By Ramadan Ilnica & Qemal Biraku
Part One
Memorie.al / The materials in this article, which we are publishing below in several issues, have been prepared based on documents from the Albanian Secret Services, during a period that begins in the late ’70s and ends in the early ’80s, when the people of Kosovo took to the streets in mass demonstrations, demanding more independence. This entire material refers to a secret file that agents of the Albanian State Security were able to steal from the secret safes of the 11th Division of the Yugoslav Army of that time. The “Kosova” file, processed by specialized structures of the Albanian Secret Services, was commissioned by the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Albanian Party of Labour, with the personal interest of Enver Hoxha, a few years before he died.
The first part (always referring to the secret documents of the Yugoslav army) provides a detailed biography of the infamous Serbian academic Vaso Čubrilović, who was decorated in 1976 for his detailed plan on how the province of Kosovo would be “Serbianized” with colonists, using not only mass expulsions but also the physical extermination of thousands of Albanians living there.
The plan was put into action back then. The data was also taken from Vaso Čubrilović’s report “The Expulsion of the Arnauts.” Meanwhile, this file contains many interesting unpublished facts about how Serbia, from the beginning of the last century, had a clear scheme in place for the depopulation of the Albanian lands of Kosovo and beyond, from the indigenous population that lived there.
The facts about the role of the Yugoslav Communist Party from its founding and later in favor of this strategy are interesting. Stalin’s letter to this party in 1925, where he demands that Kosovo have the right to self-determination. The massacres of the last 100 years and how Yugoslav partisan divisions killed and massacred the Albanian population there…!
The 36-year period (1876-1912)
In 1877, the Vilayet of Kosovo had 760,000 inhabitants, and at that time, this vilayet included not only the territory of present-day Kosovo but also Skopje, Tetovo, Novi Pazar, Sjenica, Toplica, Kuršumlija, Prokuplje, Leskovac, and Vranje. Whereas in the years 1912-1913, it numbered 497,000 inhabitants in the same territory as in 1877, excluding the regions occupied by Serbia at that time.
All sources show that 3/4 of the population of Kosovo was Albanian. At this time, Albanians, in addition to fighting against the Turkish invaders, fought to defend themselves from the new threat of occupation by the Serbian state, which actively worked to forcibly expel tens of thousands of Albanians from their territories in the border areas with Serbia and Montenegro.
At this time, Serbia occupied entire Albanian areas like Toplica, Vranje, Kuršumlija, Prokuplje, and Leskovac, while Montenegro took Ulqin and others. In 1877, over 30,000 Albanians were expelled from Toplica and Klisura. From just 81 villages from Toplica and Kosanica, about 1867 Albanian families were displaced.
In the years 1876-1878, from Prokuplje and Kuršumlija, where 50 percent of the population was Albanian, about 20,000 Albanian residents were killed. According to Turkish, Austrian, Serbian, and French data, about 300,000 Albanians, displaced as a result of the occupation of the upper provinces by Serbia and Montenegro, were settled in the interior of the Vilayet of Kosovo and Shkodra.
The killings and mass expulsion of the local Albanian population by the Serbo-Montenegrin army created great concern and alarm, not only in the Albanian regions bordering Serbia and Montenegro, but throughout the country. A powerful popular movement for self-defense was born and developed against this chauvinistic policy, which aimed to protect the homeland from fragmentation and new slavery. At this time, the Albanian League of Prizren was also created.
The 24-year period (1913-1937)
During the years 1913-1937 (excluding the years of World War I), Kosovo and other Albanian regions in Macedonia and Montenegro were occupied by the Yugoslav state. During this time, the chauvinist regime of the Greater Serbian bourgeoisie used all political, economic, ideological, and military means for the denationalization and completes Slavization of the annexed Albanian territories.
Denationalization through physical extermination
Documents available in the Albanian State Archive (the fund of the “National Defense of Kosovo” Committee) testify that during the years 1913-1927, 207,448 Albanians were killed in Kosovo and other regions of the former Yugoslavia. In Kosovo alone, during the years 1913-1927, 22,110 Albanians were imprisoned.
Also during these years, 57 villages were completely erased, 6,050 houses were burned, and 10,526 families were looted. Due to lack of data, the physical exterminations that took place in Kosovo and other Albanian regions in Macedonia and Montenegro during the years 1927-1937 are not included here.
Denationalization through colonizing agrarian reform
The Greater Serbian bourgeoisie, in addition to using violence in the war for the denationalization of Kosovo and other Albanian regions of the former Yugoslavia, also used other economic means, mainly colonizing agrarian reform.
Based on archival documents and some data provided by some Kosovar researchers, about 58,714 Serbian and Montenegrin colonists were settled in Kosovo in the period between the two world wars. Only until 1937, 16,622 families of Serbian and Montenegrin colonists were settled in Kosovo, and similarly, 2,000 other families of Serbo-Montenegrin colonists were settled in the Albanian regions of Macedonia.
Based on the colonization map, by 1937, about 374 colonist villages were established in Kosovo. According to the report of the Supreme Directorate of the Yugoslav Agrarian Reform, during the years 1920-1940, in only a few districts of Kosovo and Macedonia, thousands of hectares of land were taken from Albanians and given to Serbo-Montenegrin colonists. Denationalization through displacement is another method used by the Serbs.
Thus, due to the fierce violence for the extermination and massacre of Albanians, the mass grabbing of land, and the use of other coercive means, during the years 1913-1937, a large mass of the Albanian population living in Kosovo, Macedonia, and Montenegro was displaced from their homes.
In the years 1937-1941, due to the intensification of propaganda by the regime’s politicians, the Greater Serbian state apparatus implemented a variety of measures to accelerate the colonization and Slavization of the Albanian provinces in Yugoslavia. As a result, in these years the Yugoslav government undertook talks with Turkey to displace at least 400,000 Albanians in the coming years.
This was achieved by increasing the level of political violence and economic coercion to a higher degree. The arrival of colonists and the taking of Albanian land increased. The army was also engaged in the mission of displacing the Albanians.
In 1938, the command of the Third Army Zone in Skopje proposed: “We must try to move the strong and complex groups of Albanians as soon as possible, by placing at least 50 percent of our own (Slavic) population among them.” For this purpose, during the years 1939-1940, two terror operations were carried out against Albanians, under the pretext of collecting weapons, leading to the murder and massacre of the Albanian population by the Yugoslav army on the eve of the capitulation of Yugoslavia (April 1941).
All these actions caused the mass displacement of Albanians to Turkey to rise to a higher level. In these years alone, about 280,000 more Albanians were expelled from their lands. In total, during the 28-year period (1913-1941), over 500,000 Albanians were displaced from the Albanian regions in Yugoslavia. (220,000 until 1937 and 280,000 in the years 1937-1941). Of the 500,000 Albanians displaced during this period, a part was settled in Albania and the other part, about 380,000, in Turkey.
In the face of such a denationalizing policy, the population of the annexed Albanian regions of Yugoslavia developed a strong resistance in various forms, including armed struggle. The uprisings of Kosovo, the Dukagjini Plain, and Dibra in September 1913 are well-known. The uprisings of Plav, Gusinje, and Rugova in 1919, or that of the Dukagjini Plain in the same year, where the number of rebels reached 10,000.
Another uprising, that of Kosovo, would break out in 1920, where 12,000 rebels fought against the Greater Serbian army. Archival documents also shed light on the movement of rebel groups in the years 1918-1927, especially in the Drenica area. According to statistics provided by Yugoslav state bodies, during the years 1919-1927, about 4,000 Albanian rebel fighters were killed.
The four-year period (1941-1944)
Even after the capitulation of monarchist Yugoslavia, under the conditions of the Nazi-fascist occupation, during the war years, the ultra-nationalist Greater Serbian forces of the Chetniks, consisting of 40,000 soldiers of the former royal army, under the command of Draža Mihailović, continuously attacked Kosovo and other surrounding Albanian regions, committing mass killings and massacres.
The tragedy of Bihor is well known, in January 1943, when the Chetniks ravaged 52 villages, killed 4,000 inhabitants, abducted 300 girls, and threatened the entire Albanian population in Kosovo and other regions that, in case of resistance to not accept Serbian rule, they would suffer the same misfortune as the population of Bihor and Novi Pazar.
Stalin’s letter in 1925, Kosovo until secession
Consequently, the Albanian population in Kosovo and the surrounding regions had to wage a multifaceted war; both against the Italian and German occupiers, as well as against the Serbian forces represented by the Chetniks and the Bulgarian ones of Boris, who committed serious crimes against the Albanian population. On the other hand, Tito’s chauvinist group, with its stances, sabotaged the National Liberation War of the Albanian population.
In this regard, the chauvinist decision of AVNOJ (the Anti-Fascist Council for the National Liberation of Yugoslavia) in November 1943, in Jajce, is meaningful. In contradiction with the Marxist-Leninist stance on national issues and the orientations given by the COMINTERN at that time, which proclaimed that all nations and nationalities in the former monarchist Yugoslavia would remain within the borders of the post-war Yugoslav state, and even that the Yugoslav national minorities remaining outside the borders would join post-war Yugoslavia.
Josif Stalin, unmasking the national-chauvinist views and stances of the leadership of the Yugoslav Communist Party (Sema) in 1925, wrote that in the party’s program, the Leninist principle of the right to self-determination, even to secession, should be taken as the basis for the solution of the national question, and not the imperialist borders of the bourgeois Yugoslav state, created as a result of wars and violence (J. Stalin, Works, volume 7, page 22).
Thus, AVNOJ did not leave the issue of Kosovo and other Albanian regions to be resolved on the basis of the Leninist principle of self-determination up to secession, but proclaimed its solution by leaving Kosovo within the framework of post-war Yugoslavia.
We emphasize that no representative from Kosovo participated in this AVNOJ meeting. It is known that one month after the second meeting of AVNOJ (on December 31, 1943), in the village of Bujan, Tropoja, the First Conference of the National Liberation Council of Kosovo and the Dukagjini Plain decided: “Kosovo and the Dukagjini Plain are provinces in which the majority of the population is Albanian, which, as always, now wishes to unite with Albania.
Therefore, we feel it is our duty to point out the right path that the Albanian people should follow in order to realize their aspirations… so the Albanian people will have the opportunity to self-determine their fate, with the right of self-determination up to secession.” This decision by the Titist group was considered to be in conflict with the decisions of AVNOJ and with the views of the political line of the Yugoslav Communist Party, regarding the unity of Yugoslavia after the war…!
Who was Vaso Čubrilović, his career and work?
Dr. Vaso Čubrilović was born in 1897. As early as 1914, he was a member of the “Young Bosnia” organization, a Serbian nationalist organization that was charged with responsibility for the assassination of the heir to the Austrian royal throne in Sarajevo, on June 23, 1914. Čubrilović graduated from the University of Belgrade, where he later defended his doctorate. Since 1930, he was an assistant professor at the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade.
On March 7, 1937, he completed his study “The Expulsion of the Arnauts,” which he then presented to the Serbian cultural club, which approved it and immediately considered it the platform of the Greater Serbian bourgeoisie for the denationalization and colonization of Kosovo and other Albanian regions in Yugoslavia. After World War II, he was the minister of Forestry Economy and in other departments in the government of the Yugoslav Federal Republic.
Vaso Čubrilović is known as a politician, historian, and member of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia. In 1946, he was a professor at the University of Belgrade and a member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences. In 1970, Čubrilović directed the Balkanological Institute of Belgrade. The study “The Expulsion of the Arnauts” is still preserved today in Serbian archives and in the Military-Historical Institute of the 19th century.
New facts from secret archive documents about the Serbian reprisals in Kosovo after World War II
How did Tito favor Kosovars to go to the West?
Survival by giving birth to three times more than the Serbs –
It is no coincidence that, during the years 1944-1966, 70,000 Albanians were killed by Serbian terror in Kosovo and its regions, of which about 40,000 were killed in the four-year period 1944-’48. Over 30,000 others were eliminated during the years 1949-1966. The most typical examples of these extermination crimes are the shooting of 17,000 Albanians in Tetovo, Gostivar, Tivar, Mitrovica, and Gjilan, in the years 1944-1945.
Likewise, one cannot forget the massacre of more than 30,000 Albanians in Drenica, during the autumn and winter of 1944-1945, or the poisoning with gas of two thousand Albanian boys in Gorica. The Serbs later continued with the murders and inhumane tortures in the years 1955-1957, which they masked under the so-called “action for collecting weapons.” In this infamous massacre, more than 50 percent of the men of Kosovo were tortured.
The infamous Titist concentration camps and prisons were well known, where thousands of Albanians met their death, such as in: Niš, Mitrovica, Otaku, Idrisava, Srem, Stata, Sinja. Serbian violence against the ethnic people of Kosovo and its regions was once again demonstrated in the suppression of the demonstrations of 1968 in Pristina, Tetovo, Gostivar. In addition, more than 120,000 Albanians were followed by the UDB with processing files./Memorie.al
