoslavian territory. To justify the invasion, the Italian news accounts of the time manufactured a propaganda story that Zog had invited Italian troops to safeguard his regime. Zog allegedly planned to use the forces to invade Kosovo according to these accounts. The Italian occupation forces installed Shefket Verlaci as the new Albanian prime minister.
Mustafa Kruja replaced Verlaci as prime minister at the end of 1941. In January, 1943, Kruja resigned. He was replaced by the Eqrem Bey Libohova government, which lasted for three weeks. The Maliq Bushati government, which replaced it, lasted three weeks itself. The Italian "lieutenant-general" or governor, Francesco Jacomoni, was dismissed and replaced as well at this time. In May, 1943, Libohova was appointed for a second time to head the Albanian fascist government.
When Italy surrendered to the Allies on September 8, 1943, there were 7 to 8 Italian garrison divisions in Albania, consisting of 100,000 troops. Nazi Germany then occupied Albania and established a new "national committee". The new Albanian prime minister under German sponsorship was Rexhep Mitrovica.
In June, 1944, Fiqri Dine replaced Mitrovica, who had resigned.
In August, 1944, following Fikri's resignation, Ibrahim Bicaku was the last Axis-installed prime minister of Albania, before the German evacuation of the country.
Following the surrender of Yugoslavia on April 16, 1941 to the Axis Powers, the bulk of Kosovo and Metohija was immediately annexed to Albania. The western part of Macedonia, known as Illirida in the Greater Albania nationalist lexicon, was similarly annexed to Albania, as was territory from Montenegro. What emerged was a Greater Albania as envisaged by the 1878 League of Prizren made possible by the military intervention of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.
3. Greater Albania Emerges
Following the annexation of Kosovo and Metohija, known as New Albania, by Albania, Albanian political leaders sought to integrate the Serbian province by establishing Albanian control over the region and by expelling or killing the Serbian Orthodox population. Albanian political leaders advocated the genocide of the indigenous Serbian population of Kosovo. Albanian prime minister Mustafa Kruja, in a June, 1942 speech made in Kosovo, then called the "New Albania", stated:
The Serbian population of Kosovo should be removed as soon as possible�All indigenous Serbs should be qualified as colonists and as such, via the Albanian and Italian government, be sent to concentration camps in Albania. Serbian settlers should be killed.
The pre-war Muslim Jemiet party founded a new political organization with an irredentist orientation called the Lidhja Kombetare Shquiptare, which sought to Albanize and Islamicize the province.
Ferat-bey Draga, a prominent Kosovo Albanian leader, stated that the "time has come to exterminate the Serbs" and that "there will be no Serbs under the Kosovo sun."
Austrian diplomat Hermann Neubacher, the Third Reich's plenipotentiary for southeastern Europe and Balkans diplomatic troubleshooter for Nazi Germany, noted the policy of genocide by Kosovar Albanian political leaders: "Shqiptars were in a hurry to expel as many Serbs as possible from the country. From those expelled local tyrants often took a gift in gold for permission to emigrate."
In a speech on the subject of Greater Albania before the Italian Royal Academy on May 30, 1941, Kruja stated that "with the victory of the axis powers and establishment of the new world order, Mussolini and Hitler will ensure the Albanian people a national state that will cover its broadest ethnic borders and be indissolubly linked with fascist Italy."
The Italian diplomat Carlo Umilta, the civilian aide to the commander of the Italian military occupation forces, stated that the Italian forces intervened on many occasions to prevent massacres of Kosovo Serbs by Albanians. Umilta stated that "the Albanians are out to exterminate the Slavs." An Italian army report stated that the Albanians are "hunting down Serbs" and that the "Serbian minority are living in conditions that are truly disgraceful, constantly harassed by the brutality of the Albanians, who are whipping up racial hatred."
Kachak irregulars or guerrillas from Albania poured into Kosovo-Metohija with the Italian occupation forces. The Italian fascist authorities created a local Albanian police in Kosovo, the Vulnetari. Albanian language schools were established, Albanian or Shqip was made the official language, the Albanian Lek became the official currency, the civil administration and governmental offices were staffed by Albanians, and Albanian newspaper and radio stations were established. Pec, Djakovica, Istok, and Orahovac were annexed to Albania at the start of the occupation. Kosovo and Metohija, known as New Albania, became incorporated into a Greater Albania.
Kosovo and Metohija were politically integrated into Albania, Shqiperia or Shqipnija. Albanian political representatives from Kosovo and Metohija met at the Albanian parliament in Tirana and were made part of the Tirana regime. Kosovo was now Kosova/Kosove, an Albanian district of northern Albania.
In April, 1941, the first week after the attack on Yugoslavia, Kosovo Serbs were immediately attacked. Retreating and withdrawing Yugoslav army units were attacked by Albanians who were not disarmed and who seized weapons from military depots and weapons warehouses or armories. Yugoslav troops were robbed or killed and their houses were burned and destroyed and were left empty and deserted.
The entire Albanian population joined in the attacks against Kosovo Serbs. According to Gavril Kovijanic, a professor in Pec, in 1941, Albanians destroyed 65% of the Serbian houses in Pec and 95% in other areas of Metohija. Serbian cemeteries and gravestones were desecrated and destroyed, trees and crops were cut down, and fields were destroyed, meant to starve out the Serbian population to force them to flee. The Albanians looted, robbed, burned Serbian houses and property; there were mass executions of Kosovo Serbs; Serbs were tortured, beaten, and humiliated; and there was the torture and killing of Serbian children and the rape of Kosovo Serb women.
Dimitrije Sekularac, a Kosovo Serb refugee from the Drenica parish, described on July 20, 1941 how he fled from Kosovo with his wife and children to escape the mass murders and genocide. Sekularac stated that as the Yugoslav armed forces and civilian administrative authorities were retreating from Kacanik in southern Kosovo, they were attacked by Albanian deserters of the Yugoslav army who used their weapons against the Yugoslav forces. These Albanian deserters burned houses and killed Serbian civilians.
Kosovar Albanians began killing Serbian civilians in the villages around Pec, where Sekularac and his family fled from. He appealed to the German occupation forces, who occupied the region at that time, for protection of the Serbian population but the German commander told him that he didn't have enough troops.
Prizren was under Italian military control at that time. The police was entirely made up of Italian members for a year following the occupation. Then a mixed Italian and Albanian police force was created. Around Prizren, new Serbian settlements and houses were uprooted and destroyed and the Serbs were expelled to Serbia and Montenegro. The Serbian land and properties were taken over by ethnic Albanians.
Kosovo Serbs were killed in the villages around Prizren in the first months of the war. Kosovo Serb Djordje Jovanovic, who had been the former president of the Damjanska district, was known to have been killed at this time.
Branislav Leskovac, 23, and Zivota Jovanovic, 24, gave eyewitness accounts of the occupation of Prizren in the early stages of the war and occupation. On April 17, 1941, Italian forces entered Prizren following the surrender of the Yugoslav army. The fascist Italian troops were greeted enthusiastically by the Albanian population because Ciano had promised them the creation of an ethnically pure, Albanian Kosova, incorporated into Greater Albania.
On about April 20, 1941, the first mass arrests and roundups of the Serbian population occurred when 20-30 Serbs were arrested and taken into custody. They had been part of the Yugoslav civil administration. They were imprisoned in the Prizren administrative/municipal/city hall building where they were beaten with guns and hoes. After a few days passed, five were led out and summarily executed. Those murdered were two brothers named Marjanovic, Andrija Fisic, Samardzija and Popovic, and one other person named Kokolja. Kokolja and Fisic were killed with knives and before they died their eyes were gouged out.
Kosovo Serbs were interned in prisons and concentration camps in Tirana and other sites in Albania. In March, 1942, about 40 Serbs were interned in Prizren.
Arrests of Serbs intensified when Albanian leaders visited Kosovo. When the fascist prime minister of Albania, Mustafa Kruja, made an official visit to Prizren in June, 1942, 30 Serbs were arrested.
Kol Bib Mirakaja, the secretary of the fascist party of Albania, made a visit in July, 1942, along with Italian governor Francesco Jacomoni, when more arrests of Serbs occurred and when they intensified.
In the summer of 1942, Serbs were rounded up and deported to internment camps in Tirana, Albania, where one Serb prisoner is known to have died.
In November, 1942, a fourth roundup of Kosovo Serbs occurred in Prizren when 25 Serbs were arrested and held in prison for five and a half months, until May 31, 1943. They were beaten and abused during this time.
On April 1, 1943, 25 Kosovo Serbs were taken to the Italian prison at Porte Romano near Draca. There were 900 Serbs in this prison camp, 600 of whom were from Gnjilane alone. The rest of the prisoners were from Prizren, Pec, Urosevac, Pristina, and Lipljan. The prisoners stayed at the Porto Romano prison until September 16, 1943 when the prisoners were released following the Italian surrender. Those from Gnjilane were transported by boat for Trieste. The boat sank, however, in the Adriatic Sea and almost all the prisoners were killed or drowned. Several survivors recounted this story in the middle of March, 1944 when they were in Urosevac.
When the Germans occupied Kosovo in 1943, they unleashed the Albanian police against the Kosovo Serb population. Murders and expulsions of Kosovo Serbs were intensified. While the Italians restrained the Albanians, the German policy was to turn the Albanians loose on the Serbian population to murder, rob, and loot Serbian settlements. The German occupation forces sought to gain favor with the Albanian population in this way.
Following the Italian surrender on September 8, 1943, Albanian interior minister Dzafer Deva came to Kosovo and reorganized the police force which was made up of balists, Greater Albania nationalists of the Balli Kombetar (BK, National Union).
On December 9, 1943, in Prizren, Kosovo Serb Stevan Bacetovic, a cafe owner, was taken from his house and he was murdered and his body was thrown in a garbage dump. Serbian houses and settlements around Prizren were torched and burned. Serbian women were raped in their houses. In 1944, the two sisters named Berzanovic were known to have been raped by Albanian attackers.
In September, 1943, Serbian houses had been robbed and looted and Serbs were murdered, while 800 were imprisoned.
In the Istok parish in Metohija, 102 Serbs are known to have been murdered by Albanians, as recorded by iguman Sava. Andrija Popovic, the Serbian Orthodox priest of the Istok parish, was murdered, as were priests Vladeta Popovic and Nikodim Radosavljevic of the Gorioca monastery. These are the names of the Kosovo and Metohija Serbs killed by Albanians as recorded in the parish record: [names listed]
In the Lipljan parish, the priest Borislav Kevkic, recorded the names of 62 Serbs who were murdered by Kosovar Albanians in the Lipljan and Donja Gusterica region: [names listed]
The German occupation forces were brutal towards the Serbian population of Kosovo, aiding and abetting the murders and expulsions carried out by their Albanian Kosovar proxies. The Italian forces were more sympathetic to the plight of the Serbian population.
In 1942, the Italians interned a large group of Kosovo Serbs. Facing imminent military collapse, in the summer of 1943, the Italians began transferring the civil administration in Kosovo to local Albanian Muslims. When Italy surrendered on September 8, 1943, a military and political vacuum resulted in Albania proper and Kosova. German forces poured into Kosovo and Albania from Serbia proper to occupy the area and to safeguard the fascist Greater Albania statelet founded by Benito Mussolini.