Country: Northern Macedonia

Group: Albanians

Data Finalized: 2/22/2020

Team: Colleen Clauss (lead), Jayline Martin, Payton Thompson

Content Warning: homicide, torture, sexual assault

Approximate Time Period: 1912-1980

During the Balkan Wars from 1912-1913, Serbian troops and paramilitary groups committed atrocities and systematic massacres against the Albanian population of Kosovo (United States Department of State, 1963). It seems that the intention of the “Serbian and Montenegrin troops” was “the entire transformation of the ethnic character of regions inhabited exclusively by Albanians’” during the “liberation” of land formerly controlled by the Ottomans (Kramer, 2007). An estimated 20,000-25,000 deaths resulted from direct gunfire, artillery, famine resulting from the military campaigns, “terror, burnings, killings, robberies, rapes, and ethnic cleansing of Albanians all over Kosovo” (Hudson, 128; Goldwyn). These killings occurred primarily in Kosovo, but also in territory that is now part of Northern Macedonia.  This includes the killing of 500 Turks and Albanians by Serb forces at Ohrid [in current-day Northern Macedonia] (Kramer, 2007). On another occasion, the headless remains of hundreds of Albanian civilians apparently killed by Serbian paramilitary squads were found in Skopje, Macedonia (Trix, 44). Some of the genocidal acts were spontaneous, but many were directed by officials hoping to force the Albanians to surrender \. More violence against Albanians occurred after the end of World War II, when Serbian secret police carried out fierce repressions of Albanians, and when Tito, former president of Republic of Yugoslavia, died in 1980.

The data quality was rated as a 3 because credible sources were found in the form of government documents, reports from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and a personal interview published in a peer reviewed journal.

References

  1. Goldwyn, A. J., & Hoxha, R. (2012). “Finally, Ali Podrimja spoke”: a conversation. World Literature Today, 86(3), 28+
  2. Hudson, Kimberly A. (5 March 2009). Justice, Intervention, and Force in International Relations: Reassessing Just War Theory in the 21st Century. Taylor & Francis. p. 128.
  3. Kramer, Alan. (2007). Dynamic of Destruction : Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War (Making of the modern world (Oxford University Press)). Oxford University Press.
  4. Mojzes, P. (2009). The genocidal twentieth century in the Balkans. Confronting Genocide: Judaism, Christianity, Islam, 151-181.
  5. Trix, Frances (2016). Urban Muslim migrants in Istanbul: Identity and trauma among Balkan immigrants. Bloomsbury Publishing. p. 44.
  6. United States Department of State. (1963). Papers relating to the foreign relations of the United States, 115–116.