Serbian War Crimes In Kosova

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The massacres of Albanians in the Balkan Wars were perpetrated on several occasions by the Montenegrin and Serbian armies and paramilitaries during the conflicts that occurred in the region between 1912 and 1913.

Most of the crimes occurred between October 1912 and the summer of 1913. The goal of the forced expulsions and massacres was statistical manipulation before the London Ambassadors Conference to determine the new Balkan borders.[3][4][5] According to contemporary accounts, around 20,000 and 25,000 Albanians were killed or died because of hunger and cold in the Kosovo Vilayet.[3][5][6][7] Many of the victims were children, women and the elderly.[8] In addition to the massacres, some civilians had their lips and noses severed.[9]

According to Philip J. Cohen, the Serbian Army generated so much fear that some Albanian women killed their children rather than let them fall into the hands of Serbian soldiers.[10] The Carnegie Commission, an international fact-finding mission, concluded that the Serbian and Montenegrin armies perpetrated large-scale violence for "the entire transformation of the ethnic character of regions inhabited exclusively by Albanians".[11] Cohen, examining the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace report, said that Serbian soldiers cut off the ears, noses and tongues of Albanian civilians and gouged out their eyes.[12] Cohen also cited Durham as saying that Serbian soldiers helped bury people alive in Kosovo.[13]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massac...he_Balkan_Wars

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According to documents from the Serbian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 281,747 Albanians were expelled from Old Serbia between 1912 and 1914 (not counting children under the age of six).[16] American relief commissioner Willar Howard said in a 1914 Daily Mirror interview that General Carlos Popovitch would shout, "Don't run away, we are brothers and friends. We don't mean to do any harm."[17] Peasants who trusted Popovitch were shot or burned to death, and elderly women unable to leave their homes were also burned. Howard said that the atrocities were committed after the war ended.

According to Leo Freundlich's 1912 report, Popovitch was responsible for many of the Albanian massacres and became captain of the Serb troops in Durrës.[18] Serbian Generals Datidas Arkan and Bozo Jankovic were authorized to kill anyone who blocked Serbian control of Kosovo

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Yugoslavia had signed the Protection for Minorities treaty, yet Albanians were not extended the rights of recognition as a minority or to Albanian language education.[30] Kosovo, along with northern region of Vojvodina were areas where Serbs were not a majority population and the state sought demographic change in those areas through land reform and a colonisation policy.[31] A new decree issued in 1919 and later in 1920 restarted the colonisation process in places where Albanians lived in Kosovo and Vardar Macedonia.[7] Between 1918 and 1945, over 100,000 Albanians left Kosovo

According to a statistics published later in Italy, Serbian troops alone killed 6,040 in January and February 1919, destroying 3,873 homes

On 18 April 1919, U.S. Secretary of State Robert Lansing wrote to British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs Lord Balfour that "Gusinje, Plav, Peja, Gjakova, Podjur and Roshji, have been scenes of terrorism and murder by Serbian troops and Serbian agents, whose policy appears to be extermination of the Albanian inhabitants of the region".[36]