One of the arguments for interpreting the present demographic distribution has always been the ethnic purity of proper Albania. In other words, it has been always claimed by the Albanians and supported by the official statistical data, that this “purity” testifies the unjust drawing of the borders between Albania and the neighboring countries [...]
When at the 1878 Berlin Congress Serbia and Montenegro had to become recognized as sovereign states, the Muslim Albanian representatives tried to initiate the same for their own national state or wider autonomy within the Ottoman Empire which they considered as their own national state.
They founded the (First) Prizren League in Metochia (the western portion of contemporary Kosovo).[1] However, this Islamic initiative failed with Bismarck’s explicit rejection to speak about Albanian nationality as nonexistent at all in Europe at that time as they have been considered as the Turks. At the same time, the Albanian national movement Rilindja was initiated, as ideological support for the national striving. It was not insignificant that Rilindja meant renaissance (revival), suggesting that it was concerned not with forging new nationality but just reviving some older one. Nevertheless, at this instance, the Albanian struggle for forging their own nation and consequently their own national state was trigged. With this justifiable aim came along, however, unjustifiable means, as a consequence of insatiable thirst for acquiring the necessary prerequisites for a sovereign state came as well: land, people, and language (as the landmark of an alleged authentic history). Their leaders, in fact, considered that this legitimate end justified any available means, as Machiavelli put it.[2]
Albania was officially proclaimed as an independent state on November 28, 1912, during the First Balkan War (1912−1913), fought between Serbia, Greece, Montenegro, and Bulgaria against the Ottoman Empire.[3] Majority of ethnic Turks in those four countries left them for Asia Minor, some of them voluntarily, some expelled. A small minority of those Turks is still extant in Kosovo-Metochia (KosMet).[4] As a matter of very historical fact, Albania as a state was founded on the insistence of Austro-Hungary, as a barrier between growing Serbia and the Adriatic Sea. As expected, the state borders could not delimit exactly the ethnographic distribution, so that some Serbs, Greeks, “Macedonians”, and Montenegrins remained in Albania and some ethnic Albanians were left in these countries too. When looking at the present-day ethnic distribution one may have the impression that these “ethnic remnants” were unequally distributed and that too many Albanians were left outside the homeland. But this impression is not only deceiving but points into the opposite direction.
Two decisive phenomena have contributed to this situation: migrations and demographic expansion.
Migrations
The issue of migrations can be split into two categories: anthropological and political. The first refers to the common tendency of the highlanders to move to the lowlands like the Balkan Dinariods. North Albanian mountaineers used to migrate to the Albanian plane in Central Albania, but equally firstly to Metochia and then Kosovo (proper), during the Ottoman rule especially after the 1690 First Great Serbian Migration from Kosovo-Metochia to South and Central Hungary.[5] Apart from the slow individual migrations, ever present in such situations, there is what a Serb ethnologist and ethnographer Jovan Cvijić labeled as metanastatic migration.[6] In other words, ever after an abortive uprising or rebellion within the Ottoman Empire (or elsewhere) people from the region used to find their escape from the certain retaliation by moving to more secure areas.
It happened many times, for instance with the Serbs from Bosnia-Herzegovina, who used to move to Serbia (independent or occupied alike), with Serbs and Albanians from KosMet moving to North Serbia or the Habsburg Monarchy (Austria-Hungary from 1867 to 1918) from the territory of the Ottoman Empire, the Serbs from the so-called Independent State of Croatia (during WWII), the Serbs from Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina during the civil wars in ex-Yugoslavia in the 1990s, the Albanians and non-Albanians from KosMet during the NATO aggression on the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (the FRY) in March-June 1999 (78 days). In the case of rebellions on the smaller scale, the very government moves forcibly some population, as many villages in present-day Turkey, populated by the Bosnians-Herzegovinians (Bosniaks), testify.
Political migrations are motivated by governments’ desires to expand its population into the neighboring areas so as to broaden its control and subsequently its state. Some of these controlled migrations appear counter-measures against the first ones, in order to balance the demographic disequilibrium.
Demographic expansion
With regard KosMet, this ethnographic phenomenon concerns the misbalance in the birthrate of two populations in close contact, sharing the same territory – the Serbs and the Albanians. The ethnic Albanians have by far the biggest birthrate in Europe, matching those of Central Africa. This phenomenon has resulted in the demographic explosion, in particular in non-Albania’s regions, where a considerable number of ethnic Albanians live. It concerns Serbia, North Macedonia, Montenegro, and Greece.
Both effects mentioned above have resulted in the misbalance in the demographic content within the areas bordering Albania, mentioned above. When the borders of Albania in 1913 were drawn, the ethnic Albanians were a small part of the contemporary populations in West North Macedonia, Kosovo-Metochia in Serbia, East Montenegro, and North-West Greece (Epir, which Albania’s Albanians call Cameria, with a clear message to Greece).[7]
In the view of all of these claims by the Albanian leaders on the territories where the ethnic Albanians are majority today, it reminds one of an appeal of a lawyer, who defends a man accused of killing his parents, addressing the members of the jury with the words: “Gentlemen jury, will you really have a hart to sentence this orphan?”
To these two points, one should add another, important for the understanding of the Albanian Question in general. It is tightly linked with the issue of ethnic Albanians outside Albania and the project of a Greater Albania. One of the arguments for interpreting the present demographic distribution has always been the ethnic purity of proper Albania. In other words, it has been always claimed by the Albanians and supported by the official statistical data, that this “purity” testifies the unjust drawing of the borders between Albania and the neighboring countries. The argument, in fact, goes like this. Albania is founded on the ground where only the ethnic Albanians live, whereas the bordering areas with mixed populations were delivered to the neighboring states around Albania – the motherland of the ethnic Albanians. The statistic which should corroborate these claims is the following: In present-day Albania live 95% ethnic Albanians, 3% Greeks and the rest goes to the Slavs and other minorities.[8] These data, however, are false.[9] According to the Greek records, there are about 400.000. Greeks in Albania, which constitutes 12% of the overall population. As for the other minorities, the situation is similar – their real number is officially suppressed. It is known that the Slavophone Albanians are not allowed to speak Slavic language in Albania (the Serb or the “Macedonian”), as the Yugoslav journalists found many times while visiting Albania. The above estimate is further corroborated by the statistic of confessional distribution in Albania: 70% Muslim, 20% Greek Orthodox and 10% Roman Catholics. However, those 20% of Christian Orthodox confession are not allowed to declare themselves as non-Albanians but, nevertheless, they belong to the Greeks, Serbs, Montenegrins, and “Macedonians”. The Roman Catholics are the ethnic Albanians from North Albania.
However, this is not the end of the story. Practically all traces of the presence of non-Albanian elements have been wiped out in Albania, like toponyms, ethnological staff, etc. This instance will be of the utmost importance when considering the state of art at KosMet and the foreseeable future of the province.
In conclusion, it can be summarized the political strategy for the creation of a Greater Albania by the following:
(a) The false hypothesis of ancient Illyrian (Pelasgian) origin should provide the ethnic Albanians with the right on any land they are occupying presently (or even in the near future), endowing them with the unique status as indigenous people on the Balkans.[10]
(b) The majorization of the mixed populated areas by migration and fast breeding should provide the young state of Albania with its Lebensraum.
(c) All non-Albanians within the projected state must be eliminated, either by expelling or by assimilation as it is already done in the case of Kosovo-Metochia, for instance.[11]
[1] Петер Бартл, Албанци од Средњег века до данас, Београд: CLIO, 2001, 94−97.
[2] It has to be noted that the meaning of his famous slogan “The aim determines the means” has often been distorted into “The aim justifies the means”.
[3] On the 1912−1913 Balkan Wars, see in [E. R. Hooton, Prelude to the First World War: The Balkan Wars 1912−1913, Fonthill, 2014].
[4] KosMet is an abbreviated term for historical Serbia’s province of Kosovo-Metochia. The term was in use until December 1968 when the Yugoslav Communist authorities replaced it by only the term Kosovo (Kosova in Albanian) for the sake to politically more link the province with the Albanian population and, therefore, to more alienate it from Serbia, the Serbs, and Serbian history and culture. The problem with the term Metochia was in essence of the political nature as it is in direct association with the Serbian national, historical, and cultural background. Metochia as a geographical region of the western part of the province of Kosovo-Metochia is originally meaning the “church land”, i.e. the huge portions of West KosMet which historically belong to the Serbian Orthodox Church. The term Metochia is derived from the Greek word metoch – the land belonging to the church or the monastery usually granted by the feudal lords (magnates) or the rulers. Politically, the term Metochia shows no Albanian historical connections with the province but only the Serbian ones. Geographically, Metochia is the populated and fertile plain running from the city of Peć down to the city of Prizren (for the Serbs – the “Serbian Constantinople” as Prizren was in the Middle Ages a capital of Serbia). The term KosMet is applied for the whole province, with the term Kosovo referring only to its western part. The Albanian-language equivalent of Metochia is Dukagjin – a term derived from the Latin dux (Duke).
[4] On the Balkan Wars, see in [Б. Ратковић, М. Ђуришић, С. Скоко, Србија и Црна Гора у Балканским ратовима 1912−1913, Друго издање, Београд: БИГЗ, 1972].
[5] About this migration, see in [Radovan Samardžić i drugi, Kosovo i Metohija u srpskoj istoriji, Beograd: SKZ, 1989, 127−142; Стефан Чакић, Велика сеоба Срба 1689/90 и патријарх Арсеније III Црнојевић, Нови Сад: Добра вест, 1990].
[6] The first word comes from the Greek μέτα (after) and ανάστασις (uprising).
[7] It is also called as South Albania (Shqiperia jugore).
[9] Some of the latest statistics provide: Greeks 1%. A British researcher Hugh Poulton decisively claims that “All these [official] figures are contested” [Hugh Poulton, The Balkans. Minorities and States in Conflict, London: Minority Rights Group, 1994, 195].
[10] A British historian Noel Malcolm is one of the best examples of spreading such false hypothesis in the academic circles [Noel Malcolm, Kosovo: A Short History, New York: New York University Press, 1998]. But who is he? Noel Malcolm (born in 1956) is a British scholar and historian. After the success in the West of his pro-Muslim and pro-Croat book Bosnia: A Short History (London, 1995), he published next piece of shameful propaganda work ‒ pro-Albanian and enormously anti-Serbian Kosovo: A Short History (New York, 1998). This not academic, not objective and highly politically motivated book, however, was very much praised in the West and had a great impact among the Western readers during the 1998‒1999 Kosovo War. He became active pro-Albanian propagator as the president of the Anglo-Albanian Association in London.
[11] Мирко Чупић, Отета земља. Косово и Метохија (злочини, прогони, отпори…), Београд. Нолит, 2006; Hannes Hofbauer, Eksperiment Kosovo: Povratak kolonijalizma, Beograd: Albatros Plus, 2009; Пјер Пеан, Косово: „Праведни“ рат за стварање мафијашке државе, Београд: Службени гласник, 2013.
We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.
One can only imagine the risk when some citizens of a small country conceal hundreds of thousands of weapons and explosives. The nation becomes a powder keg, awaiting one small mistake to spark a deadly explosion.This is the situation currently in Albania. During the civil war of 1997, military depots were looted, and more than 650,000 guns, 1.5 billion bullets, 3.5 million grenades and 1 million landmines were stolen from military warehouses by various criminal groups and the Kosovo Liberation Army.The government has attempted to resolve, or at least reduce, this serious problem. Since 1997, it has announced three amnesty ...
Albin Kurti is on the verge of becoming the next Prime Minister of Kosovo after he and opposition chairman Isa Mustafa confirmed last week that the two rival political parties had made progress to create a coalition government. Mustafa said that Kurti can rightfully become the next Prime Minister if he can convince the three remaining parliamentarians, representing the Bosniak, Turkish and Roma minorities to enter a coalition – and it appears they will.What does the accession of Albin Kurti mean for the future of Kosovo?Kurti does not recognize the flag and anthem of Kosovo, as well as the Kosovar ...
The Argentinian authorities are wondering about the massive purchase of land in Patagonia by a British billionaire, and the “holidays” that tens of thousands of Israeli soldiers are enjoying on his property.In the 19th century, the British government were undecided as to where they should settle Israel – either in what is now Uganda, in Argentina or in Palestine. In fact, Argentina was at that time controlled by the United Kingdom and, on the initiative of French baron Maurice de Hirsch, had become a land of refuge for Jews who were fleeing the pogroms in central Europe.In the 20th century, ...
The Western-backed myth of a Greater SerbiaMuch space, time, and effort have been devoted to the recent history of West Balkans, and in particular in the latest political upheavals, about the alleged project of Greater Serbia especially by Western authors either academic scholars or journalists.[1] The issue must be, however, considered together with its counterparts from Croatia (a Greater Croatia) and Albania (a Greater Albania).Two focal questions arose here: Were all these projects serious and what was the origin of this maximalist concept of forming national states in the otherwise ethnically mixed area? Whose exact interests were involved and to ...
A project for Greater Albania – conspiracy or legitimate? According to a 2010 Gallup Balkan Monitor report, 83% of Albanians in Albania supported the idea of a Greater Albania, with 81% and 53% of Albanians in Kosovo and North Macedonia respectively supporting such an ambition.The ultimate goal? To have Kosovo and the Preševo Valley in Serbia, southern Montenegro, Epirus in Greece and western North Macedonia into a single Greater Albanian state. Although this may not be official policy of the Albanian Republic, it is ingrained into the Albanian mythos. The very idea of a Greater Albania has roots in the 1913 Treaty of London that left roughly 40% ...
Originally published in February 2019Sources: International Data Base, International Programs Center, CIA...Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate to Support UsWe would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics, and international relations.Save
The Great European Powers and the BalkansThe Balkans is a term connoting peoples, cultures, and states that make up a peninsula of South-East Europe between the Black Sea, the Adriatic Sea, the Aegean Sea, and the Mediterranean Sea. There are three crucial points of the Balkan’s significance from the geostrategic point of view: The territory of the Balkans is an important connection between West and Central Europe and the Near and the Middle East. Wealthy of the region’s natural resources. The region which is located betwixt the Danube River, the Black Sea and East Mediterranean is an important part of ...
Muslim populated states of the South-East Europe are the reservoirs of the ISIL Jihadist fighters in the Middle East: Albania, Macedonia, Kosovo, Bosnia. All of these states are the marionettes of the US. This road map was originally published with the article in one Albania's newspapers in Tirana in October 2015Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate to Support UsWe would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us ...
South-East Serbia's province of Kosovo-Metochia (KosMet) is an autochthonous Slavic, in particular Serb, land. Now, the focal question became how this province became “disputed land”, and, in particular, what it has to do with ethnic-Albanians? In the following text, this issue is going to be considered in more details, from the geographical, (pre)historic, anthropologic, religious, and political points of view. We start with the geography, in particular, the physical geography of West Balkans.Kosovo Liberation Army, August 1998, Klechka village, KosMetThe region of Dinaric Alps It is known that physical and mental structures of a particular population are determined by many ...
In May 2017, Thierry Meyssan appeared on Russia Today and explained where the South American elites were going wrong in their fight against US imperialism. He insisted that there has been a sea-change in the way the US now wages armed conflicts and we now need to radically rethink how we should defend our homeland. The operation to destabilize Venezuela continues. The first phase: violent gangs demonstrating against the government killed passers by, as if citizenship created no bonds between them. The second phase: the major food suppliers organized food shortages in the supermarkets. Then some members of the forces ...
Vladislav B. Sotirovic, “Who are the Albanians? The Illyrian Anthroponomy and the Ethnogenesis of the Albanians – A Challenge to Regional Security”, Serbian Studies: Journal of the North American Society for Serbian Studies, Vol. 26, 2012, № 1−2, ISSN 0742-3330, 2015, Slavica Publishers, Indiana University, Bloomington, USA, pp. 45−76Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection & Pinterest.Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate to Support UsWe would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on ...
I travel frequently to the countries which once made up the now defunct Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, satisfying a passion of mine that stems back to my childhood days. For me, the Balkans’ history, its people and its cultures are both enigmatic and magnetic, as they have been, too, for countless others, of many nationalities, over centuries gone by. Accounting for the enchantment of the Balkans, its captivating allure, is a challenge to put into writing. Because no words can truly embellish what is one of the most absorbing parts of the world. To understand and feel what it is ...
Just three years after a citizens’ referendum returned Crimea to Russia, from which it had been separated for sixty years, the people of Catalonia, Spain’s largest province, will vote to leave that country.And just as the international community has decreed that the Crimean referendum was a fake, Spain’s Prime Minister felt compelled to declare that the vote could’t possibly take place, that it would be illegal, that independence, in his words, could only be ‘a pipe dream’ for the country’s richest province.Clearly, national governments don’t like losing land and people, however when it suits the international community, some communities are ...
Introduction: The Missing LinkWhy did the US support the separatist and terrorist so-called Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA, or UCK in Shqip), which sought to create an ethnically pure Albanian Kosovo based on ethnicity? Why did the US sponsor a criminal and illegal separatist movement that sought to ethnically cleanse non-Albanians and create an independent state of Kosova? Why was the US supporting and sponsoring the re-establishment of a fascist-Nazi Greater Albania that Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini had initially created?When did the US begin to play a role in Kosovo? Did the US role in Kosovo begin with the arming ...
A former Islamist fighter in Syria recalls why he went to Syria, how easy it was to get there – and why he would go again, if he could.On his first trip abroad, he left with 400 euros in his pocket, a printed map from the internet and the belief that he was fulfilling his destiny in eyes of Allah. The destination was the frontline of the war in Syria, but his jihad ended faster than it started.Two years later, in a bar full of people in his hometown in northern Albania, Ebu Merjem stands out with his long beard ...
Since World War II most of the world’s conflicts have revolved around struggles for independence against Western and Japanese colonial/imperial regimes.Following formal independence, a new type of imperial domination was imposed – neo-colonial regimes, in which the US and its European allies imposed vassal rulers acting as proxies for economic exploitation. With the rise of US unipolar global domination, following the demise of the USSR (1990), the West established hegemony over the East European states. Some were subject to fragmentation and sub-divided into new NATO dominated statelets.The quest for a unipolar empire set in motion a series of wars and ...
The Albanian nationhood as understood in the 19th century was part of a romanticist notion of nationality, i.e., the Albanians were the Balkan people whose mother tongue was Albanian regardless of any confessional division of Albanian people into three denominations (Moslem, Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox). Within the north Albanian tribes, especially among the Miriditi, the Roman Catholic Church was very influential. The Roman Catholic Church became the main protector of the Albanian language and cultural heritage and the main protagonist of the national identity of the Albanians in Northern Albania.[1] The expression of common notions of the Albanian nationhood ...
Members of a notorious Albanian-run cocaine smuggling gang in London have outraged the UK mass media by flaunting their illegally obtained wealth on Instagram.The Daily Mail on Monday accused the Hellbanianz group of “brazenly flaunting their gangster lifestyle” by posting pictures of themselves draped over luxury cars, smoking drugs, sporting Gucci outfits and fielding a kind of cake made up of rolled-up 50 pound notes.A similar note of outrage was struck by the Sun and the Daily Mirror.One picture shows a gang member holding a golden “game-of-thrones” style knuckleduster, encrusted with gems and formed in the shape of the letters ...
An inquiry by the EU has found “compelling indications” that ten Serb captives had their body organs harvested for illegal trafficking during the 1998-99 Kosovo war. However, it wasn’t widespread and there will be no trial, the lead investigator said.The chief prosecutor Clint Williamson, who led the investigation, said there was no evidence of widespread organ harvesting, but that the crime had occurred a number of times.“There are compelling indications that this practice did occur on a very limited scale and that a small number of individuals were killed for the purpose of extracting and trafficking their organs,” he told ...
Part IEthnolinguistic SerbdomSerbia’s Prince Miloš’s schemes to solve the „Serbian Question“ were based exclusively on the historical (state) rights of the Serbs. However, during his reign, a new and cardinal dimension on an understanding of Serbian national identity and, therefore, the idea of the creation of the national state of the Serbs was introduced into Serbian political thought by Vuk Stefanović Karadžić (1787–1864) who framed the concept of a linguistic Serbdom.In his brief essay “Срби сви и свуда” (“Serbs All and Everywhere”),[1] V. S. Karadžić established the linguistic criteria for determining Serbian national self-identity and reformulation of the whole concept ...
Dr. Vladislav B. Sotirović
