"Criminals are always others, one's own people are always the victims." This attitude of historian Shkeljzen Gashi, expressed a few years ago on the occasion of the analysis of Serbian and Albanian textbooks in Kosovo, probably best reflects the heated Serbian-Albanian relations in the last few weeks.
The latest case is the statements of the former Kosovo Prime Minister and one of the leaders of the former Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), Ramush Haradinaj, and the bitter reactions of Belgrade. He demanded that Serbia delete Kosovo from the preamble of its constitution, threatening that when he becomes prime minister, he will state in the constitution that Kosovo is up to Niš.
Serbian Deputy Prime Minister Nebojša Stefanović retorted that "Haradinaj can only see Niš from the Niš prison", and Serbian Head of State Tomislav Nikolić, without mincing words, pointed out that "the rabid dog must be punished", repeating Belgrade's accusations against Haradinaj for war crimes.
Haradin's statement about Kosovo to Nis was certainly calculated to win over voters ahead of the upcoming elections, and it followed his months-long detention in France on a Serbian warrant. In any case, this attitude, as well as the undiplomatic and even insulting reaction of Nikolić, only inflames passions and further complicates the normalization of relations between Belgrade and Pristina, which have not moved far from the deadlock.
Supporters of unification in the vast minority
All of this was preceded by the statement of Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama that he cannot rule out the unification of his country and Kosovo if the perspective of the Balkan countries joining the EU continues to fade.
He specified that unification is not his desire, but it is a possible alternative for the closed doors of the EU. The President of Kosovo, Hashim Thaci, spoke in a similar tone.
This statement was interpreted first of all as pressure on the EU to speed up the integration process, but also as a transfer of responsibility to Brussels, because the stall in enlargement has a negative impact on the political and economic situation in Albania and Kosovo, of course, and in the entire Balkans. The European Commissioner for Enlargement, Johannes Hahn, said that such statements are counterproductive, and that they can "hit the heads" of those who utter them.
As Enver Robelli points out in "Prishtina Insight", the talk of unification is "empty rhetoric" and "helpless scare tactics" to cover up domestic problems. As an example, he cites several international reports for 2017, according to which, during Rama's government, cannabis smuggling in Albania increased by three times.
The statements of Rama and Thaci should be seen in the context of the upcoming elections in Albania and Kosovo. However, supporters of their unification are in the minority, primarily in Albania. Only Krešnik Spahiju's "Red-Black Coalition" advocates for that option, which was far below the threshold in the 2013 elections, winning only 10.000 votes.
In Kosovo, only the "Self-Determination" movement stands for unification. According to a recent survey by the Tirana Institute for International Studies, only nine percent of Albanian citizens believe that unification with Kosovo would be positive.
According to the director of this institution, Alberto Rakipi, such an undertaking would be risky:
"Both countries are very weak, and Kosovo is even unconsolidated. Both are very shaken by internal political conflicts, are not functional and have low democratic standards. In case of their unification, a larger state would be created, but a very weak one that might even be impossible to govern. Not to mention the integration of two societies that, despite speaking the same language, are very different, which would cause permanent tensions".
Rakipi points out that Albania strives to play a much more important role on the international stage compared to its real strength, which reminds him of the political culture of the time of Enver Hoxha. An example of this is the critical letter of the once undisputed Albanian communist leader to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China about why he was not consulted before the historic visit of US President Richard Nixon to Beijing.
The authorities in Belgrade condemned Rama's and Thaci's statement, warning that the unification of Albania and Kosovo would cause a new Balkan war.
"If I had said what Rama and Thaci are saying, they would have hung me on a flagpole in Brussels instead of one of the flags," said the laconic Prime Minister of Serbia, Aleksandar Vučić.
He pointed out that stories about the unification of Albania and Kosovo remain only in the realm of wishful thinking, asking their protagonists not to go public with it, "because it does not contribute to good relations in the region." With this, at first glance, measured statement, Vučić is clearly trying to show himself as a constructive politician, bearing in mind the scar from the past when he advocated the "Greater Serbia" option.
Meanwhile, official Moscow believes that it is clear who is behind the idea of a "Greater Albania", and that Rama and Thaci are undermining regional stability "under the NATO umbrella".
Although the aforementioned statements are mainly intended for internal day-to-day political needs, they slowly introduce into the political discourse a topic that was not mentioned even during the wars in the former Yugoslavia in the nineties. Edi Rama spoke in a similar way about "Greater Albania" two years ago. Although it indicates the unification of Albanians in the context of the EU, it certainly arouses the suspicion of other peoples, primarily Serbs, but also Greeks, Macedonians and Montenegrins.
Insincere negotiations between Belgrade and Pristina
Also, the mention of the idea of "Greater Albania" should be seen as the "tip of the iceberg", that is, a reflection of the accumulated and still unresolved problems in the Balkans, primarily in the relations between Belgrade and Pristina. Although in 2013 they reached an agreement on the normalization of relations, which many assessed as historic, little has been done in practice. And those small technical advances were made not as an expression of the good will of both sides for normalization, but above all as an expression of necessity, more precisely as a precondition for the European integration of both Serbia and Kosovo.
In the meantime, there remained a deep gap, suspicion and prejudice not only between the political elites in Belgrade and Pristina, but also between a significant part of both peoples. This does not only refer to different views on the solution of their national issues, but also to the personal experience of members of other nations. Thus, according to research by Srećko Mihajlović, at the end of the nineties, 55 percent of Serbs thought that Albanians hated other nations, 46 percent thought that they were insidious, and 37 percent thought that they were backward.
Albanians also had a similar attitude towards Serbs: 81 percent that they hate other nations, 52 percent that they are treacherous, and 39 percent that they are crooks. Later research also showed a similar trend. For example, according to a 2007 survey, Serbian students would five times prefer to marry Slovenes, Croats or Macedonians than Albanians.
True communication and cooperation between Serbs and Albanians is reduced to oases, or rather, the efforts of enthusiasts. All this shows that the heavy historical legacy continues to burden the relations between the two nations.
Serbian stereotypes about Albanians
Ideas about the unification of all Serbs and all Albanians appeared in the 19th century at a time when almost all European nations, primarily under foreign rule, were striving for national emancipation. Admittedly, the historian Paskar Milo points out that the Albanian national movement emerged somewhat later than the other Balkan nations, because by accepting Islam they received certain privileges from the Turkish administration, so, along with language, their religion was the only indicator of national consciousness.
The goal of Serbia, which was internationally recognized at the Congress in Berlin in 1878, was the expansion of the territories where the Serbs are located, including Kosovo, which at that time was under Turkish rule. At the same time, the Albanians who lived in the four vilayets of the Ottoman Empire also sought liberation and unification. The Kosovo vilayet also included Sandžak, the Preševo valley and western Macedonia with Skopje as the center.
Albanians, except in the north of Kosovo, were in the majority. The position of the Christian minority was particularly difficult, as it was exposed to both the repression of the Turkish administration and the violence of the Albanians, which the diplomacy of the Kingdom of Serbia used to portray them as "savages" and usurpers of the Serbian land.
The most vocal in spreading prejudices was the then Prime Minister Vladan Đorđević, who portrayed Albanians as "savages without history", as "European red-skins who sleep on trees to which they are attached by their tails". The authorities in Belgrade believed that the Albanians were "historically inferior", that they were not a people, but mutually inbred tribes without a common language and religion, and that only by joining the Serbian state would it be possible to "train them for a civilized life".
At the same time, many Serbian scholars pointed out that part of Arbanas is of Slavic origin, including the famous Skanderbeg, who was allegedly born by "the Serbian woman Vojislava".
One of the stereotypes is that Albanians "preferred to engage in robbery rather than farming". One hundred years later, the modern variant of this stereotype is that many Albanians are "criminals and drug dealers".
At the same time, although Serbs emigrated en masse after the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, especially during the time of Arsenij Čarnojević, Serbia emphasized its historical right to Kosovo as the center and "cradle" of its medieval state.
Shkodra, the "lungs of Serbia"
In 1910, the leaders of the Albanian movement began a series of uprisings against Turkish rule, demanding the formation of an autonomous Albania. The Young Turk administration initially refused, but after the rebels captured Skopje and reached Thessaloniki, it finally accepted their demands.
However, neighboring Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece and Montenegro saw this as the creation of a "Greater Albania" that would threaten their interests, given that members of other nations lived on its territory and claimed those areas. This hastened their decision to go to war with Turkey in order to expel it from the Balkans. Albanian leaders, on the other hand, decide to defend the territories they considered their own, fighting on the side of Turkey.
Thus, in 1912, the First Balkan War began, in which Turkey was expelled from this area and the four Balkan states divided almost all the areas they ruled. The Serbian army also entered Albania, which its historians qualified as the "first invasion".
Only after the intervention of the great powers, the Serbian army was forced to retreat. According to the historian Vladan Jovanović, Serbian diplomacy unsuccessfully convinced Europe that the Albanians were not civilizationally mature enough to have their own state at all, and that the withdrawal of the Albanian borders to Serbia closed one of the "lifelines of development" and the "anti-ethnographic necessity" of Serbia's exit to the Adriatic via geographer Jovan Cvijić also tried to prove that of northern Albania, whereby Thessaloniki and Shkodër were designated as "Serbia's lungs without which its economy would no longer be able to breathe".
Tucović: He must pay for the crimes against the Albanians
After two Balkan wars, Serbia annexed Sandžak, Macedonia and Kosovo. Serbian diplomacy presented the annexation of Kosovo as liberation from the Turks, although at international conferences it was a certain problem because the Serbs were not in the majority. At the peace talks in London, Serbia did not want to be satisfied with the north of Kosovo, which, ironically, as Damir Pavlica states, "will be begging for a hundred years later".
During the Balkan wars, terrible crimes were committed, which was also written about in the report of the international commission. In the Serbian public at that time, "revenge for 1389" was current, which spilled over from the Turks to the Albanians.
One of the rare critics of Serbian politics at the time, social democrat Dimitrije Tucović, warned that "a premeditated murder attempt was carried out against an entire nation", which is a "criminal act" for which "must be punished".
He opposed Serbia's territorial expansion and advocated that Kosovo enter the Balkan Federation on an equal footing with Serbia and other areas.
Tucović pointed out that if anyone had the conditions for an agreement with the Albanians, it was Montenegro and Serbia:
"Not only the mixed settlements and the kinship of the neighboring tribes but also the mutuality of interests led these two peoples to an agreement and friendly relations. Just as the road to the Adriatic Sea goes through a simple Albanian settlement, the connections of the Albanians with the interior of the peninsula lead through the Serbian border. As we need the sea, they need the land even more".
Forced emigration of Albanians between the two wars
The Serbian authorities tried to change the ethnic structure in Kosovo. By 1941, around 60.000 colonists were settled on properties mostly taken from Albanians. Such measures encouraged hatred, which left disastrous, lasting consequences on the relations between the two nations. At the same time, the Albanian population was forcibly evicted. From 1919 to 1940, 215.000 Albanians emigrated to Turkey.
However, the authorities in Belgrade believed that the gradual colonization of Kosovo was not producing the expected results. Therefore, academician Vaso Čubrilović developed a project for a quick solution to the "Albanian problem" by mass ethnic cleansing of Kosovo, describing Albanian settlements as "a wedge that has sunk deep into our lands".
The Turkish government, among other things, signed an agreement in 1936 on the acceptance of 200.000 Albanians, but which was not implemented due to the outbreak of the Second World War.
In the meantime, Ivo Andrić, as ambassador in Berlin, drew up a plan for the division of Albania between Italy and Yugoslavia in 1939. He believed that the assimilation and emigration of Albanians would be simpler only after the disappearance of Albania as a state.
Crimes against Serbs during World War II
As it happened several times in the history of Serbian-Albanian relations, the pendulum shifted with the outbreak of the Second World War. The Italians were welcomed in Kosovo as liberators and the cruel persecution of the Serbs, above all the colonists, began.
"We should try to move the Serbian population out of Kosovo as soon as possible... Serbian colonists should be killed", ordered the occupying prime minister of Albania, Mustafa Kruja, in 1942.
Albanians were not massively represented in the partisans, especially at the beginning of the war, because they were against the reconstruction of Yugoslavia, where they were oppressed.
"This explains the sad fact that for a large number of Kosovo Albanians, the conquest of the Balkans by the troops of Nazi Germany was a kind of gain, since they hoped that it would enable them to establish national unity within the framework of something that is still known as a terrifying concept "Great Albania", says the writer Beqë Cufaj.
Towards the end of the war, more and more Albanians joined the partisan movement. At the beginning of 1944, the National Liberation Committee of Kosovo made a decision on the annexation of Kosovo to Albania. However, this was not realized, and with the entry of Yugoslav partisans into Kosovo in December 1944, a mass rebellion broke out by Albanians who saw it as a new occupation. Tito sends additional forces to crush the "ballistic rebellion". It is also interesting that Enver Hoxha sent two brigades to help Tito's units.
A military administration was instituted, and the return of Serbian colonists was temporarily prohibited. After the war, the possibility of creating a "Balkan federation" by joining Yugoslavia with Bulgaria and Albania was considered. Enver Hodža wrote in his memoirs that Tito told him in Belgrade that he understood the desire of the Albanians to unify the ethnic space, but that "it is not possible to achieve this because the Serbs would not understand it".
However, after the Resolution of the Informburo in 1948, Yugoslavia and Albania cooled their relations. The rest is history. Police pressure under the control of Aleksandar Ranković on the Albanians, then their rebellions in the late 1974s and early 1989s, greater rights for Kosovo under the Constitution of XNUMX and the abolition of autonomy in XNUMX, partial emigration of Serbs under pressure in the XNUMXs, terror against Albanians in the XNUMXs, NATO intervention, persecution Serbs. The roles of oppressor and victim changed, but none of these roles brought good to either the Serbs or the Albanians.
Bonus video:
