Albania + Kosovo... Why not?

[Zenga]

Hi my dear Albanians!


Albania and Kosovo...Why dont you unite?

Thanks.

Zenga

[Pahli]

Albania and Kosovo...Why dont you unite?

Because the Serbs will get pissed

[Shqipez]

Albania and Kosovo...Why dont you unite?

Exactly. they have every right to unite. Albanians have fought so hard for this throughout history. But anti-Albanians talk like greater Albania is a crime. No, its based on historical rights/historical facts. What is a crime is what happened in 1912, when all Albanian inhabited lands were given to slavs and greeks, lands that Albanians fought for against Ottomans and even slavs... and in the end all Albanians only got was this little country called 'Albania', that's real crime!!!

[Shqipez]

Because the Serbs will get pissed

Fuck the Serbs.

[Minesweeper]

Albania and Kosovo...Why dont you unite?

Like they can decide anything on their own, let alone these big decisions.

[RandoBloom]

Like they can decide anything on their own, let alone these big decisions.

They can. And they did. Remember how Kosovo is independent now and you need your passport to pass :laugh:

[Minesweeper]

They can. And they did. Remember how Kosovo is independent now and you need your passport to pass :laugh:

I simply don't.

[RandoBloom]

https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-zLPmCfSPZ6M/U9ct_VDkw-I/AAAAAAAAHMA/bkJk9AIcvIE/s640/blogger-image--957436976.jpg

Just beautiful :D

[Zenga]

Hrulj, just wait that Vajdasag and Sandjak declare indenpendence.

[Zenga]

I hope some Albanian historian will show up. Or atleast person who read a lot about it.

[Minesweeper]

https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-zLPmCfSPZ6M/U9ct_VDkw-I/AAAAAAAAHMA/bkJk9AIcvIE/s640/blogger-image--957436976.jpg

Just beautiful :D

Like Republika Srpska table.

[Shqipez]

https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-zLPmCfSPZ6M/U9ct_VDkw-I/AAAAAAAAHMA/bkJk9AIcvIE/s640/blogger-image--957436976.jpg

Just beautiful :D

Soon to be ''Republika e Shqiperis'' = ''Republic of Albania''

[Arijanit]

USA won't ever let us unite, because the more countries they have under their wing, the more influence they will have...

[Dun93]

Step by step xD

The meeting between two Albanian Republics that happened this month
https://fbcdn-sphotos-a-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xat1/v/t1.0-9/11069935_10152827407511523_7951441098457611506_n.j pg?oh=891204793954717c568d53891a2e7b13&oe=55B323D8&__gda__=1436653850_f05796a641e8c398bb089c82fb1e27d 6

The motto of the meeting : " Nje toke , nje popull , nje enderr " - " One land , one nation , one dream "
https://fbcdn-sphotos-c-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xpa1/v/t1.0-9/11082531_10152828378636523_1865770689135837063_n.j pg?oh=6823944b0d8a4d6c3a32c1142b02685c&oe=55AA6F27&__gda__=1436786481_bdd881c4ed8f30b74eee75b2e5d1c7a a

[Shqipez]

I simply don't.

I remember after I was in Kosova for vacation and was going back, we wanted to drive through Serbia but since we came from Kosova the Serb police at the border there would not let us pass by we had to drive all the way back and in to Macedonia before into Serbia again.

[interes]

kosovo=serbia

kosovo is serbia

[Dun93]

kosovo=serbia

kosovo is serbia


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBkuNpgACH0

[Vullkan]

The ideal is albanian federation like federative germany.We dont unite because our politicians are criminals who are deeply corrupt,.

[Era]

I doubt there will be a full union anytime soon. But a federation like is the way to go. Currently there is a cultural fusion going on and Albos of Kosovo can get Albanian citizenship easily. Also there is some academic coordination by having unification of school curriculums. Much more should be done regarding economical cooperation.

[The.Mask]

As long as traitor politicians will be in power in both states there will be no reunification, on the other side if we would have only 50 men like those in my signature we would be able to remove the Kosovan-Albanian border and to take control of the North Kosova. But someday it will be happen just like both Germany.

[Suleiman Arian]

Because are so called allies in the western governments are using us and don't have any balls.

[armenianbodyhair]

Exactly. they have every right to unite. Albanians have fought so hard for this throughout history. But anti-Albanians talk like greater Albania is a crime. No, its based on historical rights/historical facts. What is a crime is what happened in 1912, when all Albanian inhabited lands were given to slavs and greeks, lands that Albanians fought for against Ottomans and even slavs... and in the end all Albanians only got was this little country called 'Albania', that's real crime!!!
Irredentism of any kind almost always involves criminal behavior under international law, so technically you're wrong. Sorry bud.

[The.Mask]

It's not a Greater Albania it's an ethnic Albania cutted by the biggest powers, Britains are in big part responsible of this, first for having lied the Albanians and took them almost all the weapons with a promise that they would have their lands, and after that signed the Treaty of London wich cutted Albania into many pieces.

[Kabul]

Because the Serbs will get pissed

Who cares? Serbia borders mostly EU and NATO states, they have to live up to the fact that Kosovo isn't Serbia anymore, neither in practice nor in paper according to most UN member states.

[Kabul]

Because the political elites in Kosovo would lose their status and jobs as politicians if this were to happen. The average Kosovar Albanian wants to unite with Albania, but unfortunately greed coming from politicians holds it back.

[Mraz]

Albania would have to be recognized in its new borders, some treaties would become void, a lot of administrative work would have to be done especially since Kosovo has more than half of Albania's population. I don't believe this can be done during peace time since it would cost a lot of ressources.

[Raikaswinþs]

Have heard from numerous sources that Albanians in Kosovo slowly became a majority by emigrating from other Albanian areas over the last 150 years or so in some sort of slow and gradual population replacement. Serbs claim that Kosovo is to them a sort of Kievan Rus; the foundation of the Serbian nation

What is the Albanian version of the story?

No trolling btw. Honest curiosity.

[Vullkan]

that bullshit propaganda albania fell under communism and the borders were the most fortified.On the contrary many kosovo albanians went in albania there are many kosovo albanians in many albanian cities in large numbers .

Albanians had more babes than serbs thats all not to mention the mass ethnic cleansing that serb did during their rule.There are 300 k kosovo albanians in swiss alone not to mention germany,sweden,holland,belgium ,england ect.

Serbian propagand and irrealistic.

Albania had only 800 k people in 1945 and went to four million in 215 for 70 years.

meaning five times initial population.

There is no possible way that albanians went to kosovo in this time its mathematically impossible


And why should they go to the least developed part of yougoslavia.

On the other hands there were 60 k kosov albanians in beograd and today there are a few hundret if you dont call that ethnic cleansing.

[Raikaswinþs]

that bullshit propaganda albania fell under communism and the borders were the most fortified.On the contrary many kosovo albanians went in albania there are many kosovo albanians in many albanian cities in large numbers .

Albanians had more babes than serbs thats all not to mention the mass ethnic cleansing that serb did during their rule.There are 300 k kosovo albanians in swiss alone not to mention germany,sweden,holland,belgium ,england ect.

Serbian propagand and irrealistic.

Albania had only 800 k people in 1945 and went to four million in 215 for 70 years.

So rather than migration into Kosovo, the population replacement took place due to outbreeding the Serbs, is that what you meant?

[Dun93]

So rather than migration into Kosovo, the population replacement took place due to outbreeding the Serbs, is that what you meant?

First they said that we came from Caucasus with ottomans xD
Then we emigrated from other parts of Albania , which parts ?
greeks say we emigrated from the north to south , Macedonians say we emigrated from west to east
serbs say from south to north .
It's really a nobrainer bullshit xD

[Vullkan]

So rather than migration into Kosovo, the population replacement took place due to outbreeding the Serbs, is that what you meant?

yeah although serbs tried everything to halt this through forced migration or easing migration.

But according to historical data for the last 200 years kosovo had always albanian majority.By the way the albanian fight for indipendence started in prizren a city in kosovo.

How can the fight for indipendence start in a place where people are not the majority it makes no sense.

Its as if in spain independence started in madrid and they say its not madrid Spaniard city lol.

[The Illyrian Warrior]

Because the political elites in Kosovo would lose their status and jobs as politicians if this were to happen. The average Kosovar Albanian wants to unite with Albania, but unfortunately greed coming from politicians holds it back.

This and West isn't quite supportive of having a stronger Albania, the smaller and lesser it is the easier has to control, not just Albania but any country.

[Minesweeper]

yeah although serbs tried everything to halt this through forced migration or easing migration.

But according to historical data for the last 200 years kosovo had always albanian majority.By the way the albanian fight for indipendence started in prizren a city in kosovo.

How can the fight for indipendence start in a place where people are not the majority it makes no sense.

Its as if in spain independence started in madrid and they say its not madrid Spaniard city lol.

When did the fight for independence in Prizren start?

[Vullkan]

Serbia is the only country in the world and Britain who planned extermination academically against a population Britain for the irish Serbia for the Albanians.

Its the declaration of the academia of Belgrade.They kept doing for the last two hundred years slowly and the world did not care cause we had no allies.

[Vullkan]

When did the fight for independence in Prizren start?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/League_of_Prizren

1877

[Vullkan]

For more info ask kastrioti he has more info than me on this topic.

[Minesweeper]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/League_of_Prizren

1877

So, who denies Albanians had majority in Kosovo in 1877?

[Raikaswinþs]

yeah although serbs tried everything to halt this through forced migration or easing migration.

But according to historical data for the last 200 years kosovo had always albanian majority.By the way the albanian fight for indipendence started in prizren a city in kosovo.

How can the fight for indipendence start in a place where people are not the majority it makes no sense.

Its as if in spain independence started in madrid and they say its not madrid Spaniard city lol.


Madrid is not a Spanish city in many ways. More like the Spanish Branch of the Global Republic. The Capital of the Basque provinces , city of Vitoria, is acity governed by conservative Spanish unionists (PP) since the beginning of elections. Yet Basques chose it to be its capital nevertheless in fears that it would become a second Rioja or Navarra (The province of Vitoria (Alaba) its quite divided between the pro-basque shires near Biscay and the pro-Spanish areas Neighbouring Castile.

To complicate things even more, there are some Castilian towns, particularly the very important town of Miranda de Ebro, were a part of its population wants to separate and become a Basque town. So yeah, XIXth century ideolgies screwed everyone up.

Back to topic, when did Albanians become a majority in Kosovo?

[armenianbodyhair]

First they said that we came from Caucasus with ottomans xD
Then we emigrated from other parts of Albania , which parts ?
greeks say we emigrated from the north to south , Macedonians say we emigrated from west to east
serbs say from south to north .
It's really a nobrainer bullshit xD

No, its a no brainer that your population grew outward in all directions, like all populations do if they are growing over time.

[Vullkan]

The opposite was made serbs tried to colonise kosovo and expell the albanians and kill them

Death Toll: 120,000 – 270,000 Albanians of both sexes and all ages.
255,878 Albanians expelled.

According to the Serbian documents, 239,807 people were expatriated from October 1912 until March 1914, without accounting the children up to six years old. By august 1914 this number had increased to 281,747, again not counting those less than six years old. The vast majority of these were Albanians. Serbia and Montenegro plundered 381,245 hectares of land in Kosova and Macedonia. In Kosova 228,000 hectares of land were taken for colonists, and it was settled by 15,943 families. The ‘Serbization’ of Kosova continued until 1941. In this way the territory for the Serbian national element was created.

I repeat i am quotting serbian documents.

[Sideritis]

Have heard from numerous sources that Albanians in Kosovo slowly became a majority by emigrating from other Albanian areas over the last 150 years or so in some sort of slow and gradual population replacement. Serbs claim that Kosovo is to them a sort of Kievan Rus; the foundation of the Serbian nation

What is the Albanian version of the story?

No trolling btw. Honest curiosity.

lol. Which Albanian areas, if may I ask? Albania after WW2 felt into in an isolated dictatorship, comparable to North Korea. The number of people going out of Albania was almost irrelevant with only a handful of people managing to escape( around a thousand if I am not mistaken). The family of the people who made it out the borders were imprisoned or isolated in an area, as punishment.
On the other side, there is a factual deportation of Albanians in Turkey (http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=kosovar_self-determination_tmln_40)during the Yugoslavs, started from 1939. All in the name of ethnical purity.

[Vullkan]

This article treats it very good http://espressostalinist.com/genocide/albanian-genocide/

[Minesweeper]

Back to topic, when did Albanians become a majority in Kosovo?

Mid or late 19. century.

[armenianbodyhair]

Serbia is the only country in the world and Britain who planned extermination academically against a population Britain for the irish Serbia for the Albanians.

Incorrect. I can name Croats, Germans, White Americans, Israelis and North Sudanese off the top of my head.

[Vullkan]

lol. Which Albanian areas, if may I ask? Albania after WW2 felt into in an isolated dictatorship, comparable to North Korea. The number of people going out of Albania was almost irrelevant with only a handful of people managing to escape( around a thousand if I am not mistaken). The family of the people who made it out the borders were imprisoned or isolated in an area, as punishment.
On the other side, there is a factual deportation of Albanians in Turkey (http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=kosovar_self-determination_tmln_40)during the Yugoslavs, started from 1939. All in the name of ethnical purity.

Its not good talking to retard where they say something without backing data ,there is not a single document i repeat there is not a single document that docoument the albanian migration to kosovo,on the other side there are countless of documents of the ethnic cleansing of albanians in kosovo from foreign source even serbia itself.

If serbia can not believe her documents its blinded.

Planned stermination of albanians was done and planned by so called serbian scientists and accademics carefully but they did not succeed.

[Vullkan]

http://www.albanianhistory.net/texts20_2/AH1937_1.html

1937
Vaso Cubrilovic:
The Expulsion of the Albanians - Memorandum

"The Expulsion of the Albanians," is a memorandum prepared and written by the noted Bosnian Serb scholar and political figure Vaso Cubrilovic (1897-1990). As a student in 1914, Cubrilovic had participated in the assassination in Sarajevo of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary, the event which precipitated the First World War. Between the two wars, he was professor at the Faculty of Arts in Belgrade. A leading member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Art, Cubrilovic also held several ministerial portfolios after World War II. Among his writings is the monograph "Istorija politicke misle u Srbiji XIX veka," Belgrade 1958 (History of political thought in Serbia in the 19th century).



The Expulsion of the Albanians

The problem of the Albanians in the life of our country and people did not arise yesterday. It played a major role in our life in the Middle Ages, but its importance only became decisive towards the end of the seventeenth century, at a time when the masses of the Serbian people were displaced northwards out of their former ancestral territory of Rashka / Raška, supplanted by Albanian highlanders. Gradually, the latter came down from their mountains to the fertile plains of Metohija and Kosovo. Spreading northwards, they continued in the direction of southern and western Morava and, crossing the Shar mountains, descended into Polog and, from there, towards the Vardar. Thus, by the nineteenth century was formed the Albanian triangle, a wedge which, with its Debar-Rogozna axis in the rear, penetrated as far into our territories as Nish / Niš and separated our ancient land of Rashka from Macedonia and the Vardar Valley.

In the nineteenth century, this wedge, inhabited by wild Albanian elements, prevented the maintenance of any strong cultural, educational and economic links between our northern and southern territories. This was also the main reason why, until 1878, Serbia was unable to establish and maintain continuous links with Macedonia through Vranja and the Black Mountain of Skopje and thus to exercise its cultural and political influence on the Vardar Valley, to the extent that one would have expected in view of conducive geographical factors and historical traditions in these regions. Although the Bulgarians began their life as a nation later than the Serbs, they had greater success initially. This explains why there are permanent settlements of southern Slavs from Vidin in the north to Ohrid in the south. Serbia began to slice off pieces of this Albanian wedge as early as the first uprising, by expelling the northernmost Albanian settlers from Jagodina.

Thanks to the wide-ranging national plans of Jovan Ristic, Serbia sliced off another piece of this wedge with the annexation of Toplica and Kosanica. At that time, the regions between Jastrebac and southern Morava were radically cleared of Albanians.
From 1918 onwards, it was the task of our present state to suppress what remained of the Albanian triangle, but it did not succeed. Though there are a number of reasons for this, we shall examine only the most important of them.



1. The fundamental mistake made by the authorities in charge at that time was that, forgetting where they were, they wanted to solve all the major ethnic problems of the troubled and bloody Balkans by Western methods. Turkey brought to the Balkans the customs of the Sheriat, according to which victory in war and the occupation of a country conferred the right on the victor to dispose of the lives and property of the subjected inhabitants. Even the Balkan Christians learned from the Turks that not only state power and domination, but also home and property could be won and lost by the sword. This concept of land ownership in the Balkans was to be softened somewhat by laws, ordinances and international agreements brought about under pressure from Europe, but it has, to a good extent, remained a primary instrument of leverage for Turkey and the Balkan states up to this very day. We need not evoke the distant past. It is sufficient to refer to a few cases which have taken place in recent times: the transfer of Greeks from Asia Minor to Greece and of Turks from Greece to Asia Minor, or the recent expulsion of Turks from Bulgaria and Romania to Turkey. While all the Balkan states, since 1912, have solved or are on the point of solving their problems with national minorities through mass population transfers, we have stuck to the slow and cumbersome strategy of gradual colonization. The result has been negative, as evident from the statistics of the eighteen districts which make up the Albanian triangle. These figures show that the natural growth of the Albanian population in these regions is still greater than the total increase in our population from both natural growth and new settlers (from 1921 to 1931, the Albanian population increased by 68,060, while the Serbs showed an increase of 58,745, i.e. a difference of 9,315 in favour of the Albanians). Taking into account the intractable character of the Albanians, the pronounced increase in their numbers and the ever-increasing difficulties of colonization will eventually put in question even those few successes we have achieved in our colonization from 1918 onwards.

2. Even the strategy of gradual colonization was not properly applied. Worse still in a matter of such importance, there was no specific state plan for every government and regime to adhere to and implement. Work was intermittent, in fits and starts, with each new minister undoing what his predecessor had done and himself creating nothing solid. Laws and regulations were amended but, weak as they were, were never implemented. Some individuals, especially deputies from other regions, who could not manage to secure a mandate at home, would go down south and butter up the non-national elements to gain a mandate there, thus sacrificing major national and state interests. The colonization apparatus was extremely costly, inflated and loaded with people who were not only incompetent, but were also frequently without scruples. Their activities are indeed a topic in itself. Finally, one need only total up the huge sums this state has invested in colonization and divide them by the number of families settled to prove how costly every new household established since the war has been, regardless of whether or not this expenditure was met by the settlers themselves or by the state. Likewise, it would be interesting to compare the amounts paid out for personal expenditures and those for materials needed for colonization. In the past, Serbia went about this matter quite differently. Karageorge, during the first uprising, as well as Miloš, Mihajlo and Jovan Ristic had no special ministry of land reform, no general land inspectors, or costly apparatus, and still, they managed to purge Serbia of foreign elements and populate it with our own people who felled the endless forests of Shumadia (Šumadija), transforming them from the wild state they were once in to the fertile Shumadia we know today.

3. Even those few thousand families who were settled after the war did not remain where they were originally located. There was more success in Kosovo, especially in the Lab / Llap valley, where the Toplicans penetrated of their own accord from north to south. Our oldest and most stable settlements there were established with elements from various Serbian regions. In Drenica and Metohija we had no success at all. Colonization should never be carried out with Montenegrins alone. We do not think that they are suitable as colonists because of their pastoral indolence. This applies to the first generation only. The second generation is quite different, more active and more practical. The village of Petrovo in Miroc north of the Danube, the most advanced village in Krajina, is inhabited exclusively by Montenegrins. In Serbia today, there are thousands of other flourishing towns, especially in Toplica and Kosanica, which were established by Montenegrins of the first generation who mixed with more advanced elements. The foregoing consideration, nonetheless, still applies in Metohija where, since the settlers are on their own ancestral lands, old customs still abound. A visit to any coffee-house in Peja / Pec is sufficient proof. This is why our colonization has had so little success throughout Metohija. It must be admitted, on the other hand, that these colonies were poorly situated on barren, scrub-covered land, and were almost totally lacking in basic agricultural equipment. These people should have been given more assistance than other colonists because they were among the poorest Montenegrin elements.

4. Without doubt, the main cause for the lack of success in our colonization of these regions was that the best land remained in the hands of the Albanians. The only possible means for our mass colonization of these regions to succeed is for us to take the land away from them. This could have been achieved easily during the rebellion after the war, when the insurgents were active, by expelling part of the Albanian population to Albania, by refusing to legalize their usurpations and by buying up their pasture land. Here, we must refer once again to the gross error committed in our post-war strategy, that of the right to own land. Instead of taking advantage of the strategy used by the Albanians themselves for ownership of the land they usurped (scarcely any of them had deeds issued by the Turks, and those who did, got them only for land purchased), we not only legalized all these usurpations to the detriment of our state and nation, but worse still, we accustomed the Albanians to western European attitudes to private property. Prior to that, they could never have understood such concepts. In this way, we ourselves handed them a weapon with which to defend themselves, keeping the best land for themselves and rendering impossible the nationalization of a region of supreme importance to us.

It is apparent from the above that our colonization strategy in the south has not yielded the results which ought to have been achieved and which now impose themselves upon us as a major necessity of state. We are not criticizing this strategy merely for the sake of criticism, but so that, on the basis of our past experience, we can find the right way to solve this problem.



The Problem of Colonization of the Southern Regions

Reading the first part of this paper and comprehending the problem of colonization of the south, one realizes immediately that the primary issue at stake are the regions north and south of the Shar mountains. This is no coincidence. The wedge of Albanians on both sides of the Shar range is of great national and strategic significance to our state. We have already mentioned the way the population structure came into existence there and the importance of these regions for links to the lands of the Vardar Valley, which are firmly within the limits of our ancient territories. The strength of Serbian expansion ever since the foundation of the first Serbian state in the ninth century has lain in the continuity both of this expansion and of the expansion of ancient Rashka / Raška in all directions, including southwards. But this continuity has been interrupted by the Albanians, and until the ancient link between Serbia and Montenegro on the one hand, and Macedonia on the other, is re-established along the whole line from the River Drin to southern Morava, we will not be secure in the possession of our territories. From an ethnic point of view, the Macedonians will only unite with us, if they receive true ethnic support from their Serbian motherland, something which they have lacked to this day. This can only be achieved through the destruction of the Albanian wedge.

From a military and strategic point of view, the Albanian wedge occupies one of the most vital points in our country, the starting point from which major Balkan rivers flow to the Adriatic Sea, to the Black Sea and to the Aegean. Possession of this strategic point determines, to a large degree, the fate of the central Balkans, and in particular, the fate of the main line of Balkan communications from the Morava to the Vardar. It is no coincidence that many battles of decisive importance to the destiny of the Balkans were fought here (Nemanja against the Greeks, the Serbs against the Turks in 1389, Hunyadi against the Turks in 1446). In the twentieth century, only a country inhabited by its own people can be confident of its security. It is therefore imperative that we not allow such points of strategic importance to be held by hostile and alien elements. This is all the more true in this case in that the element in question has the support of a nation state of the same race. Today this state is powerless, but even as such, it has become a base for Italian imperialism which aims to use the country as a means of penetrating into the heart of our nation. Our people, who are willing and able to defend their land and country, are the most reliable element in the fight against such penetration.

With the exception of this block of eighteen districts, the Albanians and other national minorities in other parts of the south are scattered and, therefore, constitute less of a threat to the life of our nation and state. Nationalizing the regions around the Shar mountains would mean that we can stifle irredentism once and for all, and ensure our control over these territories forever.

Colonization from the north should be kept to a minimum in the regions inhabited by the Macedonians. Here land is scarce and for this reason, the Macedonians would resist an influx of settlers from the north, all the more so because they would regard this influx as a sign of mistrust on our part. As such, even such a minimal colonization would do us more harm than good. If we do send people down there, to the region south of the Black Mountain of Skopje, they should be people from Vranje and Leskovac, who are closer in mentality and culture to the Macedonians. By no means should we send people from the Dinaric region because their irritable and uncontrolled temperaments would only arouse the hostility of the local population. We repeat that this problem will only be solved when our colonies advancing from the north through Kosovo and Metohija in the direction of the Shar mountains and Polog have reached Macedonian settlements.

The problem of the Sandjak of Novi Pazar is solving itself and no longer plays the role it did in the life of our country before 1912. Let it suffice to mention that with the elimination of the Albanians, the last link between our Moslems in Bosnia and Novi Pazar and the rest of the Moslem world will have been cut. They are becoming a religious minority, the only Moslem minority in the Balkans, and this fact will accelerate their assimilation.

Montenegro has become a serious problem recently. This barren land cannot sustain the population which, despite resettlement, increased by 16% from 1912 to 1931. This impulsive, pastoral people has contributed many essential characteristics to our race over the centuries. Channelled in the right direction, their energy will not be destructive, and could, if directed towards the southeast, be employed for the common good of the country.



Summing up:



The Albanians cannot be dispelled by means of gradual colonization alone. They are the only people who, over the last millennium, managed not only to resist the nucleus of our state, Rashka and Zeta, but also to harm us by pushing our ethnic borders northwards and eastwards. When in the last millennium our ethnic borders were shifted up to Subotica in the north and to the Kupa River in the northwest, the Albanians drove us out of the Shkodra (Scutari) region, out of the former capital of Bodin, and out of Metohija and Kosovo. The only way and only means to cope with them is through the brute force of an organized state, in which we have always been superior to them. If since 1912 we have had no success in the struggle against them, we have only ourselves to blame since we have not used this force as we should have. There is no possibility for us to assimilate the Albanians. On the contrary, because their roots are in Albania, their national awareness has been awakened, and if we do not settle the score with them once and for all, within 20-30 years we shall have to cope with a terrible irredentism, the signs of which are already apparent and will inevitably put all our southern territories in jeopardy.



The International Problems of Colonization

If we proceed on the assumption that the gradual displacement of the Albanians by means of gradual colonization is ineffective, we are then left with only one course - that of mass resettlement. In this connection, we must consider two countries: Albania and Turkey.

With its sparse population, its many undrained swamps and uncultivated valleys, Albania would have no difficulty admitting some hundred thousand Albanians from our country. With its vast and uninhabited frontiers in Asia Minor and Kurdistan, modern Turkey, for its part, offers seemingly unlimited opportunities for internal colonization. Despite efforts on the part of Kemal Atatürk, the Turks have not yet been able to fill the vacuum created by the evacuation of the Greeks from Asia Minor to Greece and of some of the Kurds to Persia. Hence, the greatest possibilities lie in sending the bulk of our displaced Albanians there.

Firstly, I stress that we must not limit ourselves to diplomatic démarches with the Ankara government, but must employ all means available to convince Tirana to accept some of our displaced people, too. I believe that we will come up against difficulties in Tirana because Italy will try to hinder the process. Be this as it may, money plays an important role in Tirana. In negotiations on the issue, the Albanian government should be informed that we will stop at nothing to achieve the final solution to this question. At the same time, we should tell them about colonization subsidies available, stressing that no controls will be exercised over them. Eventually, notables in Tirana will see the material gains involved and be persuaded through secret channels not to raise any objections to the whole business.

We have heard that Turkey has agreed, initially, to accept about 200,000 of our displaced persons on condition that they are Albanians, something which is most advantageous to us. We must comply with Turkey's wish immediately and sign a convention for the resettlement of the Albanian population as soon as possible. Concerning the resettlement of this Albanian population, we must study conventions which Turkey signed recently with Greece, Romania and Bulgaria, paying particular attention to two aspects: Turkey should accept the largest possible contingent and should be given maximum assistance from a financial point of view, in particular for the swift organization of transportation facilities. As is inevitable in such cases, this problem will no doubt give rise to some international concern. Over the last hundred years, whenever such actions have been carried out in the Balkans, there has always been some power which has protested because the action did not conform to its interests. In the present case, Albania and Italy may make some protest. We have already pointed out that attempts should be made to conclude an agreement with Albania on this matter and, failing this, we should at least secure its silence on the evacuation of the Albanians to Turkey. We repeat that skilful action and money properly used in Tirana may be decisive in this matter. World opinion, especially that financed by Italy, will be upset a little. Nevertheless, the world today has grown used to things much worse than this and is so preoccupied with its day-to-day problems that this issue should not be a cause for concern. At a time when Germany can expel tens of thousands of Jews and Russia can shift millions of people from one part of the continent to another, the evacuation of a few hundred thousand Albanians will not set off a world war. Be this as it may, decision-makers should know ahead of time what they want and unfalteringly pursue those goals, regardless of possible international repercussions.

Italy, no doubt, will raise more difficulties, but at present the country is extremely preoccupied by problems of its own in Abyssinia. Austria, for its part, will not dare to go very far in its opposition. To tell the truth, the greatest danger lies in the possibility that our great allies, France and Britain, may interfere. These two countries must be given the calm and resolute reply that the security of the Morava-Vardar line is in their interests. That this is so was confirmed during the last great war and that line can only be made more secure, for them and for us, if in ethnic terms, we completely dominate the region around the Shar mountains and Kosovo.



The Mode of Evacuation

As we have already stressed, the mass evacuation of the Albanians from their triangle is the only effective course we can take. In order to relocate a whole people, the first prerequisite is the creation of a suitable psychosis. This can be done in various ways.

It is well known that the Moslem masses are generally readily influenced by religion and are prone to superstition and fanaticism. Therefore, we must first of all win over the clergy and men of influence through money and threats in order for them to give their support to the evacuation of the Albanians. Agitators, especially from Turkey, must be found as quickly as possible to promote the evacuation, if Turkey will provide them for us. They must laud the beauties of the new territories in Turkey and the easy and pleasant life to be had there, and must kindle religious fanaticism among the masses and awaken pride in the Turkish state. Our press can be of colossal assistance by describing how gently the evacuation of the Turks from Dobruja took place and how easily they settled in their new regions. Such information would create the requisite predisposition for the masses of Albanians to be willing to leave.

Another means would be coercion by the state apparatus. The law must be enforced to the letter so as to make staying intolerable for the Albanians: fines, imprisonment, the ruthless application of all police regulations, such as the prohibition of smuggling, cutting forests, damaging agriculture, leaving dogs unchained, compulsory labour and any other measure that an experienced police force can contrive. From the economic aspect, this should include the refusal to recognize old land deeds. The work of the land registry should be accompanied from the start by the ruthless collection of taxes and the payment of all private and public debts, the requisitioning of all public and municipal pasture land, the cancellation of concessions, the withdrawal of permits to exercise an occupation, dismissal from government, private and municipal offices etc., all of which will speed up the process of evacuation. Health measures should include the harsh application of all regulations, even within homes, the pulling down of encircling walls and high hedges around private houses, and the rigorous implementation of veterinary measures which will result in a ban on selling livestock on the market, etc. All these measures can be applied in a practical and effective way. The Albanians are very touchy when it comes to religion. They must therefore be harassed on this score, too. This can be achieved through the ill-treatment of their clergy, the demolition of their cemeteries, the prohibition of polygamy, and especially the inflexible application of the regulation compelling girls to attend elementary school, wherever they are.

Private initiative, too, can assist greatly in this direction. We should distribute weapons to our colonists, as need be. The old form of Chetnik action should be organized and secretly assisted. In particular, a mass migration of Montenegrins should be launched from the mountain pastures in order to create a large-scale conflict with the Albanians in Metohija. This conflict should be prepared and encouraged by people we can trust. This can be easily achieved since the Albanians have, indeed, revolted. The whole affair can be presented as a conflict between clans and, if need be, can be ascribed to economic reasons. Finally, local riots can be incited. These will be bloodily suppressed by the most effective means, though by colonists from the Montenegrin clans and the Chetniks, rather than by means of the army.

There remains one more method Serbia employed with great practical effect after 1878, that is, secretly razing Albanian villages and urban settlements to the ground.



The Organization of the Evacuation

From the attached map (1), it is apparent what regions must be cleared. They are: Upper Dibër / Debar, Lower Polog, Upper Polog, the Shar mountains, Drenica, Peja / Pec, Istog / Istok, Vuçitërna / Vucitrn, Stavica, Llap / Lab, Graçanica / Gracanica, Nerodimja / Nerodimje, Gjakova / Djakovica, Podgor, Gora (Dragash), Lugu i Drinit / Podrimje, Gjilan / Gnjilane and Kaçanik / Kacanik. Of these regions, which together form the Albanian wedge, the most important for us at the moment are: Peja / Pec, Gjakova / Djakovica, Lugu i Drinit / Podrimje, Gora (Dragash), Podgor, Shar, Istog / Istok and Drenica, all to the north of the Shar mountains, Upper Dibër / Debar and the two Pologs to the south, and the Shar mountains themselves. These are border regions that must be cleared of Albanians at any cost. The internal regions such as Kaçanik / Kacanik, Gjilan / Gnjilane, Nerodimja / Nerodimje, Graçanica / Gracanica, Llap / Lab, and Vuçitërna / Vucitrn etc. must be weakened if possible, particularly Kaçanik / Kacanik and Llap / Lab, while the others should be gradually and systematically colonized over a period of decades.

The above-mentioned methods should be used primarily in the border regions, if we wish to clear them of Albanians.

During resettlement, the following must be kept in mind:

In the first place, resettlement should begin in the villages and then move to the towns. The villages are the more dangerous, being more compact. Then, the mistake of removing only the poor should be avoided. The middle and wealthy classes make up the backbone of every nation. They, too, must therefore be persecuted and driven out. Lacking the support which their economically independent compatriots have, the poor will then submit more quickly. This question is of great importance, and I emphasize this, because one of the main causes for the failure of our colonization in the south has been that the poor were expelled while the rich remained. We were, thus, no better off because we gained very little land for the settlement of our colonists. To create a proper psychosis for resettlement, everything possible must be done to evacuate whole villages, or at least whole families. It must be prevented at all costs that part of a family is transferred while other members remain behind. Our state is willing to spend millions not to make life easier for the Albanians, but to get rid of as many of them as possible. For this reason, those who remain behind must be barred absolutely from purchasing property from those evacuated. This should be taken into consideration in the evacuation of individuals and of whole villages if we want to make things as easy as possible for them during the process of relocation.

Once they agree to move, they should be given all the assistance they require. Administrative formalities should be simplified, their property paid for on the spot, travel documents issued without the least formality, and they should be assisted in getting to the nearest railway station. Trains should be made available for them as far as Salonika, and from there, they should be transported immediately by ship to Asia. It is very important that the journey be easy, comfortable and cheap. Train travel should perhaps be made free of charge and displaced persons should be assisted with food because, whether or not large masses of people can be evacuated or not depends largely on conditions of transport. Fear of difficulties en route is a major factor in keeping people from departing. This fear must be overcome by solving all the problems connected with the journey quickly and energetically. Particular care must therefore be taken to ensure that these people have the fewest possible difficulties en route. Simple people often have trouble finding their way, so it would be advisable to have major travel enterprises study transportation systems and adapt them accordingly. The displaced person must pass from hand to hand without feeling that his movement is a burden. Only in this way will it be possible to create a proper flow of Albanian evacuees and empty the south of them.



Depopulating and Repopulating Regions

The problem of the establishment of colonies in the depopulated regions is no less important than the expulsion of the Albanians.

The first question to arise is: Who is to be settled here? The most natural thing would be to populate these regions with elements of our people from destitute areas: Montenegrins in the first place, but also Hercegovinians, Licanas and Krajšniks. The Montenegrins are the most appropriate for several reasons, and Metohija, Drenica and Kosovo are the most natural places for them to descend into from their impoverished mountain homelands. The increase of population in Montenegro has caused much poverty there which, in recent times, has given rise to continual social and political unrest. This is unfavourable for our control of the country and is very dangerous for the maintenance of law and order in the future. Giving them maize and pensions is useless. The only solution is to send them down into the fertile regions of Metohija, Drenica and Kosovo. The Montenegrins will prove to be excellent instruments to overcome the Albanians since they are akin to them in mentality and temperament. They must be settled initially in the regions north of the Shar mountains. Along with them, however, people from Lican, Krajšnica, Serbia, Cacak, Užice and Toplica should be brought in as colonists as well. This is necessary in order to create improved working habits and organization among the Montenegrins, and to break down the nomadic group mentality, the spirit of collectivity which characterizes the highlanders, by mixing and by intermarriage with people from various Dinaric regions. In this way, a new type of Montenegrin can be created with a less local and more broad-minded, Serbian outlook.
Suitable conditions should be created for southern Serbian emigrants living in the regions south of the Shar mountains so that they can take possession of the fertile lands. They are honest, hardworking people who would be grateful to the state all their lives if better living conditions could be created for them in rural areas. The rural southern Serbs have a right to expect more care and attention than we are giving them today. Settling these poor people in Polog (Upper and Lower) and Dibër / Debar and allocating pasture land to them instead of to the Albanians will give them a sense of belonging to the state and they will be more willing, accordingly, to defend its borders.

Colonization south of the Shar mountains and the Black Mountain of Skopje can also be achieved with Serbs from Vranje, Leskovac, Pirot and Vlasenica, especially those from destitute mountain villages. We repeat that the Dinarics should not be allowed to expand south of the line formed by the Black Mountain of Skopje and the Shar mountain range.

It is essential to avoid bureaucracy and petty formalities in the settlement of villages cleared of Albanians. The first and immediate step is to give the colonists deeds to the land they are settling. One of the main reasons for the failure of our colonization so far has been that settlers did not feel secure on their land because they did not receive a title to it and were thus left to the mercy of unscrupulous petty officials and local politicians. The peasant only feels secure if he knows that no one can take his land away from him. Such a guarantee should therefore be provided from the start. On the other hand, it is dangerous to give colonists the full and unrestricted ownership to land. In principle, homesteaders are carrying out a mission on behalf of the state and the nation, and must carry through with their mission if they are to keep their homesteads. They should not, therefore, have full and unrestricted ownership of the property in question. Because there are so many different types of people among them, from village workers who have lost their inner attachment to land to herdsmen who will have to adapt themselves to agriculture, their attachment to the land must have force of law. This will ensure that they begin to love their new home and region, and if they do not succeed in this, their children at least will. For this reason, colonists should be prevented by law from obtaining full ownership of the land for any period of less than thirty years, even though the deeds are handed out at the start. According to the laws of our country, women do not enjoy the right to inherit property. In order to avoid fragmentation of property into tiny parcels, women must be excluded from inheriting such homesteads except in cases where the colonist has no male descendant and plans to bring a bridegroom into the household. The properties which have been given to the colonists up to now have been small. Bearing in mind intensive farming methods here, the fall in prices for farm products, and the large size of families among the colonists, 5-10 hectares of land is insufficient to ensure the economic survival of the settlers.

It is better to settle a region with a smaller number of colonists, giving them better conditions for development, than with a large number of rural semi-proletarians. This is another cause of failure in our colonization of the south and of the north up to now.

Individuals suitable for settling land under very difficult conditions are rare among other nations. Those few successes we have achieved in our colonization strategy have been the result of the aptitude of our race for colonization. It is only our peasants who are able to survive when shifted from one environment to another and put up against scrubland which has never been used for agriculture. Think of how they would flourish if the state were to carry out its duties and provide them with everything they needed.

On 10 February 1865, the government of Prince Mihajlo passed a law on the 'Settlement of Foreigners in Serbia'. Under this law, the Serbian government granted poor colonists from neighbouring regions 1.8 hectares of arable land, 1.8 hectares of non-arable land, a house, a yoke of oxen, a cart, two goats or sheep, a sow, necessary tools and 120 grosh in cash. In addition to this, they were of course given maize for food to last them until the first harvest. One plough was provided for every two families. These fixed and movable assets were granted to the settlers for a term of fifteen years, without the right to sell them. At the end of this period, the assets became their property. For the first five years, the settlers were exempt from all kinds of government taxes. For ten years they were also exempt from universal compulsory service in the regular army and for five years from service in the people's militia. The response from all sides was such that within a few months all homesteads were taken and we were immediately able to colonize more land than we have been able to do for several years since the war. Had the government granted such favourable conditions for settlers after 1918, our situation in the Vojvodina and in southern Serbia would be much different. This is how we must act in the future, if we want to achieve success.

There are also lessons to be learned from the colonization of Toplica and Kosanica after 1878 when the Albanians were expelled from this region. The method of colonization here was laid down in the law of 3 January 1880. On 3 February of the same year, the People's Council approved an amendment to the law on agrarian relations under the motto "land for the peasants." Without hesitation, Serbia applied for its first foreign loan in order to pay Turkey for the lands taken. It did not set up any ministry of agrarian reform or costly apparatus to deal with the problem of colonization. Everything was managed in a simple and practical manner. The police distributed land to all those who were willing to work it. People came from Montenegro, Sjenica, Vranje, Kosovo, Peja / Pec etc. and, in a matter of thirty years, Toplica and Kosanica, once Albanian regions of ill-repute, gave Serbia the finest regiment of the 1912-1918 wars, the Second Iron Regiment. During that period, Toplica and Kosanica paid and repaid, with the blood of their sons, for the millions of dinars which Serbia had spent to settle these regions.

It is only by following this example and understanding what is required, sparing neither money nor blood, that our nation can create a new Toplica out of Kosovo and Metohija.

Hence, if we want the colonists to remain where they are, we must assure them of all necessary means of livelihood within the first few years and severely prohibit any speculation with the houses and property of the displaced Albanians. The government must reserve itself the unlimited right to dispose of the fixed and movable assets of the Albanians and must settle its own colonists there as soon as the Albanians have departed. This is important because it rarely happens that a whole village departs at once. The first to be settled in these villages should be the Montenegrins who, with their arrogant, irascible and merciless behaviour, will drive the remaining Albanians away. Then colonists from other regions can be brought in.

This paper deals with the colonization of southern Serbia only. The problem of the Vojvodina, in particular with the Hungarian triangle in Backa, i.e. Senta - Kula - Backa Topola, is however no less important to us. Destroying this triangle in the Vojvodina is indeed just as essential as eradicating the Albanian wedge around the Shar mountains. Tens of thousands of Hungarian farmhands have been left behind since the break-up of the big estates in the Vojvodina and constitute a great burden for the Serbian and German farm owners in the region. Some of these Hungarian and even German farm labourers and small proprietors could be sent to the south because in Backa, on the border with Hungary, they constitute a real threat, all the more so since the Serbs in Backa represent only 25% of the population. In southern Serbia, they would become good citizens by defending their property against Albania and would integrate well into our people. What is more important, since they are more progressive and of a higher cultural level than our peasants, they would provide a good example of advanced farming methods. We stress, however, that Serbs from the Vojvodina should not be sent to the south for colonization. There is still much land to be colonized in the Vojvodina so that they should be given homesteads there instead. It must be noted that in the 1928-1929 period, there was a widespread movement among Hungarians and Germans from the Vojvodina to move to southern Serbia. Not understanding the problem, our authorities were against such a movement and nipped it in the bud. Any such reaction on the part of the government today must be countered, and the public must be instructed to encourage the movement of Hungarians and Germans from the Vojvodina, especially those from Backa, to the south.



The Colonization Apparatus

Of particular importance for the solution of the question under discussion is the existence of a proper apparatus to direct the whole business. The poor work done by the apparatus implementing our colonization strategy in the past was in good part responsible for its failures. To avoid the same mistakes in the future, we must carry out a reorganization.

No other question demands such continuity of implementation as our colonization strategy. We have pointed out that one of the main reasons for the failure of our colonies both in the north and in the south has been the inconsistent work and the vacillations on policy implemented after each change of government. If this is to be avoided in the future, our colonization strategy must be entrusted to the General Staff of the army. Why? Simply for reasons of defence. Our army is intent on settling our people along the borders, especially in the most delicate sectors. To this end, it will do its utmost to secure these borders with the firmest possible settlements. The General Staff, as the prime institution for the defence of our national interests, can contribute a great deal to our colonization strategy as a whole. It will know very well how to protect the colonization strategy from the private interference of those who want to use it for their own personal interests, and from external influence. Another important fact is that it would be easier for the General Staff to convince the responsible bodies of the importance of the issue and to force them to take effective action. The People's Council would have more faith in it and would grant the necessary credits to it more readily than to others.

The General Staff would guide all the work via a government Commission for Colonization. This Commission would be quite independent, though under the direct supervision of the Chief of General Staff, and would have under its control all bodies involved in our colonization strategy. Representatives of various interested ministries, national associations, technical organizations and scholarly institutions would also be made to take part in this Commission.

The greatest mistake of our colonization strategy in the past lay in the fact that the untrained and incompetent bureaucrats had the main say, and dealt with problems only superficially and in a piecemeal manner. We need only recall the settlement campaign carried out by volunteers from Hungary in Ovce Polje and Kadrifikovo, or the emigrants from Istria and Gorica who settled around Demir Kapija. The matter requires close collaboration between the government, private initiative and scholarly institutions. Private initiative can operate in many directions. The People's Defence, the Sokolašas, the Chetnik Associations etc. could take action against the Albanians which would be inappropriate for the state. Associations of agronomists, doctors, engineers and cooperatives etc. could provide valuable assistance with their technical advisors in solving the many problems which will arise during the colonization campaign. Cultural associations, such as Prosveta in Sarajevo, Matica Srbska in Novi Sad, the St. Sava Associations in Belgrade etc. have their role to play, too.

Undoubtedly, our institutions of higher learning have begun to lose the prestige they once had. The main reason for this is that the university and the Academy of Sciences are becoming increasingly estranged from real life and are neglecting their main duty in a relatively backward country such as ours: i. e. paving the way for the application of the scientific achievements of the twentieth century. Many billions would have been saved in this country, many mistakes would have been avoided in our government policy, including our colonization policy, had the problems been studied seriously and objectively in advance by competent scholars before they were taken up for solution. Our policy of colonization, likewise, would have acquired a more serious approach, greater continuity and effective application, had the opinions of experts and scholars been sought in advance. To start with, the Royal Serbian Academy of Sciences and the University of Belgrade ought to take the initiative to organize scientific studies of the whole problem of colonization in our country. This would be feasible for many reasons. At the university we have experts on every aspect of colonization. Teachers and academicians at the university are independent scholars, less subject to external political influence. They already have good experience in such fields and their scholarly work is a guarantee of objectivity. They should, therefore, take the initiative of setting up a colonization institute, the task of which would be to pursue colonization studies. The government, for its part, should detach from the ministries all the institutions which have been engaged with this problem so far, and create a special institution, "The Colonization Inspection Office"

The Colonization Inspection Office would be headed by an Inspector General, appointed by decree on the recommendation of the Minister of War, the Chief of General Staff and the Prime Minister. All the work in the colonization institute and in the Colonization Inspection Office would be carried out on orders from and under the supervision of the government Commission for Colonization, while the Inspector General would be answerable to the Chief of General Staff.

The colonization institute would be divided into the following sections:

1) organization,

2) education and culture,

3) finance,

4) agriculture,

5) construction,

6) hygiene, etc.

In agreement with scientific, cultural and educational associations and institutions, and with national associations, the various sections would study problems of colonization and prepare directives, thus supplying our colonization policy with solid, scientifically elaborated material on the basis of which decisions could be taken. Managing this institute would be people from the Commission for Colonization, including representatives of the above-mentioned ministries, the university, the Academy of Sciences and private, national, education and cultural organizations who would be elected or appointed to this body. In this case, care must be taken not to bring in people just for honour's sake, but only men who love and are dedicated to this great work.

The heads and employees of the institute should be selected by competition. The institute would then supply the Colonization Inspection Office with scientifically elaborated material for the implementation of our colonization strategy. Should differences of opinion arise between the Colonization Inspection Office and the institute over some fundamental question, the Chief of General Staff would have the final say.

The Colonization Inspection Office must have its executive headquarters in the territory and be made up of people selected for their enthusiasm and readiness for this work, whether or not they are employed by the government. They should, if possible, be selected by means of competition and should be appointed upon the proposal of the Chief of General Staff. Compromised or incompetent cadres must be dismissed. During its work, the Colonization Inspection Office and its organs must avoid bureaucracy as much as possible, while keeping in mind one thing only - the expulsion of the Albanians as quickly as possible and resettlement by our colonists.

The police apparatus will play a very important role in this action. It is, therefore, essential to select and second the most energetic and honest officers. Their transfer should be made with the approval of the Chief of General Staff, and for such a difficult job they should be paid from secret loans. Stern measures must be taken against anyone who commits the slightest infraction. A special commissar, who would execute the orders of the state colonization inspector, must be appointed for the whole of the eighteen districts mentioned. The prefects of the districts must be given special, wide-ranging powers for their work, as well as appropriate instructions. Our political parties should be told curtly that rivalry among them during elections in these districts is strictly prohibited, and that any interference by deputies in favour of the Albanians is categorically forbidden.

The government institute and the Colonization Inspection Office would elaborate the technical details for organizing the evacuation of the Albanians and the relocation of our settlers. It would not be bad, perhaps, if another private organization were to be created, in addition to these two official institutions. This private organization would be created out of existing associations and have the task of assisting in the implementation of our colonization strategy through private initiative. It would be best if the federation of our cultural and education associations could take over this job. Its main task would be to coordinate and assist in the promotion of links between them and the colonization institute.



Funding

Whenever our colonization strategy has been criticized for its lack of success, its defenders have always excused themselves with the inadequacy of funds the government has allocated to this work. We do not deny that this has been the case up to a point. It must be said, however, that more has been spent in our country on the maintenance of this apparatus and its irrational activities than on the work of colonization itself. Nevertheless, even though the government has not provided as much as it should have, it must be understood that every country has its own primary and secondary interests to look after. Among a country's primary interests, without doubt, is the maintenance of its rule in regions of national insecurity by colonizing such regions with its own people. All other commitments are of an importance secondary to this. Funds can and must be found to deal with this problem. We have already mentioned the colonization of Toplica and Kosanica and the benefits derived from this. Given that the small Kingdom of Serbia did not hesitate to make great financial sacrifices, indeed did not even hesitate as a free and independent kingdom to seek its first loan for colonization, is it possible that our present-day Yugoslavia would be unable to do the same? It can and must. That it lacks the means to do so, is simply not true.

Let us calculate approximately how much it would cost our country to expel 200,000 Albanians and settle the region with as great a number of our people.

The resettlement of 40,000 Albanian families, taking an average family as having five members and an average of 15,000 dinars for each family, would cost a total of 600 million dinars. The colonization apparatus for the settling of 40,000 Serbian families might reach a total of 200 million dinars. In any case, the whole operation would not cost more than 800 million dinars. This is because:



1. The evacuated Albanians would leave behind not only land, but also their houses and implements. Thus, not only would the overwhelming majority of our colonists be settled in the homes of the Albanians but, with a little assistance in food and livestock, they would soon recover economically and become independent. We stress in this connection that absolutely no private speculation with the possessions left behind by the Albanians would be tolerated. The government must be the one to take control of these possessions and distribute them to the settlers.

2. Military forces should be employed, where required, during the setting up of new colonies, as was the case with the construction of Sremska Raca and the reconstruction of the villages destroyed by the 1931 earthquake. To this end, the army should be given the right and possibility to set up a kind of compulsory labour service for public projects, just as Stambolisky created the Trudova pronist in Bulgaria and Hitler the Arbeitsdienst in Germany, that is, by calling up reservists or extending the term of military service. It would be an especially good idea for our young people, after finishing their training and after graduating from university, to be entrusted with such work. Were this to be the case, many of them, by taking part in constructive activities in the public interest, would become more conscious and look at things from a more realistic perspective. Such a scheme could be carried out easily by giving priority in public service employment to those young people who have spent a specific period of time working on behalf of our colonization strategy. This would also help reduce unemployment among our young intelligentsia, which is an increasingly acute social problem in our country.

3. In collaboration with specialized organizations and associations, we must find the cheapest means of clearing the land of scrub, of irrigating farms, of draining swamps, etc. as well as of constructing homes. Private companies should be informed that, since the government assists them with reduced customs and railway tariffs, loans and other means for the procurement of supplies and material necessary for their work, it also has the right, considering the importance of this action, to insist that such supplies and material be made available at the lowest possible price. Supplies and material should be procured by means of cartels, in agreement with which, the government would specify the quantity, quality and price of the material in question without fictitious deals being involved. Government enterprises, the railways and, in particular, forestry enterprises such as Šipad etc. should be placed at the unrestricted disposal of the government Commission for Colonization.

4. During colonization, the government may grant settlers property on credit or for cash. Many of the settlers will purchase land in the new regions by selling their original property in their place of birth. This will enable the government to recuperate a good portion of the money it has laid out. However, we stress that land must only be sold to persons who give proof that they will settle on it permanently and work it. Land given on credit must not be too expensive. The interest rate must be minimal and repayment should be deferred for several years to give the settlers time to get established, i. e. repayment should only begin when the settlers have sufficient economic strength.

Taking this as a basis, the government, which must cover all administrative expenses for these activities from its normal revenues, can procure funds from two sources. One would be the pruning of unnecessary expenditures and expenditures earmarked for other less urgent sectors. The other possible source of funds would be loans, which would be provided by state banks, alone or with private capital on the basis of a compulsory domestic credit line. This would be backed up by securities issued by the government as well as by contributions from the settlers themselves when they become independent.

It might not be a bad idea if the financing and purchasing of land were to be arranged by agricultural banks working in collaboration with co-operatives under the direct supervision and direction of the government Commission for Colonization. However, it is still too early to make any definitive pronouncement on this matter because the conditions under which Turkey will accept the population displaced from our territories are not yet known.

Taken altogether, the sum of a few hundred million dinars is no great expense for the government when compared to the real benefits gained from such an action. By securing the most sensitive regions in the south of our country for our own people, we could save the lives of several divisions in case of war. Giving land to several tens of thousands of families from economically weaker regions, Montenegro in particular, would, on the one hand, help ease the appalling economic suffering of such regions and, on the other hand, create many new jobs during the process of colonization. It would be possible to find employment for 10,000 workers, thus giving a boost to our sluggish economy.

In view of the supreme national, military, strategic and economic significance of this action, it is clearly the duty of the government to sacrifice a few hundred million dinars. At a time when the government can spend one billion dinars on the construction of an international highway from Subotica to Caribrod, the possible benefits of which we shall only enjoy at some time in the distant future, it can and must be in a position to come up with a few hundred million dinars to give us back possession of the cradle of our nation.



Conclusions

In view of all that has been said, it is no coincidence that in our examination of colonization in the south, we hold the view that the only effective means of solving this problem is the mass expulsion of the Albanians. Gradual colonization has had no success in our country, nor in other countries for that matter. If the state wishes to intervene in favour of its own people in the struggle for land, it can only be successful by acting brutally. Otherwise, the native, who has his roots in his place of birth and is at home there, will always be stronger than the colonist. In our case, we must keep this fact very much in mind, because we have to do with a hardy, resistant and prolific race which the late Cvijic described as being the most expansive in the Balkans. From 1870 to 1914, Germany spent billions of marks on the gradual colonization of its eastern territories by purchasing land from the Poles, but the fecundity of Polish women defeated German organization and money. Thus, Poland regained its Poznan in 1918. Our above-mentioned statistics of the 1921-1931 period show that it was the fecundity of Albanian women which defeated our colonization policy, too. We must draw our conclusions from this, and we must do so quickly while there is still time to correct matters.

All of Europe is in a state of turmoil. We do not know what each new day and night will bring. Albanian nationalism is on the rise in our territories, too. Should a global conflict or social revolution occur, both of which are possible in the near future, leaving the situation as it is would jeopardize all our territories in the south. The purpose of this paper is to avert such an occurrence.

If this is not the proof you want i do not know what to say more

[Vullkan]

http://www.albanianhistory.net/texts20_2/AH1937_1.html

1937
Vaso Cubrilovic:
The Expulsion of the Albanians - Memorandum

"The Expulsion of the Albanians," is a memorandum prepared and written by the noted Bosnian Serb scholar and political figure Vaso Cubrilovic (1897-1990). As a student in 1914, Cubrilovic had participated in the assassination in Sarajevo of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary, the event which precipitated the First World War. Between the two wars, he was professor at the Faculty of Arts in Belgrade. A leading member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Art, Cubrilovic also held several ministerial portfolios after World War II. Among his writings is the monograph "Istorija politicke misle u Srbiji XIX veka," Belgrade 1958 (History of political thought in Serbia in the 19th century).



The Expulsion of the Albanians

The problem of the Albanians in the life of our country and people did not arise yesterday. It played a major role in our life in the Middle Ages, but its importance only became decisive towards the end of the seventeenth century, at a time when the masses of the Serbian people were displaced northwards out of their former ancestral territory of Rashka / Raška, supplanted by Albanian highlanders. Gradually, the latter came down from their mountains to the fertile plains of Metohija and Kosovo. Spreading northwards, they continued in the direction of southern and western Morava and, crossing the Shar mountains, descended into Polog and, from there, towards the Vardar. Thus, by the nineteenth century was formed the Albanian triangle, a wedge which, with its Debar-Rogozna axis in the rear, penetrated as far into our territories as Nish / Niš and separated our ancient land of Rashka from Macedonia and the Vardar Valley.

In the nineteenth century, this wedge, inhabited by wild Albanian elements, prevented the maintenance of any strong cultural, educational and economic links between our northern and southern territories. This was also the main reason why, until 1878, Serbia was unable to establish and maintain continuous links with Macedonia through Vranja and the Black Mountain of Skopje and thus to exercise its cultural and political influence on the Vardar Valley, to the extent that one would have expected in view of conducive geographical factors and historical traditions in these regions. Although the Bulgarians began their life as a nation later than the Serbs, they had greater success initially. This explains why there are permanent settlements of southern Slavs from Vidin in the north to Ohrid in the south. Serbia began to slice off pieces of this Albanian wedge as early as the first uprising, by expelling the northernmost Albanian settlers from Jagodina.

Thanks to the wide-ranging national plans of Jovan Ristic, Serbia sliced off another piece of this wedge with the annexation of Toplica and Kosanica. At that time, the regions between Jastrebac and southern Morava were radically cleared of Albanians.
From 1918 onwards, it was the task of our present state to suppress what remained of the Albanian triangle, but it did not succeed. Though there are a number of reasons for this, we shall examine only the most important of them.



1. The fundamental mistake made by the authorities in charge at that time was that, forgetting where they were, they wanted to solve all the major ethnic problems of the troubled and bloody Balkans by Western methods. Turkey brought to the Balkans the customs of the Sheriat, according to which victory in war and the occupation of a country conferred the right on the victor to dispose of the lives and property of the subjected inhabitants. Even the Balkan Christians learned from the Turks that not only state power and domination, but also home and property could be won and lost by the sword. This concept of land ownership in the Balkans was to be softened somewhat by laws, ordinances and international agreements brought about under pressure from Europe, but it has, to a good extent, remained a primary instrument of leverage for Turkey and the Balkan states up to this very day. We need not evoke the distant past. It is sufficient to refer to a few cases which have taken place in recent times: the transfer of Greeks from Asia Minor to Greece and of Turks from Greece to Asia Minor, or the recent expulsion of Turks from Bulgaria and Romania to Turkey. While all the Balkan states, since 1912, have solved or are on the point of solving their problems with national minorities through mass population transfers, we have stuck to the slow and cumbersome strategy of gradual colonization. The result has been negative, as evident from the statistics of the eighteen districts which make up the Albanian triangle. These figures show that the natural growth of the Albanian population in these regions is still greater than the total increase in our population from both natural growth and new settlers (from 1921 to 1931, the Albanian population increased by 68,060, while the Serbs showed an increase of 58,745, i.e. a difference of 9,315 in favour of the Albanians). Taking into account the intractable character of the Albanians, the pronounced increase in their numbers and the ever-increasing difficulties of colonization will eventually put in question even those few successes we have achieved in our colonization from 1918 onwards.

2. Even the strategy of gradual colonization was not properly applied. Worse still in a matter of such importance, there was no specific state plan for every government and regime to adhere to and implement. Work was intermittent, in fits and starts, with each new minister undoing what his predecessor had done and himself creating nothing solid. Laws and regulations were amended but, weak as they were, were never implemented. Some individuals, especially deputies from other regions, who could not manage to secure a mandate at home, would go down south and butter up the non-national elements to gain a mandate there, thus sacrificing major national and state interests. The colonization apparatus was extremely costly, inflated and loaded with people who were not only incompetent, but were also frequently without scruples. Their activities are indeed a topic in itself. Finally, one need only total up the huge sums this state has invested in colonization and divide them by the number of families settled to prove how costly every new household established since the war has been, regardless of whether or not this expenditure was met by the settlers themselves or by the state. Likewise, it would be interesting to compare the amounts paid out for personal expenditures and those for materials needed for colonization. In the past, Serbia went about this matter quite differently. Karageorge, during the first uprising, as well as Miloš, Mihajlo and Jovan Ristic had no special ministry of land reform, no general land inspectors, or costly apparatus, and still, they managed to purge Serbia of foreign elements and populate it with our own people who felled the endless forests of Shumadia (Šumadija), transforming them from the wild state they were once in to the fertile Shumadia we know today.

3. Even those few thousand families who were settled after the war did not remain where they were originally located. There was more success in Kosovo, especially in the Lab / Llap valley, where the Toplicans penetrated of their own accord from north to south. Our oldest and most stable settlements there were established with elements from various Serbian regions. In Drenica and Metohija we had no success at all. Colonization should never be carried out with Montenegrins alone. We do not think that they are suitable as colonists because of their pastoral indolence. This applies to the first generation only. The second generation is quite different, more active and more practical. The village of Petrovo in Miroc north of the Danube, the most advanced village in Krajina, is inhabited exclusively by Montenegrins. In Serbia today, there are thousands of other flourishing towns, especially in Toplica and Kosanica, which were established by Montenegrins of the first generation who mixed with more advanced elements. The foregoing consideration, nonetheless, still applies in Metohija where, since the settlers are on their own ancestral lands, old customs still abound. A visit to any coffee-house in Peja / Pec is sufficient proof. This is why our colonization has had so little success throughout Metohija. It must be admitted, on the other hand, that these colonies were poorly situated on barren, scrub-covered land, and were almost totally lacking in basic agricultural equipment. These people should have been given more assistance than other colonists because they were among the poorest Montenegrin elements.

4. Without doubt, the main cause for the lack of success in our colonization of these regions was that the best land remained in the hands of the Albanians. The only possible means for our mass colonization of these regions to succeed is for us to take the land away from them. This could have been achieved easily during the rebellion after the war, when the insurgents were active, by expelling part of the Albanian population to Albania, by refusing to legalize their usurpations and by buying up their pasture land. Here, we must refer once again to the gross error committed in our post-war strategy, that of the right to own land. Instead of taking advantage of the strategy used by the Albanians themselves for ownership of the land they usurped (scarcely any of them had deeds issued by the Turks, and those who did, got them only for land purchased), we not only legalized all these usurpations to the detriment of our state and nation, but worse still, we accustomed the Albanians to western European attitudes to private property. Prior to that, they could never have understood such concepts. In this way, we ourselves handed them a weapon with which to defend themselves, keeping the best land for themselves and rendering impossible the nationalization of a region of supreme importance to us.

It is apparent from the above that our colonization strategy in the south has not yielded the results which ought to have been achieved and which now impose themselves upon us as a major necessity of state. We are not criticizing this strategy merely for the sake of criticism, but so that, on the basis of our past experience, we can find the right way to solve this problem.



The Problem of Colonization of the Southern Regions

Reading the first part of this paper and comprehending the problem of colonization of the south, one realizes immediately that the primary issue at stake are the regions north and south of the Shar mountains. This is no coincidence. The wedge of Albanians on both sides of the Shar range is of great national and strategic significance to our state. We have already mentioned the way the population structure came into existence there and the importance of these regions for links to the lands of the Vardar Valley, which are firmly within the limits of our ancient territories. The strength of Serbian expansion ever since the foundation of the first Serbian state in the ninth century has lain in the continuity both of this expansion and of the expansion of ancient Rashka / Raška in all directions, including southwards. But this continuity has been interrupted by the Albanians, and until the ancient link between Serbia and Montenegro on the one hand, and Macedonia on the other, is re-established along the whole line from the River Drin to southern Morava, we will not be secure in the possession of our territories. From an ethnic point of view, the Macedonians will only unite with us, if they receive true ethnic support from their Serbian motherland, something which they have lacked to this day. This can only be achieved through the destruction of the Albanian wedge.

From a military and strategic point of view, the Albanian wedge occupies one of the most vital points in our country, the starting point from which major Balkan rivers flow to the Adriatic Sea, to the Black Sea and to the Aegean. Possession of this strategic point determines, to a large degree, the fate of the central Balkans, and in particular, the fate of the main line of Balkan communications from the Morava to the Vardar. It is no coincidence that many battles of decisive importance to the destiny of the Balkans were fought here (Nemanja against the Greeks, the Serbs against the Turks in 1389, Hunyadi against the Turks in 1446). In the twentieth century, only a country inhabited by its own people can be confident of its security. It is therefore imperative that we not allow such points of strategic importance to be held by hostile and alien elements. This is all the more true in this case in that the element in question has the support of a nation state of the same race. Today this state is powerless, but even as such, it has become a base for Italian imperialism which aims to use the country as a means of penetrating into the heart of our nation. Our people, who are willing and able to defend their land and country, are the most reliable element in the fight against such penetration.

With the exception of this block of eighteen districts, the Albanians and other national minorities in other parts of the south are scattered and, therefore, constitute less of a threat to the life of our nation and state. Nationalizing the regions around the Shar mountains would mean that we can stifle irredentism once and for all, and ensure our control over these territories forever.

Colonization from the north should be kept to a minimum in the regions inhabited by the Macedonians. Here land is scarce and for this reason, the Macedonians would resist an influx of settlers from the north, all the more so because they would regard this influx as a sign of mistrust on our part. As such, even such a minimal colonization would do us more harm than good. If we do send people down there, to the region south of the Black Mountain of Skopje, they should be people from Vranje and Leskovac, who are closer in mentality and culture to the Macedonians. By no means should we send people from the Dinaric region because their irritable and uncontrolled temperaments would only arouse the hostility of the local population. We repeat that this problem will only be solved when our colonies advancing from the north through Kosovo and Metohija in the direction of the Shar mountains and Polog have reached Macedonian settlements.

The problem of the Sandjak of Novi Pazar is solving itself and no longer plays the role it did in the life of our country before 1912. Let it suffice to mention that with the elimination of the Albanians, the last link between our Moslems in Bosnia and Novi Pazar and the rest of the Moslem world will have been cut. They are becoming a religious minority, the only Moslem minority in the Balkans, and this fact will accelerate their assimilation.

Montenegro has become a serious problem recently. This barren land cannot sustain the population which, despite resettlement, increased by 16% from 1912 to 1931. This impulsive, pastoral people has contributed many essential characteristics to our race over the centuries. Channelled in the right direction, their energy will not be destructive, and could, if directed towards the southeast, be employed for the common good of the country.



Summing up:



The Albanians cannot be dispelled by means of gradual colonization alone. They are the only people who, over the last millennium, managed not only to resist the nucleus of our state, Rashka and Zeta, but also to harm us by pushing our ethnic borders northwards and eastwards. When in the last millennium our ethnic borders were shifted up to Subotica in the north and to the Kupa River in the northwest, the Albanians drove us out of the Shkodra (Scutari) region, out of the former capital of Bodin, and out of Metohija and Kosovo. The only way and only means to cope with them is through the brute force of an organized state, in which we have always been superior to them. If since 1912 we have had no success in the struggle against them, we have only ourselves to blame since we have not used this force as we should have. There is no possibility for us to assimilate the Albanians. On the contrary, because their roots are in Albania, their national awareness has been awakened, and if we do not settle the score with them once and for all, within 20-30 years we shall have to cope with a terrible irredentism, the signs of which are already apparent and will inevitably put all our southern territories in jeopardy.



The International Problems of Colonization

If we proceed on the assumption that the gradual displacement of the Albanians by means of gradual colonization is ineffective, we are then left with only one course - that of mass resettlement. In this connection, we must consider two countries: Albania and Turkey.

With its sparse population, its many undrained swamps and uncultivated valleys, Albania would have no difficulty admitting some hundred thousand Albanians from our country. With its vast and uninhabited frontiers in Asia Minor and Kurdistan, modern Turkey, for its part, offers seemingly unlimited opportunities for internal colonization. Despite efforts on the part of Kemal Atatürk, the Turks have not yet been able to fill the vacuum created by the evacuation of the Greeks from Asia Minor to Greece and of some of the Kurds to Persia. Hence, the greatest possibilities lie in sending the bulk of our displaced Albanians there.

Firstly, I stress that we must not limit ourselves to diplomatic démarches with the Ankara government, but must employ all means available to convince Tirana to accept some of our displaced people, too. I believe that we will come up against difficulties in Tirana because Italy will try to hinder the process. Be this as it may, money plays an important role in Tirana. In negotiations on the issue, the Albanian government should be informed that we will stop at nothing to achieve the final solution to this question. At the same time, we should tell them about colonization subsidies available, stressing that no controls will be exercised over them. Eventually, notables in Tirana will see the material gains involved and be persuaded through secret channels not to raise any objections to the whole business.

We have heard that Turkey has agreed, initially, to accept about 200,000 of our displaced persons on condition that they are Albanians, something which is most advantageous to us. We must comply with Turkey's wish immediately and sign a convention for the resettlement of the Albanian population as soon as possible. Concerning the resettlement of this Albanian population, we must study conventions which Turkey signed recently with Greece, Romania and Bulgaria, paying particular attention to two aspects: Turkey should accept the largest possible contingent and should be given maximum assistance from a financial point of view, in particular for the swift organization of transportation facilities. As is inevitable in such cases, this problem will no doubt give rise to some international concern. Over the last hundred years, whenever such actions have been carried out in the Balkans, there has always been some power which has protested because the action did not conform to its interests. In the present case, Albania and Italy may make some protest. We have already pointed out that attempts should be made to conclude an agreement with Albania on this matter and, failing this, we should at least secure its silence on the evacuation of the Albanians to Turkey. We repeat that skilful action and money properly used in Tirana may be decisive in this matter. World opinion, especially that financed by Italy, will be upset a little. Nevertheless, the world today has grown used to things much worse than this and is so preoccupied with its day-to-day problems that this issue should not be a cause for concern. At a time when Germany can expel tens of thousands of Jews and Russia can shift millions of people from one part of the continent to another, the evacuation of a few hundred thousand Albanians will not set off a world war. Be this as it may, decision-makers should know ahead of time what they want and unfalteringly pursue those goals, regardless of possible international repercussions.

Italy, no doubt, will raise more difficulties, but at present the country is extremely preoccupied by problems of its own in Abyssinia. Austria, for its part, will not dare to go very far in its opposition. To tell the truth, the greatest danger lies in the possibility that our great allies, France and Britain, may interfere. These two countries must be given the calm and resolute reply that the security of the Morava-Vardar line is in their interests. That this is so was confirmed during the last great war and that line can only be made more secure, for them and for us, if in ethnic terms, we completely dominate the region around the Shar mountains and Kosovo.



The Mode of Evacuation

As we have already stressed, the mass evacuation of the Albanians from their triangle is the only effective course we can take. In order to relocate a whole people, the first prerequisite is the creation of a suitable psychosis. This can be done in various ways.

It is well known that the Moslem masses are generally readily influenced by religion and are prone to superstition and fanaticism. Therefore, we must first of all win over the clergy and men of influence through money and threats in order for them to give their support to the evacuation of the Albanians. Agitators, especially from Turkey, must be found as quickly as possible to promote the evacuation, if Turkey will provide them for us. They must laud the beauties of the new territories in Turkey and the easy and pleasant life to be had there, and must kindle religious fanaticism among the masses and awaken pride in the Turkish state. Our press can be of colossal assistance by describing how gently the evacuation of the Turks from Dobruja took place and how easily they settled in their new regions. Such information would create the requisite predisposition for the masses of Albanians to be willing to leave.

Another means would be coercion by the state apparatus. The law must be enforced to the letter so as to make staying intolerable for the Albanians: fines, imprisonment, the ruthless application of all police regulations, such as the prohibition of smuggling, cutting forests, damaging agriculture, leaving dogs unchained, compulsory labour and any other measure that an experienced police force can contrive. From the economic aspect, this should include the refusal to recognize old land deeds. The work of the land registry should be accompanied from the start by the ruthless collection of taxes and the payment of all private and public debts, the requisitioning of all public and municipal pasture land, the cancellation of concessions, the withdrawal of permits to exercise an occupation, dismissal from government, private and municipal offices etc., all of which will speed up the process of evacuation. Health measures should include the harsh application of all regulations, even within homes, the pulling down of encircling walls and high hedges around private houses, and the rigorous implementation of veterinary measures which will result in a ban on selling livestock on the market, etc. All these measures can be applied in a practical and effective way. The Albanians are very touchy when it comes to religion. They must therefore be harassed on this score, too. This can be achieved through the ill-treatment of their clergy, the demolition of their cemeteries, the prohibition of polygamy, and especially the inflexible application of the regulation compelling girls to attend elementary school, wherever they are.

Private initiative, too, can assist greatly in this direction. We should distribute weapons to our colonists, as need be. The old form of Chetnik action should be organized and secretly assisted. In particular, a mass migration of Montenegrins should be launched from the mountain pastures in order to create a large-scale conflict with the Albanians in Metohija. This conflict should be prepared and encouraged by people we can trust. This can be easily achieved since the Albanians have, indeed, revolted. The whole affair can be presented as a conflict between clans and, if need be, can be ascribed to economic reasons. Finally, local riots can be incited. These will be bloodily suppressed by the most effective means, though by colonists from the Montenegrin clans and the Chetniks, rather than by means of the army.

There remains one more method Serbia employed with great practical effect after 1878, that is, secretly razing Albanian villages and urban settlements to the ground.



The Organization of the Evacuation

From the attached map (1), it is apparent what regions must be cleared. They are: Upper Dibër / Debar, Lower Polog, Upper Polog, the Shar mountains, Drenica, Peja / Pec, Istog / Istok, Vuçitërna / Vucitrn, Stavica, Llap / Lab, Graçanica / Gracanica, Nerodimja / Nerodimje, Gjakova / Djakovica, Podgor, Gora (Dragash), Lugu i Drinit / Podrimje, Gjilan / Gnjilane and Kaçanik / Kacanik. Of these regions, which together form the Albanian wedge, the most important for us at the moment are: Peja / Pec, Gjakova / Djakovica, Lugu i Drinit / Podrimje, Gora (Dragash), Podgor, Shar, Istog / Istok and Drenica, all to the north of the Shar mountains, Upper Dibër / Debar and the two Pologs to the south, and the Shar mountains themselves. These are border regions that must be cleared of Albanians at any cost. The internal regions such as Kaçanik / Kacanik, Gjilan / Gnjilane, Nerodimja / Nerodimje, Graçanica / Gracanica, Llap / Lab, and Vuçitërna / Vucitrn etc. must be weakened if possible, particularly Kaçanik / Kacanik and Llap / Lab, while the others should be gradually and systematically colonized over a period of decades.

The above-mentioned methods should be used primarily in the border regions, if we wish to clear them of Albanians.

During resettlement, the following must be kept in mind:

In the first place, resettlement should begin in the villages and then move to the towns. The villages are the more dangerous, being more compact. Then, the mistake of removing only the poor should be avoided. The middle and wealthy classes make up the backbone of every nation. They, too, must therefore be persecuted and driven out. Lacking the support which their economically independent compatriots have, the poor will then submit more quickly. This question is of great importance, and I emphasize this, because one of the main causes for the failure of our colonization in the south has been that the poor were expelled while the rich remained. We were, thus, no better off because we gained very little land for the settlement of our colonists. To create a proper psychosis for resettlement, everything possible must be done to evacuate whole villages, or at least whole families. It must be prevented at all costs that part of a family is transferred while other members remain behind. Our state is willing to spend millions not to make life easier for the Albanians, but to get rid of as many of them as possible. For this reason, those who remain behind must be barred absolutely from purchasing property from those evacuated. This should be taken into consideration in the evacuation of individuals and of whole villages if we want to make things as easy as possible for them during the process of relocation.

Once they agree to move, they should be given all the assistance they require. Administrative formalities should be simplified, their property paid for on the spot, travel documents issued without the least formality, and they should be assisted in getting to the nearest railway station. Trains should be made available for them as far as Salonika, and from there, they should be transported immediately by ship to Asia. It is very important that the journey be easy, comfortable and cheap. Train travel should perhaps be made free of charge and displaced persons should be assisted with food because, whether or not large masses of people can be evacuated or not depends largely on conditions of transport. Fear of difficulties en route is a major factor in keeping people from departing. This fear must be overcome by solving all the problems connected with the journey quickly and energetically. Particular care must therefore be taken to ensure that these people have the fewest possible difficulties en route. Simple people often have trouble finding their way, so it would be advisable to have major travel enterprises study transportation systems and adapt them accordingly. The displaced person must pass from hand to hand without feeling that his movement is a burden. Only in this way will it be possible to create a proper flow of Albanian evacuees and empty the south of them.



Depopulating and Repopulating Regions

The problem of the establishment of colonies in the depopulated regions is no less important than the expulsion of the Albanians.

The first question to arise is: Who is to be settled here? The most natural thing would be to populate these regions with elements of our people from destitute areas: Montenegrins in the first place, but also Hercegovinians, Licanas and Krajšniks. The Montenegrins are the most appropriate for several reasons, and Metohija, Drenica and Kosovo are the most natural places for them to descend into from their impoverished mountain homelands. The increase of population in Montenegro has caused much poverty there which, in recent times, has given rise to continual social and political unrest. This is unfavourable for our control of the country and is very dangerous for the maintenance of law and order in the future. Giving them maize and pensions is useless. The only solution is to send them down into the fertile regions of Metohija, Drenica and Kosovo. The Montenegrins will prove to be excellent instruments to overcome the Albanians since they are akin to them in mentality and temperament. They must be settled initially in the regions north of the Shar mountains. Along with them, however, people from Lican, Krajšnica, Serbia, Cacak, Užice and Toplica should be brought in as colonists as well. This is necessary in order to create improved working habits and organization among the Montenegrins, and to break down the nomadic group mentality, the spirit of collectivity which characterizes the highlanders, by mixing and by intermarriage with people from various Dinaric regions. In this way, a new type of Montenegrin can be created with a less local and more broad-minded, Serbian outlook.
Suitable conditions should be created for southern Serbian emigrants living in the regions south of the Shar mountains so that they can take possession of the fertile lands. They are honest, hardworking people who would be grateful to the state all their lives if better living conditions could be created for them in rural areas. The rural southern Serbs have a right to expect more care and attention than we are giving them today. Settling these poor people in Polog (Upper and Lower) and Dibër / Debar and allocating pasture land to them instead of to the Albanians will give them a sense of belonging to the state and they will be more willing, accordingly, to defend its borders.

Colonization south of the Shar mountains and the Black Mountain of Skopje can also be achieved with Serbs from Vranje, Leskovac, Pirot and Vlasenica, especially those from destitute mountain villages. We repeat that the Dinarics should not be allowed to expand south of the line formed by the Black Mountain of Skopje and the Shar mountain range.

It is essential to avoid bureaucracy and petty formalities in the settlement of villages cleared of Albanians. The first and immediate step is to give the colonists deeds to the land they are settling. One of the main reasons for the failure of our colonization so far has been that settlers did not feel secure on their land because they did not receive a title to it and were thus left to the mercy of unscrupulous petty officials and local politicians. The peasant only feels secure if he knows that no one can take his land away from him. Such a guarantee should therefore be provided from the start. On the other hand, it is dangerous to give colonists the full and unrestricted ownership to land. In principle, homesteaders are carrying out a mission on behalf of the state and the nation, and must carry through with their mission if they are to keep their homesteads. They should not, therefore, have full and unrestricted ownership of the property in question. Because there are so many different types of people among them, from village workers who have lost their inner attachment to land to herdsmen who will have to adapt themselves to agriculture, their attachment to the land must have force of law. This will ensure that they begin to love their new home and region, and if they do not succeed in this, their children at least will. For this reason, colonists should be prevented by law from obtaining full ownership of the land for any period of less than thirty years, even though the deeds are handed out at the start. According to the laws of our country, women do not enjoy the right to inherit property. In order to avoid fragmentation of property into tiny parcels, women must be excluded from inheriting such homesteads except in cases where the colonist has no male descendant and plans to bring a bridegroom into the household. The properties which have been given to the colonists up to now have been small. Bearing in mind intensive farming methods here, the fall in prices for farm products, and the large size of families among the colonists, 5-10 hectares of land is insufficient to ensure the economic survival of the settlers.

It is better to settle a region with a smaller number of colonists, giving them better conditions for development, than with a large number of rural semi-proletarians. This is another cause of failure in our colonization of the south and of the north up to now.

Individuals suitable for settling land under very difficult conditions are rare among other nations. Those few successes we have achieved in our colonization strategy have been the result of the aptitude of our race for colonization. It is only our peasants who are able to survive when shifted from one environment to another and put up against scrubland which has never been used for agriculture. Think of how they would flourish if the state were to carry out its duties and provide them with everything they needed.

On 10 February 1865, the government of Prince Mihajlo passed a law on the 'Settlement of Foreigners in Serbia'. Under this law, the Serbian government granted poor colonists from neighbouring regions 1.8 hectares of arable land, 1.8 hectares of non-arable land, a house, a yoke of oxen, a cart, two goats or sheep, a sow, necessary tools and 120 grosh in cash. In addition to this, they were of course given maize for food to last them until the first harvest. One plough was provided for every two families. These fixed and movable assets were granted to the settlers for a term of fifteen years, without the right to sell them. At the end of this period, the assets became their property. For the first five years, the settlers were exempt from all kinds of government taxes. For ten years they were also exempt from universal compulsory service in the regular army and for five years from service in the people's militia. The response from all sides was such that within a few months all homesteads were taken and we were immediately able to colonize more land than we have been able to do for several years since the war. Had the government granted such favourable conditions for settlers after 1918, our situation in the Vojvodina and in southern Serbia would be much different. This is how we must act in the future, if we want to achieve success.

There are also lessons to be learned from the colonization of Toplica and Kosanica after 1878 when the Albanians were expelled from this region. The method of colonization here was laid down in the law of 3 January 1880. On 3 February of the same year, the People's Council approved an amendment to the law on agrarian relations under the motto "land for the peasants." Without hesitation, Serbia applied for its first foreign loan in order to pay Turkey for the lands taken. It did not set up any ministry of agrarian reform or costly apparatus to deal with the problem of colonization. Everything was managed in a simple and practical manner. The police distributed land to all those who were willing to work it. People came from Montenegro, Sjenica, Vranje, Kosovo, Peja / Pec etc. and, in a matter of thirty years, Toplica and Kosanica, once Albanian regions of ill-repute, gave Serbia the finest regiment of the 1912-1918 wars, the Second Iron Regiment. During that period, Toplica and Kosanica paid and repaid, with the blood of their sons, for the millions of dinars which Serbia had spent to settle these regions.

It is only by following this example and understanding what is required, sparing neither money nor blood, that our nation can create a new Toplica out of Kosovo and Metohija.

Hence, if we want the colonists to remain where they are, we must assure them of all necessary means of livelihood within the first few years and severely prohibit any speculation with the houses and property of the displaced Albanians. The government must reserve itself the unlimited right to dispose of the fixed and movable assets of the Albanians and must settle its own colonists there as soon as the Albanians have departed. This is important because it rarely happens that a whole village departs at once. The first to be settled in these villages should be the Montenegrins who, with their arrogant, irascible and merciless behaviour, will drive the remaining Albanians away. Then colonists from other regions can be brought in.

This paper deals with the colonization of southern Serbia only. The problem of the Vojvodina, in particular with the Hungarian triangle in Backa, i.e. Senta - Kula - Backa Topola, is however no less important to us. Destroying this triangle in the Vojvodina is indeed just as essential as eradicating the Albanian wedge around the Shar mountains. Tens of thousands of Hungarian farmhands have been left behind since the break-up of the big estates in the Vojvodina and constitute a great burden for the Serbian and German farm owners in the region. Some of these Hungarian and even German farm labourers and small proprietors could be sent to the south because in Backa, on the border with Hungary, they constitute a real threat, all the more so since the Serbs in Backa represent only 25% of the population. In southern Serbia, they would become good citizens by defending their property against Albania and would integrate well into our people. What is more important, since they are more progressive and of a higher cultural level than our peasants, they would provide a good example of advanced farming methods. We stress, however, that Serbs from the Vojvodina should not be sent to the south for colonization. There is still much land to be colonized in the Vojvodina so that they should be given homesteads there instead. It must be noted that in the 1928-1929 period, there was a widespread movement among Hungarians and Germans from the Vojvodina to move to southern Serbia. Not understanding the problem, our authorities were against such a movement and nipped it in the bud. Any such reaction on the part of the government today must be countered, and the public must be instructed to encourage the movement of Hungarians and Germans from the Vojvodina, especially those from Backa, to the south.



The Colonization Apparatus

Of particular importance for the solution of the question under discussion is the existence of a proper apparatus to direct the whole business. The poor work done by the apparatus implementing our colonization strategy in the past was in good part responsible for its failures. To avoid the same mistakes in the future, we must carry out a reorganization.

No other question demands such continuity of implementation as our colonization strategy. We have pointed out that one of the main reasons for the failure of our colonies both in the north and in the south has been the inconsistent work and the vacillations on policy implemented after each change of government. If this is to be avoided in the future, our colonization strategy must be entrusted to the General Staff of the army. Why? Simply for reasons of defence. Our army is intent on settling our people along the borders, especially in the most delicate sectors. To this end, it will do its utmost to secure these borders with the firmest possible settlements. The General Staff, as the prime institution for the defence of our national interests, can contribute a great deal to our colonization strategy as a whole. It will know very well how to protect the colonization strategy from the private interference of those who want to use it for their own personal interests, and from external influence. Another important fact is that it would be easier for the General Staff to convince the responsible bodies of the importance of the issue and to force them to take effective action. The People's Council would have more faith in it and would grant the necessary credits to it more readily than to others.

The General Staff would guide all the work via a government Commission for Colonization. This Commission would be quite independent, though under the direct supervision of the Chief of General Staff, and would have under its control all bodies involved in our colonization strategy. Representatives of various interested ministries, national associations, technical organizations and scholarly institutions would also be made to take part in this Commission.

The greatest mistake of our colonization strategy in the past lay in the fact that the untrained and incompetent bureaucrats had the main say, and dealt with problems only superficially and in a piecemeal manner. We need only recall the settlement campaign carried out by volunteers from Hungary in Ovce Polje and Kadrifikovo, or the emigrants from Istria and Gorica who settled around Demir Kapija. The matter requires close collaboration between the government, private initiative and scholarly institutions. Private initiative can operate in many directions. The People's Defence, the Sokolašas, the Chetnik Associations etc. could take action against the Albanians which would be inappropriate for the state. Associations of agronomists, doctors, engineers and cooperatives etc. could provide valuable assistance with their technical advisors in solving the many problems which will arise during the colonization campaign. Cultural associations, such as Prosveta in Sarajevo, Matica Srbska in Novi Sad, the St. Sava Associations in Belgrade etc. have their role to play, too.

Undoubtedly, our institutions of higher learning have begun to lose the prestige they once had. The main reason for this is that the university and the Academy of Sciences are becoming increasingly estranged from real life and are neglecting their main duty in a relatively backward country such as ours: i. e. paving the way for the application of the scientific achievements of the twentieth century. Many billions would have been saved in this country, many mistakes would have been avoided in our government policy, including our colonization policy, had the problems been studied seriously and objectively in advance by competent scholars before they were taken up for solution. Our policy of colonization, likewise, would have acquired a more serious approach, greater continuity and effective application, had the opinions of experts and scholars been sought in advance. To start with, the Royal Serbian Academy of Sciences and the University of Belgrade ought to take the initiative to organize scientific studies of the whole problem of colonization in our country. This would be feasible for many reasons. At the university we have experts on every aspect of colonization. Teachers and academicians at the university are independent scholars, less subject to external political influence. They already have good experience in such fields and their scholarly work is a guarantee of objectivity. They should, therefore, take the initiative of setting up a colonization institute, the task of which would be to pursue colonization studies. The government, for its part, should detach from the ministries all the institutions which have been engaged with this problem so far, and create a special institution, "The Colonization Inspection Office"

The Colonization Inspection Office would be headed by an Inspector General, appointed by decree on the recommendation of the Minister of War, the Chief of General Staff and the Prime Minister. All the work in the colonization institute and in the Colonization Inspection Office would be carried out on orders from and under the supervision of the government Commission for Colonization, while the Inspector General would be answerable to the Chief of General Staff.

The colonization institute would be divided into the following sections:

1) organization,

2) education and culture,

3) finance,

4) agriculture,

5) construction,

6) hygiene, etc.

In agreement with scientific, cultural and educational associations and institutions, and with national associations, the various sections would study problems of colonization and prepare directives, thus supplying our colonization policy with solid, scientifically elaborated material on the basis of which decisions could be taken. Managing this institute would be people from the Commission for Colonization, including representatives of the above-mentioned ministries, the university, the Academy of Sciences and private, national, education and cultural organizations who would be elected or appointed to this body. In this case, care must be taken not to bring in people just for honour's sake, but only men who love and are dedicated to this great work.

The heads and employees of the institute should be selected by competition. The institute would then supply the Colonization Inspection Office with scientifically elaborated material for the implementation of our colonization strategy. Should differences of opinion arise between the Colonization Inspection Office and the institute over some fundamental question, the Chief of General Staff would have the final say.

The Colonization Inspection Office must have its executive headquarters in the territory and be made up of people selected for their enthusiasm and readiness for this work, whether or not they are employed by the government. They should, if possible, be selected by means of competition and should be appointed upon the proposal of the Chief of General Staff. Compromised or incompetent cadres must be dismissed. During its work, the Colonization Inspection Office and its organs must avoid bureaucracy as much as possible, while keeping in mind one thing only - the expulsion of the Albanians as quickly as possible and resettlement by our colonists.

The police apparatus will play a very important role in this action. It is, therefore, essential to select and second the most energetic and honest officers. Their transfer should be made with the approval of the Chief of General Staff, and for such a difficult job they should be paid from secret loans. Stern measures must be taken against anyone who commits the slightest infraction. A special commissar, who would execute the orders of the state colonization inspector, must be appointed for the whole of the eighteen districts mentioned. The prefects of the districts must be given special, wide-ranging powers for their work, as well as appropriate instructions. Our political parties should be told curtly that rivalry among them during elections in these districts is strictly prohibited, and that any interference by deputies in favour of the Albanians is categorically forbidden.

The government institute and the Colonization Inspection Office would elaborate the technical details for organizing the evacuation of the Albanians and the relocation of our settlers. It would not be bad, perhaps, if another private organization were to be created, in addition to these two official institutions. This private organization would be created out of existing associations and have the task of assisting in the implementation of our colonization strategy through private initiative. It would be best if the federation of our cultural and education associations could take over this job. Its main task would be to coordinate and assist in the promotion of links between them and the colonization institute.



Funding

Whenever our colonization strategy has been criticized for its lack of success, its defenders have always excused themselves with the inadequacy of funds the government has allocated to this work. We do not deny that this has been the case up to a point. It must be said, however, that more has been spent in our country on the maintenance of this apparatus and its irrational activities than on the work of colonization itself. Nevertheless, even though the government has not provided as much as it should have, it must be understood that every country has its own primary and secondary interests to look after. Among a country's primary interests, without doubt, is the maintenance of its rule in regions of national insecurity by colonizing such regions with its own people. All other commitments are of an importance secondary to this. Funds can and must be found to deal with this problem. We have already mentioned the colonization of Toplica and Kosanica and the benefits derived from this. Given that the small Kingdom of Serbia did not hesitate to make great financial sacrifices, indeed did not even hesitate as a free and independent kingdom to seek its first loan for colonization, is it possible that our present-day Yugoslavia would be unable to do the same? It can and must. That it lacks the means to do so, is simply not true.

Let us calculate approximately how much it would cost our country to expel 200,000 Albanians and settle the region with as great a number of our people.

The resettlement of 40,000 Albanian families, taking an average family as having five members and an average of 15,000 dinars for each family, would cost a total of 600 million dinars. The colonization apparatus for the settling of 40,000 Serbian families might reach a total of 200 million dinars. In any case, the whole operation would not cost more than 800 million dinars. This is because:



1. The evacuated Albanians would leave behind not only land, but also their houses and implements. Thus, not only would the overwhelming majority of our colonists be settled in the homes of the Albanians but, with a little assistance in food and livestock, they would soon recover economically and become independent. We stress in this connection that absolutely no private speculation with the possessions left behind by the Albanians would be tolerated. The government must be the one to take control of these possessions and distribute them to the settlers.

2. Military forces should be employed, where required, during the setting up of new colonies, as was the case with the construction of Sremska Raca and the reconstruction of the villages destroyed by the 1931 earthquake. To this end, the army should be given the right and possibility to set up a kind of compulsory labour service for public projects, just as Stambolisky created the Trudova pronist in Bulgaria and Hitler the Arbeitsdienst in Germany, that is, by calling up reservists or extending the term of military service. It would be an especially good idea for our young people, after finishing their training and after graduating from university, to be entrusted with such work. Were this to be the case, many of them, by taking part in constructive activities in the public interest, would become more conscious and look at things from a more realistic perspective. Such a scheme could be carried out easily by giving priority in public service employment to those young people who have spent a specific period of time working on behalf of our colonization strategy. This would also help reduce unemployment among our young intelligentsia, which is an increasingly acute social problem in our country.

3. In collaboration with specialized organizations and associations, we must find the cheapest means of clearing the land of scrub, of irrigating farms, of draining swamps, etc. as well as of constructing homes. Private companies should be informed that, since the government assists them with reduced customs and railway tariffs, loans and other means for the procurement of supplies and material necessary for their work, it also has the right, considering the importance of this action, to insist that such supplies and material be made available at the lowest possible price. Supplies and material should be procured by means of cartels, in agreement with which, the government would specify the quantity, quality and price of the material in question without fictitious deals being involved. Government enterprises, the railways and, in particular, forestry enterprises such as Šipad etc. should be placed at the unrestricted disposal of the government Commission for Colonization.

4. During colonization, the government may grant settlers property on credit or for cash. Many of the settlers will purchase land in the new regions by selling their original property in their place of birth. This will enable the government to recuperate a good portion of the money it has laid out. However, we stress that land must only be sold to persons who give proof that they will settle on it permanently and work it. Land given on credit must not be too expensive. The interest rate must be minimal and repayment should be deferred for several years to give the settlers time to get established, i. e. repayment should only begin when the settlers have sufficient economic strength.

Taking this as a basis, the government, which must cover all administrative expenses for these activities from its normal revenues, can procure funds from two sources. One would be the pruning of unnecessary expenditures and expenditures earmarked for other less urgent sectors. The other possible source of funds would be loans, which would be provided by state banks, alone or with private capital on the basis of a compulsory domestic credit line. This would be backed up by securities issued by the government as well as by contributions from the settlers themselves when they become independent.

It might not be a bad idea if the financing and purchasing of land were to be arranged by agricultural banks working in collaboration with co-operatives under the direct supervision and direction of the government Commission for Colonization. However, it is still too early to make any definitive pronouncement on this matter because the conditions under which Turkey will accept the population displaced from our territories are not yet known.

Taken altogether, the sum of a few hundred million dinars is no great expense for the government when compared to the real benefits gained from such an action. By securing the most sensitive regions in the south of our country for our own people, we could save the lives of several divisions in case of war. Giving land to several tens of thousands of families from economically weaker regions, Montenegro in particular, would, on the one hand, help ease the appalling economic suffering of such regions and, on the other hand, create many new jobs during the process of colonization. It would be possible to find employment for 10,000 workers, thus giving a boost to our sluggish economy.

In view of the supreme national, military, strategic and economic significance of this action, it is clearly the duty of the government to sacrifice a few hundred million dinars. At a time when the government can spend one billion dinars on the construction of an international highway from Subotica to Caribrod, the possible benefits of which we shall only enjoy at some time in the distant future, it can and must be in a position to come up with a few hundred million dinars to give us back possession of the cradle of our nation.



Conclusions

In view of all that has been said, it is no coincidence that in our examination of colonization in the south, we hold the view that the only effective means of solving this problem is the mass expulsion of the Albanians. Gradual colonization has had no success in our country, nor in other countries for that matter. If the state wishes to intervene in favour of its own people in the struggle for land, it can only be successful by acting brutally. Otherwise, the native, who has his roots in his place of birth and is at home there, will always be stronger than the colonist. In our case, we must keep this fact very much in mind, because we have to do with a hardy, resistant and prolific race which the late Cvijic described as being the most expansive in the Balkans. From 1870 to 1914, Germany spent billions of marks on the gradual colonization of its eastern territories by purchasing land from the Poles, but the fecundity of Polish women defeated German organization and money. Thus, Poland regained its Poznan in 1918. Our above-mentioned statistics of the 1921-1931 period show that it was the fecundity of Albanian women which defeated our colonization policy, too. We must draw our conclusions from this, and we must do so quickly while there is still time to correct matters.

All of Europe is in a state of turmoil. We do not know what each new day and night will bring. Albanian nationalism is on the rise in our territories, too. Should a global conflict or social revolution occur, both of which are possible in the near future, leaving the situation as it is would jeopardize all our territories in the south. The purpose of this paper is to avert such an occurrence.

If this is not the proof you want i do not know what to say more

[Vullkan]

Ethnic cleansing of albanians can be compared with final solution of the jews ,it was planned in detail,had political approval and was acted partially but fortunatelly did not execute entirely.

Albanians have every right to hate serbs since they planned our extermination.

[Sideritis]

http://www.albanianhistory.net/texts20_2/AH1937_1.html

1937
Vaso Cubrilovic:
The Expulsion of the Albanians - Memorandum

"The Expulsion of the Albanians," is a memorandum prepared and written by the noted Bosnian Serb scholar and political figure Vaso Cubrilovic (1897-1990). As a student in 1914, Cubrilovic had participated in the assassination in Sarajevo of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary, the event which precipitated the First World War. Between the two wars, he was professor at the Faculty of Arts in Belgrade. A leading member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Art, Cubrilovic also held several ministerial portfolios after World War II. Among his writings is the monograph "Istorija politicke misle u Srbiji XIX veka," Belgrade 1958 (History of political thought in Serbia in the 19th century).



The Expulsion of the Albanians

The problem of the Albanians in the life of our country and people did not arise yesterday. It played a major role in our life in the Middle Ages, but its importance only became decisive towards the end of the seventeenth century, at a time when the masses of the Serbian people were displaced northwards out of their former ancestral territory of Rashka / Raška, supplanted by Albanian highlanders. Gradually, the latter came down from their mountains to the fertile plains of Metohija and Kosovo. Spreading northwards, they continued in the direction of southern and western Morava and, crossing the Shar mountains, descended into Polog and, from there, towards the Vardar. Thus, by the nineteenth century was formed the Albanian triangle, a wedge which, with its Debar-Rogozna axis in the rear, penetrated as far into our territories as Nish / Niš and separated our ancient land of Rashka from Macedonia and the Vardar Valley.

In the nineteenth century, this wedge, inhabited by wild Albanian elements, prevented the maintenance of any strong cultural, educational and economic links between our northern and southern territories. This was also the main reason why, until 1878, Serbia was unable to establish and maintain continuous links with Macedonia through Vranja and the Black Mountain of Skopje and thus to exercise its cultural and political influence on the Vardar Valley, to the extent that one would have expected in view of conducive geographical factors and historical traditions in these regions. Although the Bulgarians began their life as a nation later than the Serbs, they had greater success initially. This explains why there are permanent settlements of southern Slavs from Vidin in the north to Ohrid in the south. Serbia began to slice off pieces of this Albanian wedge as early as the first uprising, by expelling the northernmost Albanian settlers from Jagodina.

Thanks to the wide-ranging national plans of Jovan Ristic, Serbia sliced off another piece of this wedge with the annexation of Toplica and Kosanica. At that time, the regions between Jastrebac and southern Morava were radically cleared of Albanians.
From 1918 onwards, it was the task of our present state to suppress what remained of the Albanian triangle, but it did not succeed. Though there are a number of reasons for this, we shall examine only the most important of them.



1. The fundamental mistake made by the authorities in charge at that time was that, forgetting where they were, they wanted to solve all the major ethnic problems of the troubled and bloody Balkans by Western methods. Turkey brought to the Balkans the customs of the Sheriat, according to which victory in war and the occupation of a country conferred the right on the victor to dispose of the lives and property of the subjected inhabitants. Even the Balkan Christians learned from the Turks that not only state power and domination, but also home and property could be won and lost by the sword. This concept of land ownership in the Balkans was to be softened somewhat by laws, ordinances and international agreements brought about under pressure from Europe, but it has, to a good extent, remained a primary instrument of leverage for Turkey and the Balkan states up to this very day. We need not evoke the distant past. It is sufficient to refer to a few cases which have taken place in recent times: the transfer of Greeks from Asia Minor to Greece and of Turks from Greece to Asia Minor, or the recent expulsion of Turks from Bulgaria and Romania to Turkey. While all the Balkan states, since 1912, have solved or are on the point of solving their problems with national minorities through mass population transfers, we have stuck to the slow and cumbersome strategy of gradual colonization. The result has been negative, as evident from the statistics of the eighteen districts which make up the Albanian triangle. These figures show that the natural growth of the Albanian population in these regions is still greater than the total increase in our population from both natural growth and new settlers (from 1921 to 1931, the Albanian population increased by 68,060, while the Serbs showed an increase of 58,745, i.e. a difference of 9,315 in favour of the Albanians). Taking into account the intractable character of the Albanians, the pronounced increase in their numbers and the ever-increasing difficulties of colonization will eventually put in question even those few successes we have achieved in our colonization from 1918 onwards.

2. Even the strategy of gradual colonization was not properly applied. Worse still in a matter of such importance, there was no specific state plan for every government and regime to adhere to and implement. Work was intermittent, in fits and starts, with each new minister undoing what his predecessor had done and himself creating nothing solid. Laws and regulations were amended but, weak as they were, were never implemented. Some individuals, especially deputies from other regions, who could not manage to secure a mandate at home, would go down south and butter up the non-national elements to gain a mandate there, thus sacrificing major national and state interests. The colonization apparatus was extremely costly, inflated and loaded with people who were not only incompetent, but were also frequently without scruples. Their activities are indeed a topic in itself. Finally, one need only total up the huge sums this state has invested in colonization and divide them by the number of families settled to prove how costly every new household established since the war has been, regardless of whether or not this expenditure was met by the settlers themselves or by the state. Likewise, it would be interesting to compare the amounts paid out for personal expenditures and those for materials needed for colonization. In the past, Serbia went about this matter quite differently. Karageorge, during the first uprising, as well as Miloš, Mihajlo and Jovan Ristic had no special ministry of land reform, no general land inspectors, or costly apparatus, and still, they managed to purge Serbia of foreign elements and populate it with our own people who felled the endless forests of Shumadia (Šumadija), transforming them from the wild state they were once in to the fertile Shumadia we know today.

3. Even those few thousand families who were settled after the war did not remain where they were originally located. There was more success in Kosovo, especially in the Lab / Llap valley, where the Toplicans penetrated of their own accord from north to south. Our oldest and most stable settlements there were established with elements from various Serbian regions. In Drenica and Metohija we had no success at all. Colonization should never be carried out with Montenegrins alone. We do not think that they are suitable as colonists because of their pastoral indolence. This applies to the first generation only. The second generation is quite different, more active and more practical. The village of Petrovo in Miroc north of the Danube, the most advanced village in Krajina, is inhabited exclusively by Montenegrins. In Serbia today, there are thousands of other flourishing towns, especially in Toplica and Kosanica, which were established by Montenegrins of the first generation who mixed with more advanced elements. The foregoing consideration, nonetheless, still applies in Metohija where, since the settlers are on their own ancestral lands, old customs still abound. A visit to any coffee-house in Peja / Pec is sufficient proof. This is why our colonization has had so little success throughout Metohija. It must be admitted, on the other hand, that these colonies were poorly situated on barren, scrub-covered land, and were almost totally lacking in basic agricultural equipment. These people should have been given more assistance than other colonists because they were among the poorest Montenegrin elements.

4. Without doubt, the main cause for the lack of success in our colonization of these regions was that the best land remained in the hands of the Albanians. The only possible means for our mass colonization of these regions to succeed is for us to take the land away from them. This could have been achieved easily during the rebellion after the war, when the insurgents were active, by expelling part of the Albanian population to Albania, by refusing to legalize their usurpations and by buying up their pasture land. Here, we must refer once again to the gross error committed in our post-war strategy, that of the right to own land. Instead of taking advantage of the strategy used by the Albanians themselves for ownership of the land they usurped (scarcely any of them had deeds issued by the Turks, and those who did, got them only for land purchased), we not only legalized all these usurpations to the detriment of our state and nation, but worse still, we accustomed the Albanians to western European attitudes to private property. Prior to that, they could never have understood such concepts. In this way, we ourselves handed them a weapon with which to defend themselves, keeping the best land for themselves and rendering impossible the nationalization of a region of supreme importance to us.

It is apparent from the above that our colonization strategy in the south has not yielded the results which ought to have been achieved and which now impose themselves upon us as a major necessity of state. We are not criticizing this strategy merely for the sake of criticism, but so that, on the basis of our past experience, we can find the right way to solve this problem.



The Problem of Colonization of the Southern Regions

Reading the first part of this paper and comprehending the problem of colonization of the south, one realizes immediately that the primary issue at stake are the regions north and south of the Shar mountains. This is no coincidence. The wedge of Albanians on both sides of the Shar range is of great national and strategic significance to our state. We have already mentioned the way the population structure came into existence there and the importance of these regions for links to the lands of the Vardar Valley, which are firmly within the limits of our ancient territories. The strength of Serbian expansion ever since the foundation of the first Serbian state in the ninth century has lain in the continuity both of this expansion and of the expansion of ancient Rashka / Raška in all directions, including southwards. But this continuity has been interrupted by the Albanians, and until the ancient link between Serbia and Montenegro on the one hand, and Macedonia on the other, is re-established along the whole line from the River Drin to southern Morava, we will not be secure in the possession of our territories. From an ethnic point of view, the Macedonians will only unite with us, if they receive true ethnic support from their Serbian motherland, something which they have lacked to this day. This can only be achieved through the destruction of the Albanian wedge.

From a military and strategic point of view, the Albanian wedge occupies one of the most vital points in our country, the starting point from which major Balkan rivers flow to the Adriatic Sea, to the Black Sea and to the Aegean. Possession of this strategic point determines, to a large degree, the fate of the central Balkans, and in particular, the fate of the main line of Balkan communications from the Morava to the Vardar. It is no coincidence that many battles of decisive importance to the destiny of the Balkans were fought here (Nemanja against the Greeks, the Serbs against the Turks in 1389, Hunyadi against the Turks in 1446). In the twentieth century, only a country inhabited by its own people can be confident of its security. It is therefore imperative that we not allow such points of strategic importance to be held by hostile and alien elements. This is all the more true in this case in that the element in question has the support of a nation state of the same race. Today this state is powerless, but even as such, it has become a base for Italian imperialism which aims to use the country as a means of penetrating into the heart of our nation. Our people, who are willing and able to defend their land and country, are the most reliable element in the fight against such penetration.

With the exception of this block of eighteen districts, the Albanians and other national minorities in other parts of the south are scattered and, therefore, constitute less of a threat to the life of our nation and state. Nationalizing the regions around the Shar mountains would mean that we can stifle irredentism once and for all, and ensure our control over these territories forever.

Colonization from the north should be kept to a minimum in the regions inhabited by the Macedonians. Here land is scarce and for this reason, the Macedonians would resist an influx of settlers from the north, all the more so because they would regard this influx as a sign of mistrust on our part. As such, even such a minimal colonization would do us more harm than good. If we do send people down there, to the region south of the Black Mountain of Skopje, they should be people from Vranje and Leskovac, who are closer in mentality and culture to the Macedonians. By no means should we send people from the Dinaric region because their irritable and uncontrolled temperaments would only arouse the hostility of the local population. We repeat that this problem will only be solved when our colonies advancing from the north through Kosovo and Metohija in the direction of the Shar mountains and Polog have reached Macedonian settlements.

The problem of the Sandjak of Novi Pazar is solving itself and no longer plays the role it did in the life of our country before 1912. Let it suffice to mention that with the elimination of the Albanians, the last link between our Moslems in Bosnia and Novi Pazar and the rest of the Moslem world will have been cut. They are becoming a religious minority, the only Moslem minority in the Balkans, and this fact will accelerate their assimilation.

Montenegro has become a serious problem recently. This barren land cannot sustain the population which, despite resettlement, increased by 16% from 1912 to 1931. This impulsive, pastoral people has contributed many essential characteristics to our race over the centuries. Channelled in the right direction, their energy will not be destructive, and could, if directed towards the southeast, be employed for the common good of the country.



Summing up:



The Albanians cannot be dispelled by means of gradual colonization alone. They are the only people who, over the last millennium, managed not only to resist the nucleus of our state, Rashka and Zeta, but also to harm us by pushing our ethnic borders northwards and eastwards. When in the last millennium our ethnic borders were shifted up to Subotica in the north and to the Kupa River in the northwest, the Albanians drove us out of the Shkodra (Scutari) region, out of the former capital of Bodin, and out of Metohija and Kosovo. The only way and only means to cope with them is through the brute force of an organized state, in which we have always been superior to them. If since 1912 we have had no success in the struggle against them, we have only ourselves to blame since we have not used this force as we should have. There is no possibility for us to assimilate the Albanians. On the contrary, because their roots are in Albania, their national awareness has been awakened, and if we do not settle the score with them once and for all, within 20-30 years we shall have to cope with a terrible irredentism, the signs of which are already apparent and will inevitably put all our southern territories in jeopardy.



The International Problems of Colonization

If we proceed on the assumption that the gradual displacement of the Albanians by means of gradual colonization is ineffective, we are then left with only one course - that of mass resettlement. In this connection, we must consider two countries: Albania and Turkey.

With its sparse population, its many undrained swamps and uncultivated valleys, Albania would have no difficulty admitting some hundred thousand Albanians from our country. With its vast and uninhabited frontiers in Asia Minor and Kurdistan, modern Turkey, for its part, offers seemingly unlimited opportunities for internal colonization. Despite efforts on the part of Kemal Atatürk, the Turks have not yet been able to fill the vacuum created by the evacuation of the Greeks from Asia Minor to Greece and of some of the Kurds to Persia. Hence, the greatest possibilities lie in sending the bulk of our displaced Albanians there.

Firstly, I stress that we must not limit ourselves to diplomatic démarches with the Ankara government, but must employ all means available to convince Tirana to accept some of our displaced people, too. I believe that we will come up against difficulties in Tirana because Italy will try to hinder the process. Be this as it may, money plays an important role in Tirana. In negotiations on the issue, the Albanian government should be informed that we will stop at nothing to achieve the final solution to this question. At the same time, we should tell them about colonization subsidies available, stressing that no controls will be exercised over them. Eventually, notables in Tirana will see the material gains involved and be persuaded through secret channels not to raise any objections to the whole business.

We have heard that Turkey has agreed, initially, to accept about 200,000 of our displaced persons on condition that they are Albanians, something which is most advantageous to us. We must comply with Turkey's wish immediately and sign a convention for the resettlement of the Albanian population as soon as possible. Concerning the resettlement of this Albanian population, we must study conventions which Turkey signed recently with Greece, Romania and Bulgaria, paying particular attention to two aspects: Turkey should accept the largest possible contingent and should be given maximum assistance from a financial point of view, in particular for the swift organization of transportation facilities. As is inevitable in such cases, this problem will no doubt give rise to some international concern. Over the last hundred years, whenever such actions have been carried out in the Balkans, there has always been some power which has protested because the action did not conform to its interests. In the present case, Albania and Italy may make some protest. We have already pointed out that attempts should be made to conclude an agreement with Albania on this matter and, failing this, we should at least secure its silence on the evacuation of the Albanians to Turkey. We repeat that skilful action and money properly used in Tirana may be decisive in this matter. World opinion, especially that financed by Italy, will be upset a little. Nevertheless, the world today has grown used to things much worse than this and is so preoccupied with its day-to-day problems that this issue should not be a cause for concern. At a time when Germany can expel tens of thousands of Jews and Russia can shift millions of people from one part of the continent to another, the evacuation of a few hundred thousand Albanians will not set off a world war. Be this as it may, decision-makers should know ahead of time what they want and unfalteringly pursue those goals, regardless of possible international repercussions.

Italy, no doubt, will raise more difficulties, but at present the country is extremely preoccupied by problems of its own in Abyssinia. Austria, for its part, will not dare to go very far in its opposition. To tell the truth, the greatest danger lies in the possibility that our great allies, France and Britain, may interfere. These two countries must be given the calm and resolute reply that the security of the Morava-Vardar line is in their interests. That this is so was confirmed during the last great war and that line can only be made more secure, for them and for us, if in ethnic terms, we completely dominate the region around the Shar mountains and Kosovo.



The Mode of Evacuation

As we have already stressed, the mass evacuation of the Albanians from their triangle is the only effective course we can take. In order to relocate a whole people, the first prerequisite is the creation of a suitable psychosis. This can be done in various ways.

It is well known that the Moslem masses are generally readily influenced by religion and are prone to superstition and fanaticism. Therefore, we must first of all win over the clergy and men of influence through money and threats in order for them to give their support to the evacuation of the Albanians. Agitators, especially from Turkey, must be found as quickly as possible to promote the evacuation, if Turkey will provide them for us. They must laud the beauties of the new territories in Turkey and the easy and pleasant life to be had there, and must kindle religious fanaticism among the masses and awaken pride in the Turkish state. Our press can be of colossal assistance by describing how gently the evacuation of the Turks from Dobruja took place and how easily they settled in their new regions. Such information would create the requisite predisposition for the masses of Albanians to be willing to leave.

Another means would be coercion by the state apparatus. The law must be enforced to the letter so as to make staying intolerable for the Albanians: fines, imprisonment, the ruthless application of all police regulations, such as the prohibition of smuggling, cutting forests, damaging agriculture, leaving dogs unchained, compulsory labour and any other measure that an experienced police force can contrive. From the economic aspect, this should include the refusal to recognize old land deeds. The work of the land registry should be accompanied from the start by the ruthless collection of taxes and the payment of all private and public debts, the requisitioning of all public and municipal pasture land, the cancellation of concessions, the withdrawal of permits to exercise an occupation, dismissal from government, private and municipal offices etc., all of which will speed up the process of evacuation. Health measures should include the harsh application of all regulations, even within homes, the pulling down of encircling walls and high hedges around private houses, and the rigorous implementation of veterinary measures which will result in a ban on selling livestock on the market, etc. All these measures can be applied in a practical and effective way. The Albanians are very touchy when it comes to religion. They must therefore be harassed on this score, too. This can be achieved through the ill-treatment of their clergy, the demolition of their cemeteries, the prohibition of polygamy, and especially the inflexible application of the regulation compelling girls to attend elementary school, wherever they are.

Private initiative, too, can assist greatly in this direction. We should distribute weapons to our colonists, as need be. The old form of Chetnik action should be organized and secretly assisted. In particular, a mass migration of Montenegrins should be launched from the mountain pastures in order to create a large-scale conflict with the Albanians in Metohija. This conflict should be prepared and encouraged by people we can trust. This can be easily achieved since the Albanians have, indeed, revolted. The whole affair can be presented as a conflict between clans and, if need be, can be ascribed to economic reasons. Finally, local riots can be incited. These will be bloodily suppressed by the most effective means, though by colonists from the Montenegrin clans and the Chetniks, rather than by means of the army.

There remains one more method Serbia employed with great practical effect after 1878, that is, secretly razing Albanian villages and urban settlements to the ground.



The Organization of the Evacuation

From the attached map (1), it is apparent what regions must be cleared. They are: Upper Dibër / Debar, Lower Polog, Upper Polog, the Shar mountains, Drenica, Peja / Pec, Istog / Istok, Vuçitërna / Vucitrn, Stavica, Llap / Lab, Graçanica / Gracanica, Nerodimja / Nerodimje, Gjakova / Djakovica, Podgor, Gora (Dragash), Lugu i Drinit / Podrimje, Gjilan / Gnjilane and Kaçanik / Kacanik. Of these regions, which together form the Albanian wedge, the most important for us at the moment are: Peja / Pec, Gjakova / Djakovica, Lugu i Drinit / Podrimje, Gora (Dragash), Podgor, Shar, Istog / Istok and Drenica, all to the north of the Shar mountains, Upper Dibër / Debar and the two Pologs to the south, and the Shar mountains themselves. These are border regions that must be cleared of Albanians at any cost. The internal regions such as Kaçanik / Kacanik, Gjilan / Gnjilane, Nerodimja / Nerodimje, Graçanica / Gracanica, Llap / Lab, and Vuçitërna / Vucitrn etc. must be weakened if possible, particularly Kaçanik / Kacanik and Llap / Lab, while the others should be gradually and systematically colonized over a period of decades.

The above-mentioned methods should be used primarily in the border regions, if we wish to clear them of Albanians.

During resettlement, the following must be kept in mind:

In the first place, resettlement should begin in the villages and then move to the towns. The villages are the more dangerous, being more compact. Then, the mistake of removing only the poor should be avoided. The middle and wealthy classes make up the backbone of every nation. They, too, must therefore be persecuted and driven out. Lacking the support which their economically independent compatriots have, the poor will then submit more quickly. This question is of great importance, and I emphasize this, because one of the main causes for the failure of our colonization in the south has been that the poor were expelled while the rich remained. We were, thus, no better off because we gained very little land for the settlement of our colonists. To create a proper psychosis for resettlement, everything possible must be done to evacuate whole villages, or at least whole families. It must be prevented at all costs that part of a family is transferred while other members remain behind. Our state is willing to spend millions not to make life easier for the Albanians, but to get rid of as many of them as possible. For this reason, those who remain behind must be barred absolutely from purchasing property from those evacuated. This should be taken into consideration in the evacuation of individuals and of whole villages if we want to make things as easy as possible for them during the process of relocation.

Once they agree to move, they should be given all the assistance they require. Administrative formalities should be simplified, their property paid for on the spot, travel documents issued without the least formality, and they should be assisted in getting to the nearest railway station. Trains should be made available for them as far as Salonika, and from there, they should be transported immediately by ship to Asia. It is very important that the journey be easy, comfortable and cheap. Train travel should perhaps be made free of charge and displaced persons should be assisted with food because, whether or not large masses of people can be evacuated or not depends largely on conditions of transport. Fear of difficulties en route is a major factor in keeping people from departing. This fear must be overcome by solving all the problems connected with the journey quickly and energetically. Particular care must therefore be taken to ensure that these people have the fewest possible difficulties en route. Simple people often have trouble finding their way, so it would be advisable to have major travel enterprises study transportation systems and adapt them accordingly. The displaced person must pass from hand to hand without feeling that his movement is a burden. Only in this way will it be possible to create a proper flow of Albanian evacuees and empty the south of them.



Depopulating and Repopulating Regions

The problem of the establishment of colonies in the depopulated regions is no less important than the expulsion of the Albanians.

The first question to arise is: Who is to be settled here? The most natural thing would be to populate these regions with elements of our people from destitute areas: Montenegrins in the first place, but also Hercegovinians, Licanas and Krajšniks. The Montenegrins are the most appropriate for several reasons, and Metohija, Drenica and Kosovo are the most natural places for them to descend into from their impoverished mountain homelands. The increase of population in Montenegro has caused much poverty there which, in recent times, has given rise to continual social and political unrest. This is unfavourable for our control of the country and is very dangerous for the maintenance of law and order in the future. Giving them maize and pensions is useless. The only solution is to send them down into the fertile regions of Metohija, Drenica and Kosovo. The Montenegrins will prove to be excellent instruments to overcome the Albanians since they are akin to them in mentality and temperament. They must be settled initially in the regions north of the Shar mountains. Along with them, however, people from Lican, Krajšnica, Serbia, Cacak, Užice and Toplica should be brought in as colonists as well. This is necessary in order to create improved working habits and organization among the Montenegrins, and to break down the nomadic group mentality, the spirit of collectivity which characterizes the highlanders, by mixing and by intermarriage with people from various Dinaric regions. In this way, a new type of Montenegrin can be created with a less local and more broad-minded, Serbian outlook.
Suitable conditions should be created for southern Serbian emigrants living in the regions south of the Shar mountains so that they can take possession of the fertile lands. They are honest, hardworking people who would be grateful to the state all their lives if better living conditions could be created for them in rural areas. The rural southern Serbs have a right to expect more care and attention than we are giving them today. Settling these poor people in Polog (Upper and Lower) and Dibër / Debar and allocating pasture land to them instead of to the Albanians will give them a sense of belonging to the state and they will be more willing, accordingly, to defend its borders.

Colonization south of the Shar mountains and the Black Mountain of Skopje can also be achieved with Serbs from Vranje, Leskovac, Pirot and Vlasenica, especially those from destitute mountain villages. We repeat that the Dinarics should not be allowed to expand south of the line formed by the Black Mountain of Skopje and the Shar mountain range.

It is essential to avoid bureaucracy and petty formalities in the settlement of villages cleared of Albanians. The first and immediate step is to give the colonists deeds to the land they are settling. One of the main reasons for the failure of our colonization so far has been that settlers did not feel secure on their land because they did not receive a title to it and were thus left to the mercy of unscrupulous petty officials and local politicians. The peasant only feels secure if he knows that no one can take his land away from him. Such a guarantee should therefore be provided from the start. On the other hand, it is dangerous to give colonists the full and unrestricted ownership to land. In principle, homesteaders are carrying out a mission on behalf of the state and the nation, and must carry through with their mission if they are to keep their homesteads. They should not, therefore, have full and unrestricted ownership of the property in question. Because there are so many different types of people among them, from village workers who have lost their inner attachment to land to herdsmen who will have to adapt themselves to agriculture, their attachment to the land must have force of law. This will ensure that they begin to love their new home and region, and if they do not succeed in this, their children at least will. For this reason, colonists should be prevented by law from obtaining full ownership of the land for any period of less than thirty years, even though the deeds are handed out at the start. According to the laws of our country, women do not enjoy the right to inherit property. In order to avoid fragmentation of property into tiny parcels, women must be excluded from inheriting such homesteads except in cases where the colonist has no male descendant and plans to bring a bridegroom into the household. The properties which have been given to the colonists up to now have been small. Bearing in mind intensive farming methods here, the fall in prices for farm products, and the large size of families among the colonists, 5-10 hectares of land is insufficient to ensure the economic survival of the settlers.

It is better to settle a region with a smaller number of colonists, giving them better conditions for development, than with a large number of rural semi-proletarians. This is another cause of failure in our colonization of the south and of the north up to now.

Individuals suitable for settling land under very difficult conditions are rare among other nations. Those few successes we have achieved in our colonization strategy have been the result of the aptitude of our race for colonization. It is only our peasants who are able to survive when shifted from one environment to another and put up against scrubland which has never been used for agriculture. Think of how they would flourish if the state were to carry out its duties and provide them with everything they needed.

On 10 February 1865, the government of Prince Mihajlo passed a law on the 'Settlement of Foreigners in Serbia'. Under this law, the Serbian government granted poor colonists from neighbouring regions 1.8 hectares of arable land, 1.8 hectares of non-arable land, a house, a yoke of oxen, a cart, two goats or sheep, a sow, necessary tools and 120 grosh in cash. In addition to this, they were of course given maize for food to last them until the first harvest. One plough was provided for every two families. These fixed and movable assets were granted to the settlers for a term of fifteen years, without the right to sell them. At the end of this period, the assets became their property. For the first five years, the settlers were exempt from all kinds of government taxes. For ten years they were also exempt from universal compulsory service in the regular army and for five years from service in the people's militia. The response from all sides was such that within a few months all homesteads were taken and we were immediately able to colonize more land than we have been able to do for several years since the war. Had the government granted such favourable conditions for settlers after 1918, our situation in the Vojvodina and in southern Serbia would be much different. This is how we must act in the future, if we want to achieve success.

There are also lessons to be learned from the colonization of Toplica and Kosanica after 1878 when the Albanians were expelled from this region. The method of colonization here was laid down in the law of 3 January 1880. On 3 February of the same year, the People's Council approved an amendment to the law on agrarian relations under the motto "land for the peasants." Without hesitation, Serbia applied for its first foreign loan in order to pay Turkey for the lands taken. It did not set up any ministry of agrarian reform or costly apparatus to deal with the problem of colonization. Everything was managed in a simple and practical manner. The police distributed land to all those who were willing to work it. People came from Montenegro, Sjenica, Vranje, Kosovo, Peja / Pec etc. and, in a matter of thirty years, Toplica and Kosanica, once Albanian regions of ill-repute, gave Serbia the finest regiment of the 1912-1918 wars, the Second Iron Regiment. During that period, Toplica and Kosanica paid and repaid, with the blood of their sons, for the millions of dinars which Serbia had spent to settle these regions.

It is only by following this example and understanding what is required, sparing neither money nor blood, that our nation can create a new Toplica out of Kosovo and Metohija.

Hence, if we want the colonists to remain where they are, we must assure them of all necessary means of livelihood within the first few years and severely prohibit any speculation with the houses and property of the displaced Albanians. The government must reserve itself the unlimited right to dispose of the fixed and movable assets of the Albanians and must settle its own colonists there as soon as the Albanians have departed. This is important because it rarely happens that a whole village departs at once. The first to be settled in these villages should be the Montenegrins who, with their arrogant, irascible and merciless behaviour, will drive the remaining Albanians away. Then colonists from other regions can be brought in.

This paper deals with the colonization of southern Serbia only. The problem of the Vojvodina, in particular with the Hungarian triangle in Backa, i.e. Senta - Kula - Backa Topola, is however no less important to us. Destroying this triangle in the Vojvodina is indeed just as essential as eradicating the Albanian wedge around the Shar mountains. Tens of thousands of Hungarian farmhands have been left behind since the break-up of the big estates in the Vojvodina and constitute a great burden for the Serbian and German farm owners in the region. Some of these Hungarian and even German farm labourers and small proprietors could be sent to the south because in Backa, on the border with Hungary, they constitute a real threat, all the more so since the Serbs in Backa represent only 25% of the population. In southern Serbia, they would become good citizens by defending their property against Albania and would integrate well into our people. What is more important, since they are more progressive and of a higher cultural level than our peasants, they would provide a good example of advanced farming methods. We stress, however, that Serbs from the Vojvodina should not be sent to the south for colonization. There is still much land to be colonized in the Vojvodina so that they should be given homesteads there instead. It must be noted that in the 1928-1929 period, there was a widespread movement among Hungarians and Germans from the Vojvodina to move to southern Serbia. Not understanding the problem, our authorities were against such a movement and nipped it in the bud. Any such reaction on the part of the government today must be countered, and the public must be instructed to encourage the movement of Hungarians and Germans from the Vojvodina, especially those from Backa, to the south.



The Colonization Apparatus

Of particular importance for the solution of the question under discussion is the existence of a proper apparatus to direct the whole business. The poor work done by the apparatus implementing our colonization strategy in the past was in good part responsible for its failures. To avoid the same mistakes in the future, we must carry out a reorganization.

No other question demands such continuity of implementation as our colonization strategy. We have pointed out that one of the main reasons for the failure of our colonies both in the north and in the south has been the inconsistent work and the vacillations on policy implemented after each change of government. If this is to be avoided in the future, our colonization strategy must be entrusted to the General Staff of the army. Why? Simply for reasons of defence. Our army is intent on settling our people along the borders, especially in the most delicate sectors. To this end, it will do its utmost to secure these borders with the firmest possible settlements. The General Staff, as the prime institution for the defence of our national interests, can contribute a great deal to our colonization strategy as a whole. It will know very well how to protect the colonization strategy from the private interference of those who want to use it for their own personal interests, and from external influence. Another important fact is that it would be easier for the General Staff to convince the responsible bodies of the importance of the issue and to force them to take effective action. The People's Council would have more faith in it and would grant the necessary credits to it more readily than to others.

The General Staff would guide all the work via a government Commission for Colonization. This Commission would be quite independent, though under the direct supervision of the Chief of General Staff, and would have under its control all bodies involved in our colonization strategy. Representatives of various interested ministries, national associations, technical organizations and scholarly institutions would also be made to take part in this Commission.

The greatest mistake of our colonization strategy in the past lay in the fact that the untrained and incompetent bureaucrats had the main say, and dealt with problems only superficially and in a piecemeal manner. We need only recall the settlement campaign carried out by volunteers from Hungary in Ovce Polje and Kadrifikovo, or the emigrants from Istria and Gorica who settled around Demir Kapija. The matter requires close collaboration between the government, private initiative and scholarly institutions. Private initiative can operate in many directions. The People's Defence, the Sokolašas, the Chetnik Associations etc. could take action against the Albanians which would be inappropriate for the state. Associations of agronomists, doctors, engineers and cooperatives etc. could provide valuable assistance with their technical advisors in solving the many problems which will arise during the colonization campaign. Cultural associations, such as Prosveta in Sarajevo, Matica Srbska in Novi Sad, the St. Sava Associations in Belgrade etc. have their role to play, too.

Undoubtedly, our institutions of higher learning have begun to lose the prestige they once had. The main reason for this is that the university and the Academy of Sciences are becoming increasingly estranged from real life and are neglecting their main duty in a relatively backward country such as ours: i. e. paving the way for the application of the scientific achievements of the twentieth century. Many billions would have been saved in this country, many mistakes would have been avoided in our government policy, including our colonization policy, had the problems been studied seriously and objectively in advance by competent scholars before they were taken up for solution. Our policy of colonization, likewise, would have acquired a more serious approach, greater continuity and effective application, had the opinions of experts and scholars been sought in advance. To start with, the Royal Serbian Academy of Sciences and the University of Belgrade ought to take the initiative to organize scientific studies of the whole problem of colonization in our country. This would be feasible for many reasons. At the university we have experts on every aspect of colonization. Teachers and academicians at the university are independent scholars, less subject to external political influence. They already have good experience in such fields and their scholarly work is a guarantee of objectivity. They should, therefore, take the initiative of setting up a colonization institute, the task of which would be to pursue colonization studies. The government, for its part, should detach from the ministries all the institutions which have been engaged with this problem so far, and create a special institution, "The Colonization Inspection Office"

The Colonization Inspection Office would be headed by an Inspector General, appointed by decree on the recommendation of the Minister of War, the Chief of General Staff and the Prime Minister. All the work in the colonization institute and in the Colonization Inspection Office would be carried out on orders from and under the supervision of the government Commission for Colonization, while the Inspector General would be answerable to the Chief of General Staff.

The colonization institute would be divided into the following sections:

1) organization,

2) education and culture,

3) finance,

4) agriculture,

5) construction,

6) hygiene, etc.

In agreement with scientific, cultural and educational associations and institutions, and with national associations, the various sections would study problems of colonization and prepare directives, thus supplying our colonization policy with solid, scientifically elaborated material on the basis of which decisions could be taken. Managing this institute would be people from the Commission for Colonization, including representatives of the above-mentioned ministries, the university, the Academy of Sciences and private, national, education and cultural organizations who would be elected or appointed to this body. In this case, care must be taken not to bring in people just for honour's sake, but only men who love and are dedicated to this great work.

The heads and employees of the institute should be selected by competition. The institute would then supply the Colonization Inspection Office with scientifically elaborated material for the implementation of our colonization strategy. Should differences of opinion arise between the Colonization Inspection Office and the institute over some fundamental question, the Chief of General Staff would have the final say.

The Colonization Inspection Office must have its executive headquarters in the territory and be made up of people selected for their enthusiasm and readiness for this work, whether or not they are employed by the government. They should, if possible, be selected by means of competition and should be appointed upon the proposal of the Chief of General Staff. Compromised or incompetent cadres must be dismissed. During its work, the Colonization Inspection Office and its organs must avoid bureaucracy as much as possible, while keeping in mind one thing only - the expulsion of the Albanians as quickly as possible and resettlement by our colonists.

The police apparatus will play a very important role in this action. It is, therefore, essential to select and second the most energetic and honest officers. Their transfer should be made with the approval of the Chief of General Staff, and for such a difficult job they should be paid from secret loans. Stern measures must be taken against anyone who commits the slightest infraction. A special commissar, who would execute the orders of the state colonization inspector, must be appointed for the whole of the eighteen districts mentioned. The prefects of the districts must be given special, wide-ranging powers for their work, as well as appropriate instructions. Our political parties should be told curtly that rivalry among them during elections in these districts is strictly prohibited, and that any interference by deputies in favour of the Albanians is categorically forbidden.

The government institute and the Colonization Inspection Office would elaborate the technical details for organizing the evacuation of the Albanians and the relocation of our settlers. It would not be bad, perhaps, if another private organization were to be created, in addition to these two official institutions. This private organization would be created out of existing associations and have the task of assisting in the implementation of our colonization strategy through private initiative. It would be best if the federation of our cultural and education associations could take over this job. Its main task would be to coordinate and assist in the promotion of links between them and the colonization institute.



Funding

Whenever our colonization strategy has been criticized for its lack of success, its defenders have always excused themselves with the inadequacy of funds the government has allocated to this work. We do not deny that this has been the case up to a point. It must be said, however, that more has been spent in our country on the maintenance of this apparatus and its irrational activities than on the work of colonization itself. Nevertheless, even though the government has not provided as much as it should have, it must be understood that every country has its own primary and secondary interests to look after. Among a country's primary interests, without doubt, is the maintenance of its rule in regions of national insecurity by colonizing such regions with its own people. All other commitments are of an importance secondary to this. Funds can and must be found to deal with this problem. We have already mentioned the colonization of Toplica and Kosanica and the benefits derived from this. Given that the small Kingdom of Serbia did not hesitate to make great financial sacrifices, indeed did not even hesitate as a free and independent kingdom to seek its first loan for colonization, is it possible that our present-day Yugoslavia would be unable to do the same? It can and must. That it lacks the means to do so, is simply not true.

Let us calculate approximately how much it would cost our country to expel 200,000 Albanians and settle the region with as great a number of our people.

The resettlement of 40,000 Albanian families, taking an average family as having five members and an average of 15,000 dinars for each family, would cost a total of 600 million dinars. The colonization apparatus for the settling of 40,000 Serbian families might reach a total of 200 million dinars. In any case, the whole operation would not cost more than 800 million dinars. This is because:



1. The evacuated Albanians would leave behind not only land, but also their houses and implements. Thus, not only would the overwhelming majority of our colonists be settled in the homes of the Albanians but, with a little assistance in food and livestock, they would soon recover economically and become independent. We stress in this connection that absolutely no private speculation with the possessions left behind by the Albanians would be tolerated. The government must be the one to take control of these possessions and distribute them to the settlers.

2. Military forces should be employed, where required, during the setting up of new colonies, as was the case with the construction of Sremska Raca and the reconstruction of the villages destroyed by the 1931 earthquake. To this end, the army should be given the right and possibility to set up a kind of compulsory labour service for public projects, just as Stambolisky created the Trudova pronist in Bulgaria and Hitler the Arbeitsdienst in Germany, that is, by calling up reservists or extending the term of military service. It would be an especially good idea for our young people, after finishing their training and after graduating from university, to be entrusted with such work. Were this to be the case, many of them, by taking part in constructive activities in the public interest, would become more conscious and look at things from a more realistic perspective. Such a scheme could be carried out easily by giving priority in public service employment to those young people who have spent a specific period of time working on behalf of our colonization strategy. This would also help reduce unemployment among our young intelligentsia, which is an increasingly acute social problem in our country.

3. In collaboration with specialized organizations and associations, we must find the cheapest means of clearing the land of scrub, of irrigating farms, of draining swamps, etc. as well as of constructing homes. Private companies should be informed that, since the government assists them with reduced customs and railway tariffs, loans and other means for the procurement of supplies and material necessary for their work, it also has the right, considering the importance of this action, to insist that such supplies and material be made available at the lowest possible price. Supplies and material should be procured by means of cartels, in agreement with which, the government would specify the quantity, quality and price of the material in question without fictitious deals being involved. Government enterprises, the railways and, in particular, forestry enterprises such as Šipad etc. should be placed at the unrestricted disposal of the government Commission for Colonization.

4. During colonization, the government may grant settlers property on credit or for cash. Many of the settlers will purchase land in the new regions by selling their original property in their place of birth. This will enable the government to recuperate a good portion of the money it has laid out. However, we stress that land must only be sold to persons who give proof that they will settle on it permanently and work it. Land given on credit must not be too expensive. The interest rate must be minimal and repayment should be deferred for several years to give the settlers time to get established, i. e. repayment should only begin when the settlers have sufficient economic strength.

Taking this as a basis, the government, which must cover all administrative expenses for these activities from its normal revenues, can procure funds from two sources. One would be the pruning of unnecessary expenditures and expenditures earmarked for other less urgent sectors. The other possible source of funds would be loans, which would be provided by state banks, alone or with private capital on the basis of a compulsory domestic credit line. This would be backed up by securities issued by the government as well as by contributions from the settlers themselves when they become independent.

It might not be a bad idea if the financing and purchasing of land were to be arranged by agricultural banks working in collaboration with co-operatives under the direct supervision and direction of the government Commission for Colonization. However, it is still too early to make any definitive pronouncement on this matter because the conditions under which Turkey will accept the population displaced from our territories are not yet known.

Taken altogether, the sum of a few hundred million dinars is no great expense for the government when compared to the real benefits gained from such an action. By securing the most sensitive regions in the south of our country for our own people, we could save the lives of several divisions in case of war. Giving land to several tens of thousands of families from economically weaker regions, Montenegro in particular, would, on the one hand, help ease the appalling economic suffering of such regions and, on the other hand, create many new jobs during the process of colonization. It would be possible to find employment for 10,000 workers, thus giving a boost to our sluggish economy.

In view of the supreme national, military, strategic and economic significance of this action, it is clearly the duty of the government to sacrifice a few hundred million dinars. At a time when the government can spend one billion dinars on the construction of an international highway from Subotica to Caribrod, the possible benefits of which we shall only enjoy at some time in the distant future, it can and must be in a position to come up with a few hundred million dinars to give us back possession of the cradle of our nation.



Conclusions

In view of all that has been said, it is no coincidence that in our examination of colonization in the south, we hold the view that the only effective means of solving this problem is the mass expulsion of the Albanians. Gradual colonization has had no success in our country, nor in other countries for that matter. If the state wishes to intervene in favour of its own people in the struggle for land, it can only be successful by acting brutally. Otherwise, the native, who has his roots in his place of birth and is at home there, will always be stronger than the colonist. In our case, we must keep this fact very much in mind, because we have to do with a hardy, resistant and prolific race which the late Cvijic described as being the most expansive in the Balkans. From 1870 to 1914, Germany spent billions of marks on the gradual colonization of its eastern territories by purchasing land from the Poles, but the fecundity of Polish women defeated German organization and money. Thus, Poland regained its Poznan in 1918. Our above-mentioned statistics of the 1921-1931 period show that it was the fecundity of Albanian women which defeated our colonization policy, too. We must draw our conclusions from this, and we must do so quickly while there is still time to correct matters.

All of Europe is in a state of turmoil. We do not know what each new day and night will bring. Albanian nationalism is on the rise in our territories, too. Should a global conflict or social revolution occur, both of which are possible in the near future, leaving the situation as it is would jeopardize all our territories in the south. The purpose of this paper is to avert such an occurrence.

If this is not the proof you want i do not know what to say more

Man, you don't need to provide the whole text. It gives me chills just to think that there were actual people who took their time to write down such horrible plans.

[Vullkan]

Incorrect. I can name Croats, Germans, White Americans, Israelis and North Sudanese off the top of my head.

not accademically.its more wronger.means scientist and accademics people who are belived to be the wised desire extermiantion of human population.

[Minesweeper]

I guess I should throw myself to reading now. xD

[Vullkan]

Man, you don't need to provide the whole text. It gives me chills just to think that there were actual people who took their time to write down such horrible plans.

Well serbs are sick bastards the weather is nice today

[armenianbodyhair]

not accademically.its more wronger.means scientist and accademics people who are belived to be the wised desire extermiantion of human population.
Okay, then I will take South Sudanese away. The rest stay.

[Vullkan]

Funny is that albanians provided safe passage to serbs when austro hungary attacked them.

They provided safe passage to their butchers.

The serbs repayed with more killing and ethnic cleansing.

All the serbian army went through albanian and was evacuated through durres.

that shows how noble albanians are we never attacked any country we simply wanted to live our lives.

[Minesweeper]

Kiddo is on fire tonight. :D

[Arbërori]

It's a much more complicated matter. The people itself want it and will achieve it but in due time. The politicians and world powers on the other hand have their own plans. There is an initial goal of keeping the Balkans in distress, so they can control it easier. Kind of why many ethnic territories around the world are turning into laughable provinces instead of uniting with their mother state.

[The Illyrian Warrior]

Irredentism of any kind almost always involves criminal behavior under international law, so technically you're wrong. Sorry bud.

What do you call irredentism here? Declaration of independence recognized by majority of UN member states which also according ICJ hasn't violate any international laws.

The court delivered its advisory opinion on 22 July 2010; by a vote of 10 to 4, it declared that "the adoption of the declaration of independence of the 17 February 2008 did not violate general international law because international law contains no 'prohibition on declarations of independence'":[2] nor did the adoption of the declaration of independence violate UN Security Council Resolution 1244, since this did not describe Kosovo's final status, nor had the Security Council reserved for itself the decision on final status.

Or about union with Albania where two nations would hold a referendum and if majority of people from both nations vote in favor then no law was broken since doesn't state anywhere that's illegitimate for two state to willingly unite, the only hurdle which stops juridically speaking is the fact Kosova is still not a full UN member state...Before giving emotional statement you should know if irredentism is supported anywhere beside from Serbia jurisdiction.

[Vullkan]

yeah i am on fire ;p

[Don Arb]

They exclude albanians from Macedonia, screw them.

[armenianbodyhair]

What do you call irredentism here? Declaration of independence recognized by majority of UN member states which also according ICJ hasn't violate any international laws.
You should really have read my post in context...or at all....for that matter before you tried to start an argument with me lol


Or about union with Albania where two nations would hold a referendum and if majority of people from both nations vote in favor then no law was broken since doesn't state anywhere that's illegitimate for two state to willingly unite, the only hurdle which stops juridically speaking is the fact Kosova is still not a full UN member state...Before giving emotional statement you should know if irredentism is supported anywhere beside from Serbia jurisdiction.
Please, Albanians are famous for irredentist attitudes, but as long as your allies are the stronger side your crimes will be overlooked, even if they blatantly violate human rights. This is how its works and has always worked, stop pretending Albania is innocent of typical Balkan douchebaggery, they are not. Its pathetic. So far Albos are the only ones making emotional responses and false accusations. So please, accuse me again of condoning war crimes while Albos in this thread have already called Serbs subhuman and that they should be wiped off the face of the earth, it really shows your appeal to logical, fairness, and reason.

[Arbërori]

They exclude albanians from Macedonia, screw them.

We will soon have our own country... :eyes

[Vullkan]

Albanians in macedonia are the most working albanians my opinion.

[The Illyrian Warrior]

You should really have read my post in context...or at all....for that matter before you tried to start an argument with me lol

For what I understood you assume that union with Albania is irredentist however I explained why shouldn't be a problem, ofc the only thing which stops from uniting two nations is, Kosova not being a full UN member state or people voting against union in eventual referendum and no criminal behavior would this bring, if you worry about Serbs then I careless if they go apeshit mad........I'm not such a douchey to reply on that thread before since you were so emotional so I left with that, however I see you like to snitch in different section other then Serbia and again playing the knowledgeable role.


Please, Albanians are famous for irredentist attitudes, but as long as your allies are the stronger side your crimes will be overlooked, even if they blatantly violate human rights. This is how its works and has always worked, stop pretending Albania is innocent of typical Balkan douchebaggery, they are not. Its pathetic. So far Albos are the only ones making emotional responses and false accusations. So please, accuse me again of condoning war crimes while Albos in this thread have already called Serbs subhuman and that they should be wiped off the face of the earth, it really shows your appeal to logical, fairness, and reason.

Oh please, our irredentism is ten times more excused then screaming coming from your compatriots in Bosnia for a union with Serbia which for many stay a genocidal sponsored entity without independent status different from Kosova, also you make crimes against Serbs appear bigger then they are but apparently you fail to see the beginning of chronology who started the mess up, if I'm not mistaken you had governance of territory of Kosova, controlled resources, had power in whole ex-Yugoslavia, inherited Yugoslavia army from weapons, tanks, aircraft and whatnot, but still you weren't satisfied with what you had instead start whole damn thing up and wanted the ethnic cleansing over Kosova and other republics, your excuse doesn't make any sense cause if it weren't for chauvinistic policy of Millosevic you would even control Kosova today but eagerness left you without Kosova so better swallow your own medicine now.

Look davai, and your innocent crew how many irrelevant bashing thread have made against Albanians then talk who do false accusations along with how far reasoning skills of Serbs can go.

[armenianbodyhair]

For what I understood you assume that union with Albania is irredentist however I explained why shouldn't be a problem, ofc the only thing which stops from uniting two nations is, Kosova not being a full UN member state or people voting against union in eventual referendum and no criminal behavior would this bring, if you worry about Serbs then I careless if they go apeshit mad........I'm not such a douchey to reply on that thread before since you were so emotional so I left with that, however I see you like to snitch in different section other then Serbia and again playing the knowledgeable role.
You incorrectly accused me of condoning genocide, I have a right to be angry. And no, I implied that the idea of a greater albania is irredentist and will lead only to violent conflict. LEARN TO READ.



Oh please, our irredentism is ten times more excused then screaming coming from your compatriots in Bosnia for a union with Serbia
Incorrect

also you make crimes against Serbs appear bigger then they are
Incorrect

but apparently you fail to see the beginning of chronology who started the mess up
Incorrect

if I'm not mistaken you had governance of territory of Kosova, controlled resources, had power in whole ex-Yugoslavia, inherited Yugoslavia army from weapons, tanks, aircraft and whatnot, but still you weren't satisfied with what you had instead start whole damn thing up and wanted the ethnic cleansing over Kosova and other republics, your excuse doesn't make any sense cause if it weren't for chauvinistic policy of Millosevic you would even control Kosova today but eagerness left you without Kosova so better swallow your own medicine now.
I have literally nothing to do with Kosovo, faggot.

Look davai, and your innocent crew how many irrelevant bashing thread have made against Albanians then talk who do false accusations along with how far reasoning skills of Serbs can go.I have never once defended davai. Get your facts straight before you come at me with all this estrogen.

[The Illyrian Warrior]

You incorrectly accused me of condoning genocide, I have a right to be angry. And no, I implied that the idea of a greater albania is irredentist and will lead only to violent conflict. LEARN TO READ.



Incorrect

Incorrect

Incorrect

I have literally nothing to do with Kosovo, faggot.
I have never once defended davai. Get your facts straight before you come at me with all this estrogen.

My accusation of you condoning genocide is not anywhere sweety just you disagreement to admit that genocide took place if your referring the post I made yesterday, separate things ffs its not my fault you cant distinguish things up and go all butthurt yet accuse me for not paying much attention to posts LMAO....What you personally think or any Serb is least of my concern if you wish commit seppuku, all of y'a, I don't give a fuck, but for sure your people wouldn't be able to stop unification of two independent state willing, so better get used to it already.


Incorrect

Incorrect

Incorrect

Basically nothing to reply above, just *I disagree because I don't wanna agree* :D


I have literally nothing to do with Kosovo, faggot.
I have never once defended davai. Get your facts straight before you come at me with all this estrogen.

So the fuck you say I don't have nothing to do with Kosova cause from very moment you showed up and say its illegitimate for supposed greater Albania to be created involvement is loud and clear.

You better defend him cause I see your getting closer each day, LMAO about estrogen, just one of those cheap shots I rather skip cause I see periods, alcohol left you quite in rage. :D

[Abeja]

My accusation of you condoning genocide is not anywhere sweety just you disagreement to admit that genocide took place if your referring the post I made yesterday, separate things ffs its not my fault you cant distinguish things up and go all butthurt yet accuse me for not paying much attention to posts LMAO....What you personally think or any Serb is least of my concern if you wish commit seppuku, all of y'a, I don't give a fuck, but for sure your people wouldn't be able to stop unification of two independent state willing, so better get used to it already.



Basically nothing to reply above, just *I disagree because I don't wanna agree* :D



So the fuck you say I don't have nothing to do with Kosova cause from very moment you showed up and say its illegitimate for supposed greater Albania to be created involvement is loud and clear.

You better defend him cause I see your getting closer each day, LMAO about estrogen, just one of those cheap shots I rather skip cause I see periods, alcohol left you quite in rage. :D

Illyrian I think this discussion it's useless. WOG is a fine girl, and probably doesn't even care much about things there. Direct your energy against the proper serbs like davai or novi pazar ;)

[Shqipez]

Irredentism of any kind almost always involves criminal behavior under international law, so technically you're wrong. Sorry bud.

Yeah, so what happened in 1912 to Albanian lands was a crime? Exactly. It's good we agree. You also need to study some more history instead of riding that Serbian dick.

Take the Malsors for example, they freed most of northern Albania from the Ottomans, yet half of it was given to montenegro, lol.. but majority is Albanian..... this is just an example of one of the crimes committed against Albanians.

[Shqipez]

Greater Albania/Ethnic Albania.. to me, honestly, it's the same meaning. They just try to make it sound like its a crime, with the first one having a derogatory meaning. Most Kosovo Serbs cannot trace their ancestry in kosovo more than 100 years. most of them came in 1930's. in 1912, the majority of kosovo was albanian, but was given to Serbia. that's when deportations of kosovar albanians started, done by yugoslav authorities. And Serbs started inhabiting kosovo. Millions of Albanians from 1912 to 1960's were deported to Turkey. Yet Kosovo still remained majorly Albanian.. You can talk how Serbs lived there before Ottoman conquest, yeah, they might not even of been Serbs but rather belonged to Serb orthodox religion and were written down as Serbs even though they weren't... I could also talk about how ancestors of Albanians lived there before Roman conquest and Slavic conquest and Ottoman conquest... I could also talk how Albanians lived there in metohija during the reign of the Dukagjini family, that was around 15th century and the area around there became again majorly catholic, that's where the Albanian Kanun Law comes from: ''Kanuni Leke Dukagjinit'' . Albanians call Metohija for Dukagjini. Its from the Dukagjini family.

Also, Ottomans were not friends of the Albanians. They planned on massacring the Albanians the same way they did to the Armenians. I don't see how a population could of magically taken over a country. It's bullshit propganda. Allot of Kosovars are indegenous to Kosovo, they might of converted to orthodox christianity and been written down as Serbs by Serb authorities from there they converted to Islam, in between they might of been catholics too. take the Kastrioti family for example who were not even Kosovars, but its claimed Pal Kastrioti's ancestry might of come from Kosovo: Gjon Kastrioti was sometimes orthodox and sometimes catholic, he changed religion allot of times. the Serbian nation is based on Serbian orthodoxy rather than ethnicity. the proto-serbs who came from poland area were an ethnicity, but they were already majorly mixed prior to their arrival to the balkans.

It's the same with the greeks, during byzantium empire, allot of Orthodox Albanians were written down as ''grecian'' or called ''grecian''... it's simply a person of greek orthodox religion but not by ethnicity.

[Shqipez]

Do you realize Kosovo has been majorly Albanian for 100++ years? since 1912 to 1998 it's been under slavic rule mostly.. yet all those years it remained, and still remains, majorly Albanian.

[Caballero]

The first and foremost thing we need to do is to get rid of "Kosovo" ethnonym and embrace it's ancient name of Dardania. I thing that for the moment that's the only viable option.

[Shqipez]

You incorrectly accused me of condoning genocide, I have a right to be angry. And no, I implied that the idea of a greater albania is irredentist and will lead only to violent conflict. LEARN TO READ.



It won't lead to violent conflict because it is irredentist, not at all.. a country majorly Albanian has the right to be part of Albanian lands. Same goes for all other Albanian inhabited lands, like South Montenegro.. Only thing that will lead to violence is jealousy from the enemy, but that is their fucking problem. Why should Kosovo not unite with Albania? You actually think it's gonna be given to Serbs again? Are you nuts? There is gonna be a fucking war before that happens and I'm gonna be there. You think it's gonna stay an own country? Honey, as I said earlier in my above posts, it's been majorly Albanian for 100+ years during Serbian rule at the same time as Serbs tried to make it Serbian.

[Shqipez]

Most of north and western Macedonia, which was part of Kosovo vilajet, majorly Albanian population with Shkup (Skopje) as it's capital city, akin to ancient Dardania, was given to Bulgarians who already before conquered the rest of todays Macedonia.. yes I call them Bulgarians, who created their own identity and used the name of an ancient nation they have nothing to do with. this is also another example of crime against Albanians.

[Shqipez]

Madrid is not a Spanish city in many ways. More like the Spanish Branch of the Global Republic. The Capital of the Basque provinces , city of Vitoria, is acity governed by conservative Spanish unionists (PP) since the beginning of elections. Yet Basques chose it to be its capital nevertheless in fears that it would become a second Rioja or Navarra (The province of Vitoria (Alaba) its quite divided between the pro-basque shires near Biscay and the pro-Spanish areas Neighbouring Castile.

To complicate things even more, there are some Castilian towns, particularly the very important town of Miranda de Ebro, were a part of its population wants to separate and become a Basque town. So yeah, XIXth century ideolgies screwed everyone up.

Back to topic, when did Albanians become a majority in Kosovo?

Who lived in ''Kosovo'' before Romans, Slavs and Ottomans came? What was this region called? Who's language today is the most connected with these ancient people? I can answer these questions for you if you would like.

When did Serbs become a majority in Kosovo? Were they even Serbs or just Serb-orthodoxy converts? Allot of statistical data about populations are based on religion rather than ethnicity, atleast on the Serbian side and the Greek side. Albanians on the other hand do not identify with a certain religion, which Serbs and greeks do. It's a fact that Serbs and Greeks call(ed) their muslims, or any other muslim, for Turks and deported them to Turkey. The claim that Albanians only formed a majority 150 years ago is false. My point was, after Ottoman conquest, it was given to Serbs while majority was Albanian, and for 100+ years ( to ca.1998) it was under Serbian rule, it has been still, since 1912, majorly Albania while controlled by Serbs. Add to the fact the ethnic cleansing that has been going on by Serb authorities. It's kind of the same thing going on in Preshevo (Presheva). The majority is Albanian there but the police is Serb who commit crimes against the local population, the same thing was going on during 1912 - 1998. Trust of police during those times was very slim.. I don't see why Presheva shouldn't unite with Kosovo...

[The.Mask]

Have heard from numerous sources that Albanians in Kosovo slowly became a majority by emigrating from other Albanian areas over the last 150 years or so in some sort of slow and gradual population replacement. Serbs claim that Kosovo is to them a sort of Kievan Rus; the foundation of the Serbian nation

What is the Albanian version of the story?

No trolling btw. Honest curiosity.

http://img11.hostingpics.net/pics/897588kosovo.jpg

I prefer this than explain you what happened later with the slavization of Orthodox Albanians of Kosovo etc..

[Dombra]

The first and foremost thing we need to do is to get rid of "Kosovo" ethnonym and embrace it's ancient name of Dardania. I thing that for the moment that's the only viable option.

Dardania sounds nicer :) The name Kosovo is synonymous with criminals where I live

[Caballero]

Dardania sounds nicer :)

Yes it does. :)


The name Kosovo is synonymous with criminals where I live

Unfortunately, perhaps it does. I don't know in what context you said, Kosovo as per the country or Kosovar-Albanian immigrants there?

Probably some low class immigrants were are acting cocky. But hey, they were cocky here too. But i suppose newer generations are less crime prone and more educated.

[armenianbodyhair]

It won't lead to violent conflict because it is irredentist, not at all.. a country majorly Albanian has the right to be part of Albanian lands. Same goes for all other Albanian inhabited lands, like South Montenegro.. Only thing that will lead to violence is jealousy from the enemy, but that is their fucking problem. Why should Kosovo not unite with Albania? You actually think it's gonna be given to Serbs again? Are you nuts? There is gonna be a fucking war before that happens and I'm gonna be there. You think it's gonna stay an own country? Honey, as I said earlier in my above posts, it's been majorly Albanian for 100+ years during Serbian rule at the same time as Serbs tried to make it Serbian.
You're seriously one of the biggest retards on here. Stop putting words in my mouth faggot. The KLA is the epitome of irredentist crap, and if you continue to commit violence elsewhere your allies will have a hard time justifying support for you.

[Sideritis]

Dardania sounds nicer :) The name Kosovo is synonymous with criminals where I live

Nooo don't tell me.lel The name Serbia( for example) is synonym to hard working people, lel, or to the Juggemaffian, Serbiska Brödraskap, Västberga helicopter robbery, or the guy who killed Anna Lindt, let alone the benevolent serbian gangsta who wanted to frame the Kings itself with strip pictures.:p lol
My point being, most Ex-Yugos are not associated to smth good where you live. Now things are better.

[Peter Nirsch]

why not to Macedonia or Bulgaria?

[Minesweeper]

The claim that Albanians only formed a majority 150 years ago is false.

Where is the evidence showing Albanians had majority in Kosovo before second half of 19. century? You can claim anything like this.

[Caballero]

You're seriously one of the biggest retards on here. Stop putting words in my mouth faggot. The KLA is the epitome of irredentist crap, and if you continue to commit violence elsewhere your allies will have a hard time justifying support for you.

So, what kind of violence are we talking to? The Serbs closed well the last chapter of the 20th century with their actions. They even massacred their own kind.

[Shqipez]

You're seriously one of the biggest retards on here. Stop putting words in my mouth faggot. The KLA is the epitome of irredentist crap, and if you continue to commit violence elsewhere your allies will have a hard time justifying support for you.

Those are not very nice words coming from a girl ;) Yeah, I'm such a retard because you don't agree with me. How do I put words in your mouth? Those in power do what they want to do. They even write history how they wanna write it. They did what they wanted to do in 1912, and it was a crime. But somehow what we wanna do is irredentist because it doesn't suit your interests. go back to sleep, honey ;)

U just mad because I thumbed you down? Even writing on my wall, U must be so mad right now. :D I think I rustled someones jimmies :D

[Shqipez]

Where is the evidence showing Albanians had majority in Kosovo before second half of 19. century? You can claim anything like this.

Where is the evidence that Serbs formed ever the majority? Putting people down as ''Serbs'' or calling them that due to orthodox religion is pointless. There was a time when allot, or most, of Albanians were Orthodox Christians and they were referred to as Serbs and Greeks, the same goes for Vlachs. Just take a look at some of the saints Serbian Orthodoxy has, some of them are Albanians. Like Saint Angjelina. Albanians co-existed among Slavs and Greeks, but that doesn't make them so.

I don't even think Albanians had officially Albanian names at one point in time. but rather used slavic, latin and greek names.. and spoke in those languages to communicate with the non-albanian population simply because they were under rule, they were indegenous people with no official land. There was Serbian Orthodox empire, Byzantium Empire and then there Was Bulgarian empire... Albanians still existed as an identity, just not officially recognized. How else do you explain the Albanian language? A language like that, which is its own branch within the indo-european family couldn't just of popped out like that, or else it would be closely related to other languages in the balkans, but it's rather very old.

This is my theory that Albanians under these empires, existed like the Samis do in Scandinavia and Like some of the other idegenous people around the world do. Albanians must of lived in the mountains allot. It's not just a theory, it's a fact.

[Ballist]

If Kosovo unites with Albania, Ilirida is next. We won't stop just there. They know that. Presheva would probably be next. I also saw a video of some guys with ski masks and Kalashnikovs calling themselves some radical nationalist Malsor group. As for Chameria...I don't know. It would be difficult to defeat the Greek military considering they spend a shitload on military stuff, maybe Turkey can assist us with that. In reality, KS and Albania don't unite because the politicians don't allow it. The stupid ass KS government wants Kosovo to be "multiethnic" xD. And Albania's government has been more open to KS joining, but sometimes it acts gay, too. I also heard that the two governments signed a deal so that they can't join. All of those lives lost, just so we can only be independent and not part of Albania. That is spitting on the blood from those who fought from Illyrian times to 1999. This is such a big injustice, the powers divided us mindlessly during the London Conference of 1913. They did the same thing with India and Pakistan, and now the two fight for the same reason. The borders were ridiculously drawn out.

Then again, the Russians and French (surprising, right?) proposed for Albania to be smaller than what we know it as today.

[Minesweeper]

Where is the evidence that Serbs formed ever the majority? Putting people down as ''Serbs'' or calling them that due to orthodox religion is pointless. There was a time when allot, or most, of Albanians were Orthodox Christians and they were referred to as Serbs and Greeks, the same goes for Vlachs. Just take a look at some of the saints Serbian Orthodoxy has, some of them are Albanians. Like Saint Angjelina. Albanians co-existed among Slavs and Greeks, but that doesn't make them so.

I don't even think Albanians had officially Albanian names at one point in time. but rather used slavic, latin and greek names.. and spoke in those languages to communicate with the non-albanian population simply because they were under rule, they were indegenous people with no official land. There was Serbian Orthodox empire, Byzantium Empire and then there Was Bulgarian empire... Albanians still existed as an identity, just not officially recognized. How else do you explain the Albanian language? A language like that, which is its own branch within the indo-european family couldn't just of popped out like that, or else it would be closely related to other languages in the balkans, but it's rather very old.

This is my theory that Albanians under these empires, existed like the Samis do in Scandinavia and Like some of the other idegenous people around the world do. Albanians must of lived in the mountains allot. It's not just a theory, it's a fact.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De%C4%8Dani_chrysobulls

14. century, to start with. I have more. Or perhaps you believe this is also Serbian propaganda?

First time Albanians are spotted as majority in what is today Kosovo is in late 19. century, fact.

[Era]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De%C4%8Dani_chrysobulls

14. century, to start with. I have more. Or perhaps you believe this is also Serbian propaganda?

First time Albanians are spotted as majority in what is today Kosovo is in late 19. century, fact.



Wow Serbian sources, they look very credible. :rolleyes:

It doesnt matter really, even if temporary Serbs had majority in certain areas doesnt mean anything. They were still occupiers like Turks, Bulgarians and the like. If some of them stayed they certainly dont belong there.

[Minesweeper]

Wow Serbian sources, they look very credible. :rolleyes:

It doesnt matter really, even if temporary Serbs had majority in certain areas doesnt mean anything. They were still occupiers like Turks, Bulgarians and the like. If some of them stayed they certainly dont belong there.

I don't care do you find them credibile or not.

[Shqipez]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De%C4%8Dani_chrysobulls

14. century, to start with. I have more. Or perhaps you believe this is also Serbian propaganda?

First time Albanians are spotted as majority in what is today Kosovo is in late 19. century, fact.



And that's the funniest part. the statistics show Albanians still lived there. But somehow Serbs claim Albanians did not live there when they came... not a single one apparently :D Metohija in 15th century was under Dukagjini family and the region must of been majorly Albanian at that time and Catholic. I think it was at this time north Albanians converted to catholism, before they were Orthodox Christians, belonging both to Greek and Serbian orthodoxy.


signed by Stephen Uroš III Dečanski of Serbia, the Serbian King, which contains a detailed list of households and villages in what is today Metohija and northwestern Albania.

So Serbs formed a majority in both metohija and north-west albania? lol, interesting :D It just proves my point about religion. No Albanians were fused into the Serb population? Only vlachs apparently? This can easily be disproven. There are more Serbs with Albanian origin than the opposite. The Serbian kingdom fused in allot of indegenous population, especially Albanians. What regions were majorly Albanian then if not even in north-albania where you claim we all came from? You have to take into consideration that Serbs were occupiers in these regions, as has been said. Neither can it include every single inhabitant but rather it shows demographics of low land villages. As it has been said before, Albanians were highlanders, and still call themselves so.. the word Malsor means highlander.

Also what you posted doesn't show demographics of east Kosovo either. neither of south-albania.. while in another thread it is claimed Albanians are not indegenous to Epirus but came from north, while here you are implying they came from the south? the geg and tosk split precedes the Serb and Croat immigration to the balkans, meaning Albanians lived both, north and south, prior to slavic immigrations and are with this conclusion; indegenous to both, as they are the descendants of surviving Illyrians.

[The Illyrian Warrior]

Wow Serbian sources, they look very credible. :rolleyes:

It doesnt matter really, even if temporary Serbs had majority in certain areas doesnt mean anything. They were still occupiers like Turks, Bulgarians and the like. If some of them stayed they certainly dont belong there.

Middle age is sacred period for Serbs cause there was spread en-mass of Slavs in Kosova however shall remind themselves autochthony is not about Middle age rather goes further back before they even set foot in Balkans....Therefore when hearing Serbs claim their historical right on Kosova just because they've settle down like gypos in this period is outstandingly retarded and hilarious to say the least.

[Minesweeper]

And that's the funniest part. the statistics show Albanians still lived there. But somehow Serbs claim they did not live there when they came... not a single one apparently :D



So Serbs formed a majority in both metohija and north-west albania? lol, interesting :D It just proves my point about religion. What regions were majorly Albanian then if not even in north-albania? You have to take into consideration that Serbs were occupiers in these regions, as has been said.

Part of the text you quoted gives an answer to your first funny observation.

We don't know what parts of NW Albania or even Metohija, Skadar, for example is a city Serbian epic poetry sings about the most or at least among the most mentioned cities and has Serbian minority even today after decades of forces assimilation. And the difference between Serbs and Albanians in that document was made according to their names, not religion.

[Minesweeper]

Middle age is sacred period for Serbs cause there was spread en-mass of Slavs in Kosova however shall remind themselves autochthony is not about Middle age rather goes further back before they even set foot in Balkans....Therefore when hearing Serbs claim their historical right on Kosova just because they've settle down like gypos in this period is outstandingly retarded and hilarious to say the least.

I already explained it, Slavs assimilated what was left of local population when they settled. Ancients inhabitants of Kosovo were slavicized and their descendants are now everything but Albanian. Serbian genes are Balkanic as much as Slavic. That is something you easily tend to forget.


If I am wrong here, give me a different theory and try to prove it.

[Era]

I already explained it, Slavs assimilated what was left of local population when they settled. Ancients inhabitants of Kosovo were slavicized and their descendants are now everything but Albanian. Serbian genes are Balkanic as much as Slavic. That is something you easily tend to forget.


If I am wrong here, give me a different theory and try to prove it.

What do you mean what was left? Did they dissapear, what happened to them? Just because there was a Serbian kingdom, or a Bulgarian kingdom or Ottoman empire that doesnt mean the ethnic makeup of the popullation completely changed. Those were just loose political entities anyway.

[Minesweeper]

What do you mean what was left? Did they dissapear, what happened to them? Just because there was a Serbian kingdom, or a Bulgarian kingdom or Ottoman empire that doesnt mean the ethnic makeup of the popullation completely changed. Those were just loose political entities anyway.

If I'm not mistaken, the local population in times of Slavic migration was lower than same population few centuries ago but that is essentially irrelevant.

[Shqipez]

I already explained it, Slavs assimilated what was left of local population when they settled. Ancients inhabitants of Kosovo were slavicized and their descendants are now everything but Albanian. Serbian genes are Balkanic as much as Slavic. That is something you easily tend to forget.


If I am wrong here, give me a different theory and try to prove it.

You're just lying to yourself when you make such a claim. There is no proof that the whole indegenous population disappeared into slavs, every single one? No. Albanians existed in the highlands which explains their existence, rather than being asimilated. there is a reason why Albanians still exist to this day. As can be said for some Vlachs who have become highlanders, although I'm not 100% sure of their origin, it's highly mixed. the indegenous population weren't all romance speaking either, Albanians are an attest to that, add that with highlander life and it explains it easily.

As for Balkan genes, must of the indegenous genes that Serbs have, which are not considered slavic, are high in Albanians. and exist in Serbs and all south slavs too... while slavic associated Y-dna haplogroups, which are highest in Croats, Bosniaks and Serbs, are lower in Albanians. How doesn't this show you aborbed allot of indegenous blood (Albanian) ? Yet imply it has nothing to do with Albanians xD but most of it is EV-13 though, j2 and r1b I think lacks in Serbs, croats and Bosniaks if i'm not mistaken?

As I said before, most of those demographics are from Serb sources and include mostly villages in low lands.

Are you implying Albanians did not exist in the balkans prior to slavs? I have tons of examples that they did way before the slavs. I also updated my posts above which might answer some of your claims.

[Era]

If I'm not mistaken, the local population in times of Slavic migration was lower than same population few centuries ago but that is essentially irrelevant.

Why was it lower? Because of the slavic occupation there was a loss of people however it doesnt mean the place was empty ready for slavs to inhabitate. That was a most coveted area from both geographic and climateric point of view. It makes no sense to have been less inhabitated than the areas around it.

[Minesweeper]

You're just lying to yourself when you make such a claim. There is no proof that the whole indegenous population disappeared into slavs, every single one? No. Albanians existed in the highlands which explains their existence, rather than being asimilated. there is a reason why Albanians still exist to this day. As can be said for some Vlachs who have become highlanders, although I'm not 100% sure of their origin, it's highly mixed. the indegenous population weren't all romance speaking either, Albanians are an attest to that, and that with highlander life and it explains it easily.

As for Balkan genes, must of the indegenous genes that Serbs have, which are not considered slavic, are high in Albanians. and exist in Serbs and all south slavs too... while slavic associated Y-dna haplogroups, which are highest in Croats, Bosniaks and Serbs, are lower in Albanians. How doesn't this show you aborbed allot of indegenous blood (Albanian) ? Yet imply it has nothing to do with Albanians xD but most of it is EV-13 though, j2 and r1b I think lacks in Serbs, croats and Bosniaks if i'm not mistaken?

As I said before, most of those demographics are from Serb sources and include mostly villages in low lands.

Are you implying Albanians did not exist in the balkans prior to slavs? I have tons of examples that they did way before the slavs. I also updated my posts above which might answer some of your claims.

Well I initially asked, give me evidence showing that ancient inhabitants of Kosovo migrated to modern day Albania. If they did and avoided slavization, then Albanians would have right to claim Kosovo on historical right. If not, you simply don't have such right. I wonder how many times I have to explain this.

You have such evidences, post them. If you don't, spare me of your comments because we are returning to same question over and over and it's damn boring.

[Shqipez]

Even genetic studies are a proof that all indegenous populations did not disappear into slavs. Take R1a and I2a for example, it's accepted it came with immigrations, slavs, goths, sarmatians etc. who were already a pile of mix. Most of these are lower in Albanians, yet prevail among the south slavic population, but what is high in Albanians is also in allot of south slavs high... which explains, the indegenous people you asimilated carried the same genes as Albanians.. that's where you got these y-dna haplogroups from.

You fused in allot of Albanians too. As I have shows some examples, such as Serbian orthodoxy with its Albanian saints.

[Shqipez]

Well I initially asked, give me evidence showing that ancient inhabitants of Kosovo migrated to modern day Albania. If they did and avoided slavization, then Albanians would have right to claim Kosovo on historical right. If not, you simply don't have such right. I wonder how many times I have to explain this.

You have such evidences, post them. If you don't, spare me of your comments because we are returning to same question over and over and it's damn boring.

You just posted a link that basically said it. and I doubt it includes highlands... So how did they get there if they were not there before Serbs? the Link you posted shows Serbian demographics of West Kosovo (DUKAGJINI/METOHIJA) And North west-Albania (Malesia).. how could Serbs be dominant population here in north-Albania where you claim all Albanians somehow came from? Where did Albanians come from then? From the south? As I said before, the geg and tosk split precedes the slavic immigration, meaning Albanians lived as they live today before Slavs came... Geg and Tosks existed before slavs came...

You're just trying to twist it. Serbs are the occupiers and are historically documented of coming to the balkans, and settling these areas... Albanians are not. there is no historical document, yet somehow you imply Albanians were not there first.. I have already asnwered allot of your questions as I have updated my posts above...

[The Illyrian Warrior]

I already explained it, Slavs assimilated what was left of local population when they settled. Ancients inhabitants of Kosovo were slavicized and their descendants are now everything but Albanian. Serbian genes are Balkanic as much as Slavic. That is something you easily tend to forget.


If I am wrong here, give me a different theory and try to prove it.

LMAO, Bitch please, provide me a link that Serbs are Illyrian or Dardanian to back up your claim otherwise live with the fact you you speak Slavic language, share similar culture with other Slavs and whatnot else, so forget you can't have two things at same time just because are appealing to you, in fact you're the ones to blame for extinction of Thracian culture and almost near extinction of Illyrian, also you're the ones who refer yourself Slavs now get out from delusional shell cause no one in right mind would refer yourselves ancient Balkanite just because some admixture you might have.

As always you guys are pathetic with excuses, deal with the fact you're newcomers as gypos.

[Shqipez]

the Albanian language is also an attest to what I'm saying. it has loan words, from both latin and greek, that pre-dates the slavic immigrations to the balkans. especially from latin, which was north of the jireck line, both from west and east romance.. It's even been suggested the word Shqiptar comes from the latin word Excipio, which means to speak or to pronounce (Shqipoj)... something like that. You're going nowhere here with your implications.. you just posted a link that claims Serbs were majority in north-Albania where you claim we immigrated from to other areas..

Add to the fact that greek mythology is identical to Albanian mythology, as is Illyrian mythology.. Illyrians believed in greek-like mythology. They found a coin from the Messapians which pictures the greek god Hercules on it.

Which shows, early influence from both, greek and latin, that: Albanians lived both; south and north.. as they always did.. geg and tosk.. and are mostly descendants of surviving Illyrians around the areas they inhabit today.

[Minesweeper]

LMAO, Bitch please, provide me a link that Serbs are Illyrian or Dardanian to back up your claim otherwise live with the fact you you speak Slavic language, share similar culture with other Slavs and whatnot else, so forget you can't have two things at same time just because are appealing to you, in fact you're the ones to blame for extinction of Thracian culture and almost near extinction of Illyrian, beside you're the ones who refer yourself Slavs now get out from delusional shell cause no one in right mind would refer yourselves ancient Balkanite just because some admixture you might have.


We are Slavs and nothing more than that, the fact we assimilated ancient population does not change it. Slavs are linguistic group. We are not and we don't want to be Illyrians or Dardanians. Our Balkanic admixture comes from ancient population that lived in territories we settled and who were assimilated by Slavs and now are Slavic speakers.

Your ability to logically conclude from my posts is shockingly blunt.

[Shqipez]

You need to prove to me how slavs asimilated all indegenous populations and how none were left. LMAO :D That is the most absurd claim I've heard in a long while... You absorbed early allot of Vlachs and then later allot of Albanians who came down from the mountains. both of these groups still exist today.. So how can you claim all indegenous populations disappeared? Vlachs didn't come from Romania. they settled in Wallachia/Romania after living in west Balkans. It is here their dispute of Moldova and Transylvania comes.. they are not indegenous to neither moldova or transylvania.. they settled in those areas and created Wallachia.

Most of the similar words with Albanians, meaning non-latin and non-slavic, do not have Dacian origin as it is claimed, but rather Illyrian because in the west balkans they were in contact with proto-Albanians.

[Minesweeper]

You need to prove to me how slavs asimilated all indegenous populations and how none were left. LMAO :D That is the most absurd claim I've heard in a long while...

But you have left, haven't you? ;)

[Era]

But you have left, haven't you? ;)

Face it Mines, you wish you were like Novi Pazar and epirot and claim we came from Caucasus. It's easier to argue like that. You are currently left with a vacuum when it comes to explaining history :D

[Minesweeper]

Face it Mines, you wish you were like Novi Pazar and epirot and claim we came from Caucasus. It's easier to argue like that. You are currently left with a vacuum when it comes to explaining history :D

Don't you mean you wish I was like them? I feel comfortable in my own skin. ;)

[Shqipez]

But you have left, haven't you? ;)

Left from where to where? Lets just put it this way: There is enough historical evidence of slavs coming to the balkans and settling those areas, somehow, no historical records of Albanians, meaning they already lived there which the language and culture proves.
You posted a link which claims they were a minority, yet still lived there, how did they get there from where etc etc. when there is no historical evidence... You have allot of questions to answer :D Yet you make crazy claims such as all indegenous populations somehow magically were asimilated into Serb Orthodoxy... nonsense.. yes, allot of people converted to serbian orthodoxy and became Serbs, some did not become Serbs but rather still kept their identity and probably later converted to Catholism before converting to Islam, while still a minority of Catholic Albanians in the Dukagjini/metohija area still to this day exists. they also exist in the Prishtina area. One could say prior to Ottoman conquest, the religion of Gegs was both Catholic and Serb orthodoxy depending on who was the ruler. For example the time when Byzantium controleld the area, these regions were majorly catholic, while the south was greek orthodox. when Serbian kingdom controlled the area, the regions were majorly serb Orthodoxy. That doesn't make us Serbs neither Greeks or Latins. As It has been shown... Go search up Albanian saints in Serbian orthodoxy religion :D most of the indegenous blood you abosrbed was from Albanians.

Because white americans have some native Indian ancestry it doesn't make them native indians.

[Minesweeper]

Left from where to where? Lets just put it this way: There is enough historical evidence of slavs coming to the balkans and settling those areas, somehow, no historical records of Albanians, meaning they already lived there which the language and culture proves.
You posted a link which claims they were a minority, yet still lived there, how did they get there from where etc etc. when there is no historical evidence... You have allot of questions to answer :D Yet you make crazy claims such as all indegenous populations somehow magically were asimilated into Serb Orthodoxy... nonsense.. yes, allot of people converted to serbian orthodoxy and became Serbs, some did not become Serbs but rather still kept their identity and probably later converted to Catholism before converting to Islam, while still a minority of Catholic Albanians in the Dukagjini/metohija area still to this day exists. they also exist in the Prishtina area. One could say prior to Ottoman conquest, the religion of Gegs was both Catholic and Serb orthodoxy depending on who was the ruler. For example the time when Byzantium controleld the area, these regions were majorly catholic, while the south was greek orthodox. when Serbian kingdom controlled the area, the regions were majorly serb Orthodoxy. That doesn't make us Serbs neither Greeks or Latins. As It has been shown... Go search up Albanian saints in Serbian orthodoxy religion :D most of the indegenous blood you abosrbed was from Albanians.

Because white americans have some native Indian ancestry it doesn't make them native indians.

When Serbs settled in Balkan they were pagans. :picard2:

[Skerdilaid]

LMAO, Bitch please, provide me a link that Serbs are Illyrian or Dardanian to back up your claim otherwise live with the fact you you speak Slavic language, share similar culture with other Slavs and whatnot else, so forget you can't have two things at same time just because are appealing to you, in fact you're the ones to blame for extinction of Thracian culture and almost near extinction of Illyrian, also you're the ones who refer yourself Slavs now get out from delusional shell cause no one in right mind would refer yourselves ancient Balkanite just because some admixture you might have.

As always you guys are pathetic with excuses, deal with the fact you're newcomers as gypos.
Yeap, agreed, they came with caravans, tents and dancing bears, just like them.

[The Illyrian Warrior]

We are Slavs and nothing more than that, the fact we assimilated ancient population does not change it. Slavs are linguistic group. We are not and we don't want to be Illyrians or Dardanians. Our Balkanic admixture comes from ancient population that lived in territories we settled and who were assimilated by Slavs and now are Slavic speakers.

Your ability to logically conclude from my posts is shockingly blunt.

I'm afraid my logical ability is better then yours since you were implying ancient Balkanite admixture to give you a boost to claim the so-called historical right in Kosova, now I see you've changed the stance and admit what you actually are and don't go further delusional over this subject, Serbs are bottom line a Slav, a newcomer, due this basic historical element you don't have anything to do with this part beside medieval and present time, admixture means shit just does to white Americans claiming NA blood, hence my reaction from beginning.

[Minesweeper]

I'm afraid my logical ability is better then yours since you were implying ancient Balkanite admixture to give you a boost to claim the so-called historical right in Kosova, now I see you've changed the stance and admit what you actually are and don't go further delusional over this subject, Serbs are bottom line a Slav, a newcomer, due this basic historical element you don't have anything to do with this part beside medieval and present time, admixture means shit just does to white Americans claiming NA blood, hence my reaction from beginning.

I stand by every single word I wrote here, without exceptions. Go ahead and find my contradictions, I can't wait to see them.

[alb0zfinest]

lol minesweeper single handedly destroying sheeptars post by post. :D

Yup must be true, davai said so lulz.

What he did was provide a fishy Serbian source that doesn't even prove him right fully. It shows some areas were Serb dominated, not all, and there isn't even proper information on how the census was conducted (and this is not even taking into account that he was trying to prove that the original settlers were Serbians without actually properly going back in time). Other than that he made random comments that backfired.

but you're right he totally rekt every1 OMG how am i going to sleep tonight? :D


Anyways on topic; It has to do with the politicians of Kosova and Albania. A unification would mean that some of them would loose their positions and that's something they don't want. On top of that the U.S won't really approve of it.

[The.Mask]

according to the Serbian scientist, Cvijic, there have never been more than 5% Serbs in Kosova
''Jovan Cvijic, Balkansko poluostrvo (Balkan Peninsula), Belgrade 1966, p. 469.''

Albanians Orthodox were declared as "serv" by the Orthodox church or registred by the administration, You can see a perfect example with Bulgarians of FYROM who called themselves "Macedonians" . Servians didn't exist as a ethicity before 1831 end of the story.

[Murri]

Step NO.1 - Albania and Kosovo merge giving life to Albania

Step NO.2 - Albania and FYROM merge, state is still called Albania

Step NO.3 ......Coming soon!

[HERK]

Like they can decide anything on their own, let alone these big decisions.

Albania and Kosovo can be united at any given moment because the frontier beetwen Kosovo and Albania are just imaginary, but if the unification happend officialy it would be a big loss for the Albanian cause, because we will most probably lose the western support and it would be hard to face a sea of christians and gypsies, the time will come even for that official unification but we will do it slowly and surely!

[Laberia]

Not only Albania +Kosova, but all the Albanian territories:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Br59EvFCUAEQJaJ.jpg