By Stavri Dajo
THE GREEK CIVIL WAR, VICTIMS, AND ALBANIAN POLITICAL REFUGEES ON CRETE (1947)
Memorie.al / At the turn of 1946 and the dawn of 1947, hundreds of Albanian political refugees were installed in various refugee camps in Greece or lived relatively freely in abandoned or hastily rehabilitated houses in rural areas. These people had the fortune of escaping the blade of the “red Albanian oligarchy” (as the Albanian communist regime was characterized by the Western press of the time) by risking their lives and overcoming the phobic hesitation of death or freedom, in favor of freedom. Along with them, many Albanians from Kosovo, whose number reached more than 200, lived in the same conditions.
All these people chose Greece as their place of refuge because they believed that Greece provided them with a greater guarantee for their lives than other neighboring countries, where the risk of expulsion or physical elimination was eminent (Neshat Bilali, “With Muharrem Bajraktari towards Greece: The history of a journey August 25 – September 13, 1946”.Selected and prepared by Petrit Palushi, p. 24).
Greece, on the other hand, was plunged into a tragic civil conflict, for which the Greek government blamed the three neighboring countries of Soviet superiority-Albania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia-and not unjustly-as supply stations for the communist rebellion against the country’s constitutional regime.
For this very reason, in September 1946, the Greek government protested energetically to the UN for the encouragement of the Greek communists’ uprising by its northern neighbors (Kyros, “The new attack against Greece: The Greek Problem before the UN, January 1946-December 1948”), and on December 3, its prime minister, Konstantinos Tsaldaris, denounced flagrant cases of incidents and violations of borders and national sovereignty.
In response, the Yugoslav ambassador to the UN, Sava Kosanović-who also represented the Albanian regime in the UN talks-harshly accused Greece of harboring “thousands of traitors and quislings” from the three countries.
“These traitors and Chetniks,” he emphasized, “collaborate with the Greek police and terrorize the population in order to incite ethnic hatred. In February 1945 alone, 40 Albanian criminals of the Italian occupation fascist organization ‘Balli Kombëtar,’ founded in Albania and with metastases in Yugoslavia, escaped to Greece”! (“Rizospastis”, December 19, 1944).
The Greek Communist Party (KKE) in its propaganda faithfully adopted the Yugoslav view. Together with the KKE, the Italian Communist Party, and all the left-wing press, it labeled the political escapees from Albania as “war criminals.” The Albanian press fiercely insulted the Albanian escapees, calling them “collaborators of the Germans, war-thirsty criminals, bloodthirsty bandits, and renegades of the nation,” whose aim was to alienate the national sovereignty of their homeland.
International law had not yet institutionalized a specific protective framework for refugees. Only UNRRA tried to breathe life into saving them, but even it suspended its charitable activities in 1947.
For all these reasons, on December 19, 1946, the UN Security Council, due to verbal protests and declarations and official requests from both Greece and its three northern neighbors, decided to establish a Commission of Inquiry. The commission visited the Hatzikyriakeio Orphanage in Piraeus on February 17, 1947, to investigate 400 Albanian political refugees who were temporarily sheltered there.
The main leaders who were questioned were: Fiqiri Dine, Hysni Dema, Muharrem Bajraktari, Alush Leshanaku, Prenk Pervizi, and Abaz Ermenji, who had played a role in Albanian politics during the Italian and German occupation, as title holders in the army and public administration. Furthermore, Fiqiri Dine also served as prime minister for a short time.
All of them declared unanimously that they were anti-communists and that if they had stayed in Albania, the state regime would have killed them. Muharrem Bajraktari even added that Greece is a country of true freedom and democracy and presented a memorandum to the Commission, refuting the accusations of Kosanović and the Albanian representative, Nesti Kerenxhi.
Two days later, on February 19, 1947, the commission visited the camp on the island of Syros in Ermoupolis, where 53 Albanian political refugees had been rehabilitated. In Syros, although the camp functioned as a place of re-education and disciplinary measures for suspects, the internees did not complain about anything bad, says an Albanian political refugee, as the population of the island was very hospitable.
Those who lived there were lucky. In August 1946, there were 1900 refugees from all countries in Syros, but later their number reached 132. Many of the refugees lived with their families, circulated and worked freely. Among the well-known Albanians in Syros were Ali Nivica, who had escaped in October 1944 under the pressure of the National Liberation Army forces, and Haki Rushiti, who also escaped at the same time.
Nesti Kerenxhi, Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs and the first Director of the State Security (1946-1948), young and aggressive with eyes covered by glasses, asked the commission to “confront the Albanian traitors and renegades,” calling them “hardened war criminals” and demanded their extradition and surrender to Albanian justice.
Also interrogated were Rexhep Ramadani and Luan Gashi, Albanians from Kosovo, who said that all their compatriots were free and were given a daily compensation of 2,000 drachmas. “The others,” Gashi underlined, “work in construction.”
The camp commander was also questioned, who rejected the claim that those installed in the camp had expressed the will to be sent to fight on the borders of their homeland, as the KKE and the representatives of Albania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia accused.
The Albanian officer also denounced that the Albanian war criminals who had taken refuge in Greece, specifically Hysni Dema, Alush Leshanaku, and Prenk Pervizi, had taken active part in the joint Italo-Albanian military formations against Greece in the operations of October–November 1940.
Kerenxhi’s accusations, accompanied by Teodor Heba, Kadri Hazbiu, Nuri Huta, etc., helped by the communist propaganda of the KKE, but also by a part of Greek extremists, hostilely inclined against the Albanian newcomers, cast a heavy shadow on the unprotected escapees and put Greece in a very difficult position as their host country, which had to protect the escapees.
Consequently, all of them experienced a tense state of insecurity and threat of being expelled, as a result of their state’s lawsuit. However, the commission of inquiry was not convinced by the “evidence” of the representative of the Albanian State Security and concluded that the detainees in the camps enjoyed complete freedom, were allowed to read books and newspapers, and their correspondence took place freely through the PTT of Greece.
All the escapees rejected the absurd claim that they received military or political instructions from any foreign mission or authority. In the Syros camp, the escapees had posted a large slogan: “Save Albania from the red terror, free one million Albanians of Kosovo from the terrible red tyranny of the Yugoslav regime. Destroy the filthy Hoxha and his gang, from Albania.”
Some of the Albanian escapees, mainly Albanians from Kosovo, were found in improvised camps or barracks or in schools in Ierapetra in Lassithi, Crete. Ierapetra also served as a re-education camp for suspects and violators of camp rules.
Meanwhile, the civil war in Greece was becoming fierce, and the cooperation between Albanian communists and Greek guerrillas was strengthening. Most of the eastern Stalinist aid was channeled to the war front (Gramoz-Murgë) from Albania.
On May 9, 1947, three months after the visit of the Commission of Inquiry to Greece, in Veria, the guerrillas launched a murderous attack on a civilian neighborhood, where there were clashes and several victims. In Elassona, there were armed clashes, while in Lamia, a group of guerrillas attacked and kidnapped civilians, while they looted the village of Monastiri, of Domoko and Agrinion.
In other areas, factories, power plants, and aqueducts were blown up. On the same day, a group of guerrillas attacked the Kalamon railway station, whose train, in addition to transporting regular passengers, also transferred 28 suspected communists, accompanied by the gendarmerie. During the clashes, 8 gendarmerie officers were killed, while all the communists fled.
But the Greek communists consider the Crete operation as the greatest operational success of the spring of 1947. On the same day, May 9, 1947, a guerrilla unit of 100 people, under the leadership of captain Ioannis Podias, attacked Ierapetra, a small town in Crete, with heavy weapons and attacked the gendarmerie, occupying a part of the city. The guerrillas clashed with the few forces of the gendarmerie, which were caught by surprise.
Then the guerrilla forces rushed against a refugee camp where Albanian escapees were sheltered, killing 11 of them and wounding 6, after a fierce hand-to-hand combat. Eleven people from the guerrilla unit were killed and eight were wounded in the clashes. There were also dead and wounded on the gendarmerie side. The guerrilla forces set fire to nitrogen fertilizer depots, looted food depots, and took 1,300,000 drachmas from the branch of the Agricultural Bank.
The situation escalated and the murderous clashes could escalate quickly. For the protection of the civilian population of Crete and the Albanian escapees, by order of the Minister of Transport, Sofoklis Venizelos, the destroyer “Kreta” was sent especially to Crete, which sailed along the coast and anchored in the port of Heraklion, to help the efforts of the local forces and to evacuate those who had survived.
Furthermore, a military airplane of the Greek royal forces was carrying out flights to supervise Ierapetra and to protect the barracks of the Albanian escapees.
“Rizospastis” characterized the Albanian victims as quislings and reported that there were only 6 killed and 6 wounded. (“Rizospastis” May 10, 1947). Later, left-wing propaganda, reproducing Kosanović’s accusations of collaboration of the Albanian escapees with the Greek gendarmerie, emphasized that “it had learned that the Albanian Nazis had reached Lassithi to be attached to the local gendarmerie there. They were the only ones who opened fire on the guerrilla forces and 11 of them lost their lives.” (Maro Douka, in the vortex of myth and history. ‘Let’s lie’. Novel, Patakis Publications).
Later, on September 10, 2006, “Rizospastis” announced that among the killer of the opposing forces were 11 Albanians, old collaborators of the German occupiers, who had now joined the gendarmerie (!).
In his memoirs, the political refugee Neshat Bilali, who escaped to Greece in September 1946 with Muharrem Bajraktari, gives his version: “Before us, in November of ’45, a group of Albanians from Kosovo, of about 50 people, had come to Greece. Initially, the Greeks had treated them well in Athens.
But these people had started to behave badly, even often sleeping on park benches, and finally the Greeks took them to Crete. They placed them in old barracks and told them that if they wanted to live, they had to work. The word slowly spread that they were Albanian nationalists from Kosovo, turkos-alvanos.
One night, a group of Greek communists went to the Kosovars to kill them. They killed 21 people. There was a big fuss. Muharrem Bajraktari went and complained to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and asked for the Kosovars who had survived to be brought to Piraeus. Finally, those who were left were also brought to Piraeus, to Hatzikyriako. The Kosovars were placed in some tents. Hatzikyriako was a large tower, with a very open courtyard. Other Albanians, who had managed to escape from Albania, also came there.” (Neshat Bilali, “Notes on History”, Selected and prepared by Petrit Palushi, p. 73).
We cannot prove any conspiratorial agreement between the two communist parties (KKE and the CPA) for this wrongdoing at the expense of the poor Albanian escapees, but we cannot claim the opposite either. One month after being informed about the macabre events of Crete, on June 19, 1947, the Albanian government asked the governments of Great Britain and the United States to extradite the war criminals and quislings-with a long list of names attached-for their immediate appearance before Albanian popular justice.
On September 28, 1947, it repeated its request to the International Commission for the Discovery of War Criminals. (AMPJ, V. 1951, D. 205, Fl-169, Letter from Mihal Prifti addressed to the President of the General Assembly of the United Nations, Padilla Nervo). Later, the government of Tirana repeated the request several times, but the international organizations were not convinced and Greece never handed over the political escapees, except in some cases after 1959.
In conclusion, under the terror of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the Albanian people were testing the limits of institutional violence and morality every day. The breakdown of this balance made them either heroes or obedient toys in the hands of the communist dictatorship. The first choice, that is, the denial of the dictatorship’s sermons, was difficult, but it made them free before their conscience, while the second alternative, moral enslavement was a limited form of living.
Under unfavorable conditions and circumstances, forced to balance internal and external aggressive reactions, but mainly those of the red oligarchy of the Albanians themselves, poor Greece and especially its wise people, exhausted by the Civil War, continued to welcome the Albanian escapees who sneaked across the tattered borders, skeletal remains from misery and terror as political refugees from their government, until the fall of the regime in 1991, with the little bread it had.
In short, Greece continued to take care of those Albanians whom their homeland had labeled as “passport-less swindlers” or, worse, as “the nation’s excrement.” Memorie.al
Note: I thank the former political refugee in Greece, Neshat Bilali, for the information he generously gave me for the drafting of this article.
Photos and captions:
- “Hatzikyriakeio” Orphanage.
- Political refugee Muharrem Bajraktari, Greece 1948.
- Hysni Dema, political refugee in Greece.
- Protest in Albania for the surrender of “war criminals”.
- Telegram of Hysni Dema from the Hatzikyriakeio Orphanage, 1947
- Albanian political refugees in Greece, 1948: from left: Neshat Bilali, Muharrem Bajraktari, Esat Bajraktari, and Tahir Vata.
- The Commission of Inquiry in Louro of Thesprotia, 1949.
- Haki Tërpeza, political refugee from Kosovo, Greece 1948.
- Halil Tërpeza, Kosovar (right), victim of the Crete attack, 1947.
- Albanian political refugees in Athens, 1949, Neshat Bilali and Tahir Vata.
- Newspaper “Eleftheria” 11/5/1947
- Crete, 1940.
- Newspaper “Empros”, 11/5/1947.
- Refugee camp in Lavrio, 1950.
