Massacres of Albanians in the Balkan Wars

A number of reports surfaced about violent Montenegrin persecutions of Catholic Albanians.[33] In Montenegrin-controlled districts, Catholic and Muslim Albanians were subject to forced mass conversions to Orthodox Christianity.[34]

When Serbo-Montenegrin soldiers invaded Shkodër, about 10,000 Montenegrins died. The city was looted, and civilians (including the sick and wounded and women and children, many of whom were Christian) were massacred.[35] In late 1913, international pressure resulted in the withdrawal of Serbian forces from Shkodër; according to the city's Austro-Hungarian consul, Serb troops killed about 600 Albanians.[33]

In 1912, Serbian forces entered Qafë Morinë and killed 15 civilians.[36]

A British captain who was aiding a general spoke with incoming Albanian refugees and reported, "In Rugova, Peja, Plav and Gusinje, the Serb army attacked Albanians who proclaimed their national identity. In Krasniq, any Albanian that stayed behind was massacred by the Serbian army".[37]

The Austro-Hungarian consulate in Belgrade reported that during February 1913, Serbian military forces executed all Albanian inhabitants of the villages of Kabash, Tërpezë, Lubisht and Gjylekar.[38] Chetniks razed the Albanian quarter of Skopje and killed a number of the city's Albanian inhabitants.[39]

When villagers heard about the Serbian massacres of Albanians in nearby villages, some raised white flags to protect themselves. When the white flags were ignored during the October 1912 Serb attack on Pristina, the Albanians (led by Ottoman and Ottoman Albanian officers) attacked and killed the Serbian soldiers.[6] The Serbian army then retaliated against civilians.

The army entered Pristina on 22 October.[40] Albanian and Turkish households were looted and destroyed, and women and children were killed.[41] A Danish journalist based in Skopje reported that the Serbian campaign in Pristina "had taken on the character of a horrific massacring of the Albanian population".[40][41] An estimated 5,000 Albanians in Pristina were killed in the early days of the Serbian occupation.[42][41][43] The events have been interpreted as an early attempt to change the region's demographics.[40] Serbian settlers were brought into the city, and Serbian Prime Minister Nikola Pašić bought 1,214 acres (491 ha) of land.[44] Pristinans who wore a plis were targeted by the Serbian army; those who wore the Turkish fez were safe, and the price of a fez rose steeply.[45]

When Serb forces entered Gazimestan in 1913, they killed 5,000 Albanians.[46]

Gjakova suffered at the hands of the Serbian-Montenegrin army. The New York Times reported that people on the gallows hanged on both sides of the road, and the road to Gjakova became a "gallows alley."[43] The regional Montenegrin paramilitary abused the Albanian population.[47]

Serbian priests forcibly converted Albanian Catholics to Serbian Orthodoxy.[26] According to a 20 March 1913 Neue Freie Presse article, Orthodox priests and the military converted 300 Gjakova Catholics to the Orthodox faith; Franciscan Pater Angelus, who refused to renounce his faith, was tortured and killed with bayonets. The History Institute in Pristina reported that Montenegro converted over 1,700 Albanian Catholics to the Serbian Orthodox faith in the Gjakova region in March 1913.[48] Albert von Mensdorff-Pouilly-Dietrichstein told Edward Grey in a 10 March 1912 interview that Serbian soldiers behaved in a "barbarous way" toward Muslim and Catholic Albanians in Gjakova.[49]

When the Serbian army controlled the city of Prizren, it imposed repressive measures against the Albanian civil population; Serbian detachments broke into houses, plundered, committed acts of violence, and killed indiscriminately.[3] About 400 people were "eradicated" during the first days of Serbian occupation.[3] About 1,500 Albanian bodies lay in the streets,[6] and foreign reporters were barred from the city.[6] After the Serbian military and paramilitary operation, Prizren became known as "the kingdom of death".[6] General Božidar Janković forced the city's surviving Albanian leaders to sign a statement expressing gratitude to Serbian King Peter I Karađorđević for their liberation.[6] An estimated 5,000 Albanians were killed in and around Prizren.[6] British traveller Edith Durham and a British military attaché were supposed to visit Prizren in October 1912, but the trip was cancelled by the authorities. Durham said, "I asked wounded Montengrins [soldiers] why I was not allowed to go and they laughed and said 'We have not left a nose on an Albanian up there!' Not a pretty sight for a British officer."[41] Durham eventually visited a northern Albanian outpost in Kosovo, where she met captured Ottoman soldiers whose upper lips and noses had been cut off.[50]

Although Prizren offered no resistance to Serb forces, it did not avert a bloodbath; Prizren was the second-hardest-hit Albanian city, after Pristina. Serb forces invaded homes and abused anyone in their way, and up to 400 people died in the first few days of the Serbian occupation. When the Serbian troops set off westwards, they could not find horses to transport their equipment and used 200 Albanians; most collapsed along the way.[51][52]

Many Albanians fled to the Austrian consulate, where Oscar Prochazka greeted them. The Serbs demanded that they be given up, and the consul refused; the Serbs then stormed the consulate.[53]

In 1913, General Janko Vukotić told Edith Durham that his soldiers had committed atrocities against the civilian population of Rugova. In response to her protests, he reportedly said: "But they are beasts, savage animals. We have done very well".[54] Slovene author Božidar Jezernik interprets this as attesting the Montenegrin goal of removing local Muslims from their newly-captured territories and resettling them.[54]

The capture of Ferizovik (as the town was known in Ottoman times) by the Serbian army and the subsequent events were documented in contemporary accounts. The entry of the Serbian army was followed by a massacre of the population.[40] Leo Freundlich recorded contemporary reports in Albania's Golgotha. According to the war correspondent from Rome's Il Messaggero, the town was destroyed and most of its inhabitants were killed.[55] A Catholic priest in the region reported that resistance was strong for three days against the advancing Serbian army. When the town was finally taken, local residents who were fleeing were invited back if they surrendered their weapons. After they did, the army killed 300 to 400 people; only a few Muslim families remained.[55] Freundlich estimated the total number of deaths at 1,200.[55]

Another source of first-hand accounts in the region was Leon Trotsky, who was a war correspondent for the Kiev newspaper Kievskaya Misl. His reports from Ferizaj describe the killings and looting which occurred after its capture by the Serbian army.[56]

Luma region

Serb military forces entered Luma in 1912 and attacked local inhabitants, killed tribal chieftains, seized cattle and razed villages.[57] This triggered a local uprising.[57] Serb forces retaliated with a scorched-earth policy and widespread killing; young and old, men and women were barricaded in mosques and houses and shot or burned.[57] Twenty-five thousand people fled to Kosovo and western Macedonia.[57] According to Mark Levene, the events were a "localized genocide".[57]

When General Božidar Janković saw that the region's Albanians would not allow Serbian forces to continue advancing to the Adriatic Sea, he ordered his troops to continue their brutality.[3] The Serbian army killed men, women and children and burned down 100-200 houses and 27 villages in the Luma region.[6] Reports cited Serbian army atrocities, including the burning of women and children tied to haystacks in front of their husbands and fathers.[3] about 400 men from Luma surrendered to Serbian authorities, and were brought to Prizren and killed.[3] According to a Daily Telegraph story, "All the horrors of history have been outdone by the atrocious conduct of the troops of General Jankovic".[3]

The second Luma massacre occurred the following year. After the Conference of the Ambassadors decided that Luma should be part of Albania, the Serbian army initially refused to withdraw. The Albanians rebelled in September 1913, and Luma again experienced harsh retaliation from the Serbian army. A report of the International Commission cited a letter from a Serbian soldier who described the punitive expedition against the rebel Albanians:

My dear Friend, I have no time to write to you at length, but I can tell you that appalling things are going on here. I am terrified by them, and constantly ask myself how men can be so barbarous as to commit such cruelties. It is horrible. I dare not tell you more, but I may say that Luma (an Albanian region along the river of the same name), no longer exists. There is nothing but corpses, dust and ashes. There are villages of 100, 150, 200 houses, where there is no longer a single man, literally not one. We collect them in bodies of forty to fifty, and then we pierce them with our bayonets to the last man. Pillage is going on everywhere. The officers told the soldiers to go to Prizren and sell the things they had stolen.[2]

A December 1913 article in the Italian daily newspaper Corriere delle Puglie described an official report which was sent to the Great Powers detailing the massacre of Albanians in Luma and Debar after an amnesty was declared by Serbian authorities. The report listed the people killed by Serbian units with their cause of death, which included burning and bayoneting. The report also listed the burned and looted villages in the Luma and Has regions.[58] A Franciscan priest who visited Luma reported seeing "poor bayonetted babies" on the streets.[59]

After the defeat at Lumë, Serbian troops were ordered to exterminate the population of the villages of Opoja, Gora, Bellobrad, Brrut, Rrenc, Bresanë, Zym and Qafëleshi. Thousands of men, women and children were killed and their houses burned down. Survivors hid in the mountains or in wells where some suffocated; in one case, a mother held her infant above the water. Some were killed at local bridges, and their bodies were eaten by dogs. Local gypsies greeted the Serbian troops with drums and music; they were killed and buried in the Opoja mosque.[60] In the Restelica region, 13 districts were burned down.[61]

British army officer Christopher Birdwood Thomson was told by a Serbian general in Belgrade in 1913 that after the 3rd Serbian Army defeated the Turkish forces in Kumanovo, they entered the city and wiped out entire villages—massacring men, women and children in their homes, and forcing others to flee to their deaths from famine and cold. In 1920, he wrote: "Nothing more terrible has taken place in any part of the world, or in the whole history of war".[62]

After the Battle of Kumanovo on 23–24 October 1912, the Morava division of the Serbian army entered Gostivar. Hundreds of Albanians were killed, resulting in protests from Vienna. Leopold Berchtold, appalled by the massacre, asked Belgrade to withdraw from Albanian territory.[63] On 21 November 1912, he wrote letters to Paris, London, Berlin, Rome and Petrograd: "The behavior of the Serbian army towards the Albanian people does not belong to any international human rights norm, but after the occupation of the countries they choose no means of dealing with it anymore. They acted brutally against the innocent and defenseless population".[64][65]

Vice-consul W. D. Peckham was informed by the Catholic curate of Skopje and Ferizaj, who visited him on 27 February 1913, that thousands of Albanians had been killed and hundreds tortured.[66] Serbian soldiers broke into the house of an Albanian family, raped the wife and beat the husband until he told them where his daughters were hiding; his daughters were then also raped.[67]

On 18 November 1912, Sir F. Cartwright wrote to Sir Edward Grey that the Serbian army entered Mitrovica, arrested the Austrian consul, and held him prisoner for 15 days; the consul escaped to Budapest after witnessing atrocities against Albanian civilians.[68] According to a 1912 Japan Times article, the Austrian consuls in Prizren and Mitrovica were arrested because the Serbian government did not want news to reach Austria that Serbian soldiers had massacred Albanian civilians.[69]

Serbian soldiers killed 17 Albanian civilians when they entered Vučitrn on 13 August 1913. The killings were documented in a letter from British vice-consul W. D. Peckham in Skopje to British ambassador Ralph Paget in Belgrade.[70]

The Serbian army bombarded the city of Peć and razed villages in 1912, aided by Chetniks.[71] Edith Durham wrote about refugees from Peć after the Serbian army entered the city in 1913:

An Ipek man, well educated and of high standing, told of what happened there. "Every day the telal cried in the streets 'To-day the Government will shoot ten (or more) men! No one knew which men they would be, or why they were shot. They were stood in a trench, which was to be their grave. Twelve soldiers fired and as the victims fell the earth was shovelled over them, whether living or dead. Baptisms were forcd by torture. Men were plunged into the ice-cold river, and then half roased till they cried for mercy". Many, terrorized into baptism, came to me.[59]

About 10,000 Albanians in Peć were forcibly converted.[72]

Carlo Papa di Castiglione d'Asti (1869-1955), an Italian major and military attaché in Belgrade and Bucharest from 1908 to 1913, observed the advancing Serbian army. He reported that the army exterminated the Albanian population of Novi Pazar to facilitate Serbian domination.[73] When Serb troops entered the Sanjak of Novi Pazar, hundreds of civilians were killed.[74] The Ibar Army under General Mihailo Zivkovic entered the sanjak and pacified the Albanian population with "soletudinem faciunt pacem appelant" ("They make a desert and call it peace").[75]

In the town of Ohrid, Serbian forces killed 500 Albanians and Turks.[10]

On 20 September 1913, the Serbian Army carried off all the cattle in Dibër, Malësia. Although the herdsmen fought back, all were killed. The Serbians also killed two Lumë chieftains (Mehmed Edem and Djafer Eleuz) and pillaged and burned the villages of Peshkopi, Blliçë and Dohoshisht in lower Dibër County and seven other villages in upper Dibër County. Women, children and old people were tortured and killed.[76]

As the army invaded Albania through Dibra, Elbasan and Shkodër, they bombarded cities and villages with artillery. The Albanian government telegraphed their delegates in Paris that Serbia's aim was to suppress the Albanian state and exterminate the Albanian population.[77]

American relief commissioner William Howard said in a 1914 Daily Mirror interview that Serbian troops destroyed 100 villages (with 12,000 houses) in Dibra, and 4,000 to 8,000 Albanians were burned, bayonetted or shot to death.[78] When Serbian troops looted the villages of Dibra, armed Albanians killed the soldiers. The Serbs responded by burning down 24 villages.[79]

Serb majors M. Vasić and Vasilije Trbić gathered 30 Chetniks in September 1912 and travelled to Desovo, where they shot 111 Albanian men and razed the village.[80] In nearby Brailovo, Trbić executed 60 Albanians.[80]

In the villages, Serbian soldiers took the men out and asked the women to pay for their release. They were put inside a mosque after payment, which was blown up. In Sulp, 73 Albanians were also killed.[81]

In Tirana, many Albanians were beaten to death by local Serb troops.[82]

Scholarship treats wartime correspondence from the Balkan Wars as first-hand evidence, and historian Wolfgang Höpken says that those sources need to be handled carefully.[102] Höpken says that although reporters (such as Trotsky) who provided firsthand information were not near the theatre of war,[102] Trotsky's accounts of the Balkan Wars were "some of the most brilliant and most analytical war reports".[103]

Contemporary journalists based in the Balkans, such as Richard von Mach from the Kölnische Zeitung, said that accounts were often from a third party or "even pure fiction".[102] Writers like Carl Pauli obtained their information from unnamed witnesses or gathered evidence from the extensive compilation by Leo Freundlich, who wrote about the Albanian conflict zone with empathy for its Albanian victims.[102] According to Höpken, these sources are significant but their information "can hardly be taken for granted".[102]

The oft-cited International Carnegie Commission report "cannot", says Höpken, "be read without a due deconstructative effort on the part of the historian".[102] However, historian Alan Kramer regards the Carnegie Commission report as a "remarkably well-documented and impartial investigation, coolly sceptical of exaggerated claims, reached conclusions that have not been improved to this day."[10] Diplomatic missions in the Balkans repeatedly sent reports of rumors and news about violent acts committed by all participants in the Balkan Wars,[104] and often complainted about their inability to obtain firsthand data.[104] Reports from British consuls described many violent acts committed by Serb irregular forces in Kosovo and Macedonia after their capture in 1912-1913 by the Serbian military.[103] The British government was suspicious of the authenticity of the complaints and reports, and hesitated to undertake political action.[105]

When political relations with Serbia were tense, Austria-Hungary was keenly interested in amassing details of Serbian atrocities and scrutinised the reliability of their sources.[105] Austro-Hungarians said that although there was often "a great deal of exaggeration" of data in their possession,[105] accounts from verified witnesses confirmed the killings of children and women, wide-scale theft and the razing of villages.[105] In Skopje, the Austro-Hungarian consul Heimroth sent his assistants into the field numerous times to examine news of atrocities before sending reports (such as "Gausamkeiten der Serben gegen Albaner") to Vienna.[106]

An extensive report by the Catholic bishop Lazër Mjeda on Serbian violence toward Skopje's Muslim and Albanian inhabitants was the subject of detailed discussion at the Austro-Hungarian consulate,[106] which concluded that the report was well-founded.[106] In his report, Consul Heimroth said that Serbian forces should at least be held to account for not halting the violence against Muslims after their arrival in Skopje.[107] Heimroth said that he received more complaints of wartime violence then he had in the Russo-Japanese War, and a conflict aimed at liberating fellow Christians concluded with an attempt to exterminate non-Orthodox inhabitants.[107]

Nonpartisan witnesses included foreign workers and engineers from the Oriental Railway and local and foreign Christian clergy.[105] Some observers suspected that forced population movements (ethnic cleansing) were part of an organised extermination effort.[105] Höpken finds insufficient support for that position in the sources, and the events "radicalised" the continuing course toward homogenous ethnic populations.[105] Historian Mark Mazower writes that despite the "careless talk of 'exterminating' the Albanian population", the killing of "perhaps thousands of civilians" by Serbian armed forces in the provinces of Kosovo and Monastir was "prompted more by revenge than genocide".[108]

Observations by "reliable" and "non-partisan" informants who witnessed the events "left no doubt", Höpken says, that extensive violence (such as the razing of homes and villages and forced population movements) occurred.[105] Apart from what Höpken calls "suspicious slaughter narratives" in second- and third-hand accounts, doctors and nurses verified that the "conflict had gone beyond all rules and regulations".[105]

In Albanian literature and scholarship, the actions described in Durham's accounts are the outcome of anti-Albanian policies organised by the Serb government to "exterminate Albanians".[87] According to Daut Dauti, Durham's wartime reports "amounted to atrocity testimonies committed against Albanians".[89] Durham's accounts were criticised by Rebecca West, a fellow traveler of the region.[42] West called Durham naive (ridiculing her support of a false 1912 report which claimed that the Austrian consul had been castrated by Serbs in Prizren),[42] but historian Benjamin Lieberman wrote that West has been accused of pro-Serbian bias.[42] Lieberman said that Durham was an eyewitness to the conflict and, in Trotsky's interviews Trotsky with Serbs, his informants lacked a motive to portray their fellow troops (and citizens) negatively.[42] He called Trotsky, Durham and others' accounts consistent and corroborated by additional sources, such as Catholic Church officials who cited multiple massacres.[42]