Albanian exodus

Albanian exodus is term used to refer to the deportation or mass migration of Albanians from their homes.

Migration to Italy (15th, 16th century)

After the Albanian national hero, Gjergj Kastrioti Skanderbeg, died and the anti-Ottoman resistance fell, some 300,000 Albanians left their homes and migrated to Italy. Descendants of these émigrés still live today in the southern Italy and retain the old name for Albanian, Arbëreshë.

A significant number of Albanians who settled in Italy came from Greece. Between the 11th and 14th centuries, many Albanians had established important colonies in the Greek regions of Thessaly, Corinth, Peloponnesus, Attica and nearby islands. The fall of these lands to the Ottoman Empire caused another wave of migrations to Italy; Albanians and Greeks landed together on the Italian coast.

anjak of Niš (1877/1878)

In the Serbian Project Načertanije of 1844, the internal affairs minister of Serbia, Ilija Garašanin, expressed his territorial claims on the Albanian populated lands. According to Garašanin’s goals the Greater Serbia would include all the northern Albania down to Shkumbin river.

During the Russo-Turkish War of the 19th century, Serbia and Montenegro, two Serbian monarchies in the Balkans, sided with the Tsar of Russia. This gave them the hope to apply the expansionist projects described by their scholars.

The battlefield between the Ottoman Empire and the growing principality of Serbia was the Albanian populated Sanjak of Niš [ [http://www.elsie.de/pdf/B2002GatheringClouds.pdf B2002GatheringClouds ] ] .

As a result of violence, hundred thousands of Albanians were forced to leave their homes and settle as refugees in the inner parts of Kosovo Vilayet. Prosecuted by the Serbs, 160,000 Albanians emigrated. [ [http://www.elsie.de/pdf/B2002GatheringClouds.pdf B2002GatheringClouds ] ]

:"In the freezing weather of the grand winter 1877-1878 I saw undressed and bare people running away. They had left their warm rooms to remember them with nostalgia… Along the road Grdelica-Vranje and down to Kumanovo, on the both edges of the street you could notice the corpses of the children, old people and others who had died of cold." - Josif H. Kostic, teacher, eyewitnesses [ [http://www.moljac.hr/biografije/garasanin.htm Biography] of Ilija Garašanin]

:"Almost the entire population of the western part of Sanjak of Niš handed over to Serbia, was Albanian of Islamic religion… For hundreds of years our people enslaved the Serbian people in their lands and now we were being thrown out of their country! it was terrible! Therefore, when this sanjak was occupied by the Serbian army, the population could not face the invader. They all run away to the inner parts of Vilayet of Kosovo leaving the whole place abandoned." - John Ross, Commissioner for Serbia’s borders [Hysni Myzyri - "Historia e popullit shqiptar", Pristina, 2003. ("History of the Albanian People")]

=The Çam (Cham) Expulsion=

Beginning on June 27, 1944, while Greece was still under German occupation, and continuing through March 1945, National Republican Greek League (EDES) resistance fighters, operating under British orders to estabilish a mono-ethnic border and to expel and punish the Nazi collaborators, launched a series of attacks on Muslim Cham villages in Epirus, killing 5,000 Chams and causing 35,000 to flee to Albania and Turkey.

Joseph Jacobs, head of the U.S. Mission in Albania (1945-1946) wrote:

In March 1945 units of Zervas's dissolved forces carried out a massacre of Chams in the Filiates area, and practically cleared the district of the Albanian minority. According to all the information I have been able to gather on the Cham issue, in the fall of 1944 and during the first months of 1945, the authorities in north-western Greece perpetrated savage brutality by evicting some 25,000 Chams - residents of Chameria - from their homes. They were chased across the border after having been robbed of their land and property. Hundreds of male Chams from the ages of 15 to 70 were interned on the islands of the Aegean Sea. In total 102 mosques were burnt down.

A large number of the predominantly Muslim refugees settled in villages of southern Albania, where today they number about 200,000. The Greek government refuses to allow them to resettle in Greece, considering them to have lost their citizenship for collaboration with the enemy and/or having left Greece as non-ethnic Greeks (either on the part of them personally or their ancestors from whom they would ordinarily have acquired it). The Greek government also refuses to negotiate over the properties formerly belonging to the Chams, considering them lawfully confiscated for the same reasons.

Legally, according to the Greek view, their status is not different from that of Czech and Polish citizens of German ethnicity who were evicted from their homes after World War II as the result of their association with Nazi Germany. The European Court of Human Rights has the authority to render a verdict on the matter of the properties of evicted Chams, but no relevant case has ever been brought before it. Nonetheless, the Cham community in Albania is preparing a lawsuit to sue the Greek state in an international court of justice for denial of the expulsion and genocide as well as for indemnification.

This issue as a whole is referred to as the Cham Cause or the Chameria issue.

Kosovo War (1999)

In 1999, during the Kosovo War, Yugoslav forces under the command of Slobodan Milošević expelled about one million Kosovo Albanians. Over half a million people found in shelter in Albania, 150,000 among Albanians in Macedonia, a significant portion in Montenengro, Germany, the United Kingdom, the United States, France, Turkey, etc. The end of war in Kosovo in June 1999 gave way to the return of the vast majority of refugees. There were significant casualties on both sides.

References

* Felix Philipp Kanitz: Das Konigreich Serbien und das Serbenvolk von der Romerzeit bis dur Gegenwart, 1904