The Serbian–Albanian conflict is a struggle between the Serbs and Albanians that lasted for several centuries. The conflict has been characterised by repeated episodes of fighting (most notably during the First Balkan War, the Second World War and the Kosovo War).
Middle ages
Thomas II Preljubović, the Serbian ruler of Epirus 1367–1384 had many conflicts with local Albanians who raided the territories. Thomas waged war against these Albanians and he successfully defeated them with help from the Ottomans, with great force, something that earned him the title of "Albanian-slayer" (Ἀλβανιτόκτονος).
Đurađ I Balšić declared war against the Thopias of Northern Albania over territories in 1363. Karl Thopia, a 14th century King of Albania, was defeated by the ruler Balša II who ruled from Shkoder who had gained Berat, Kanina (1372) and finally Dyrrhachium (1382). In 1385 defeated Thopia appealed to Ottoman Sultan Murat I for help and let the Ottoman army of Hayreddin Pasha mobilize in Albania. The Ottoman army defeated the Balšićs in the Battle of Savra in 1385 and made the Albanians vassals.
Sinan Pasha, an Albanian-Ottoman military commander ordered, in 1595, that the relics of Saint Sava, the founder of the autocephalous Serbian Orthodox Church in the 12th century, be taken from the Serbs and burned at the Vračar hill of Belgrade so that the Serbs in Banat who fought with the Habsburgs against the Ottoman Empire would see the smoke. Only the saint's right hand which was kept elsewhere remains.
Russo-Turkish War (1877-1878)
Following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire during the war, the slavic Christian nations of the balkan gained additional territory. Consequently, Serbia displaced about 80.000 Muslims (Albanians) during the winter of 1877/1878 from its newly acquired lands (the region around Leskovac, Vranje, Niš and the valley of the Morava river). Those refugees, the Muhaxir, mostly settled in today's Kosovo. Not only had this large influx of refugees a lasting effect on the demographic composition of Kosovo, it also worsened the existing tensions between Muslims and Christians in this part of the Ottoman Empire, since the Muhaxir had been driven out of Serbia by force. This act of ethnic cleansing could be seen as the actual starting point of the Serbian-Albanian conflict, since it was the first act of state-organised large-scale violence in the conflict and at least one party (the Serbs) had developed into a fully functional nation and displayed a Serbian national consciousness (whereas the Albanian nationalism was still in its infant stages).
1912 to 1946
The first Balkan War in 1912 were ignited by the Albanian uprising between 1908-10 which were directed at opposing the Young Turk policies of consolidation of the Ottoman Empire. Following the eventual weakening of the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans, Serbia, Greece and Bulgaria declared war and sought to aggrandize their respective boundaries on the remaining territories of the Empire. Albania was thus invaded by Serbia in the North and Greece in the south, restricting the country to only a patch of land around the southern coastal city of Vlora. In 1912 Albania, still under foreign occupation declared its independence and with the aid of Austria-Hungary, the Great Powers drew its present borders leaving more than half of the Albanian population outside the new country.
In September 1913, Albanians in Vardar Macedonia together with Pro-Bulgarian Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization rebelled against Serbian Chetniks in the Ohrid-Debar Uprising.
In 1914, Serbia was invaded by Austria-Hungary. During the autumn of 1915 its army, accompanied by a host of civilian refugees, was forced into retreat in the face of the Austrian invasion. It embarked on a two-month forced march across Kosovo, Montenegro and Albania to the Albanian port of Durrës, from where it was evacuated by the Allies. Along the way it was repeatedly attacked by local Albanians as the army had become known for great atrocities in the area before their forced retreat; many more Serbian soldiers and civilians died of starvation as the locals were unwilling to be sympathetic to their former occupiers, with 150,000 fatalities by the time the host had reached the sea. The Kingdom of Yugoslavia was established following the war. As the kingdom's original name - the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes - indicated, the Albanians of Yugoslavia were not regarded as a constitutive nation of the new state but rather a mere ethnic minority. Official discrimination and efforts to dilute the numbers of the Albanian population led to the formation of anti-Serbian groups, the so-called Kacak.
In the Second World War, Kosovo Albanians rebelled against Axis- Serbia who was occupied by the Axis at the time, and tried to reunite with Albania. Kosovo and parts of what was historical Albanian territories in Macedonia were annexed to Albania. Other Albanians joined the Partisans of Josip Broz Tito, since they disliked axis rule and hoped to fight for independence from the Axis powers.
1946 to 1999
From 1946, when the constitution of the Federative People's Republic of Yugoslavia (later the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia) was established, the Albanians of Yugoslavia were split between two new entities: the Socialist Autonomous Province of Kosovo and the Socialist Republic of Macedonia. The Albanians were again established as "national minorities" rather than "nations". The Yugoslav government imposed a strongly repressive policy, carried out by the UDBA secret police under the direction of Aleksandar Ranković.
After Ranković fell from power in 1966, the position of the Yugoslav Albanians improved somewhat. Mass demonstrations by Albanian students in 1974 led to the province obtaining greater autonomy under the rule of the local (Albanian-dominated) Communist Party. However, this led to discrimination against local Serbs. This, combined with Kosovo's enduring poverty, prompted thousands of Serbs to move out and led to the province becoming even more predominantly Albanian-populated.
The problems of Kosovo's Serbs were instrumental in the rise of Slobodan Milošević in the late 1980s, who used the issue as a stepping-stone to the Presidency of Serbia. In 1989 he greatly reduced the autonomy of Kosovo and imposed a harshly repressive regime that was widely criticised by foreign governments and international human rights groups. The province remained quiet during the early phase of the Yugoslav Wars, but by 1996 Albanian radicals had established the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) to fight for an independent Kosovo. Attacks against the Serbian security forces targets followed, and by 1998 the province was in a state of widespread low-level war. The Kosovo War of 1999 resulted in NATO forces expelling Serbian and Yugoslav security forces from Kosovo.
Pejoratives
Serbs use the derogatory term Šiptari (Serbian Cyrillic: Шиптари) for Albanians and it is a direct transliteration of the Albanian ethnonym Shqiptar. Albanci is the correct designation.
Albanians use the derogatory term Shkije, Shkja or Shqeh (as in Tosk Dialect) for Serbs, old nominative term meaning sclavi which translates and relates to the word slave or subhuman. Serbët is the correct designation.
Albanian_muhajir
No comments:
Post a Comment