Authored by Petrit Latifi

In 1913, the French consuls received reports of Greek and Serbian atrocities against Albanians, though few reached the French public. Instead, due to French Serbophile tendencies, focus lay on alleged “Albanian atrocities”. Maurice Carlier wrote to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in January 1913 on the miserable conditions of the Albanian, as did Etienne Dussap.

“Information about the Massacres

This representation of the Albanian as a ferocious being, which haunts the imagination of the French people of the Balkan Wars, is relayed, consolidated, and amplified by the way in which information about the atrocities committed during the conflicts in regions inhabited by Albanians is reported.

Testimonies about the massacres of Albanian populations by the Greek and Serbian occupying armies included in investigations carried out at the end of the conflicts or in subsequent historiographical research find almost no echo in the French press of the time, at least in the newspapers from which I compiled my corpus.

French consul Etienne Dussaps report of the Cretan Greek war crimes against Albanians of Aidonat

And yet, these massacres were already known to the French consuls on the ground. Maurice Carlier wrote to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in January 1913 to inform them of the miserable conditions in which the Muslim populations were living in the territories occupied by the Serbian army, while the French consul in Janina, Etienne Dussap, confirmed to the Minister of Foreign Affairs the massacre of Albanians by a Greek band commanded by a Cretan leader in the region of Aidonat:

“Although the Cretan leader was arrested, the incident was kept hidden by the Greek authorities. The Governor General spoke to me about it today in confidence and told me how deplorable the unfortunately true incident was. The authorities seem to want to hush up this affair as much as possible for fear of repercussions.”

How can we explain the fact that this information was not disseminated in the French press, while, on the contrary, information on atrocities attributed to Albanians was widely publicized, as shown in the table below?”

And the Petit Journal’s Belgrade correspondent sent this nationalist newspaper, which was pro-Balkan Allies, Turkophobic, and Islamophobic, a story in which his hatred of Muslim Albanians was evident:

“(…) I will never forget the spectacle I saw when the Albanian prisoners arrived in Belgrade. The entire population had gathered on the sidewalks from the train station to the fortress (…) to see these fierce Arnauts pass by, heads bowed, barefoot, in rags, exhausted, starving. They passed with the gait of hunted beasts among the Serbs who showed no horror, no hatred, and uttered no cry, trying hard to forget the horrible agonies of their unfortunate brothers from Old Serbia, massacred by these Arnauts.”

References and sources

https://hal.science/hal-03996189/document

October 1912 Le Petit Parisien, October 18: “The Excesses of the Montenegrins”

Le Journal, October 27: “The Abuses of the Muslim Albanians”

Archives du Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, nouvelle série, Turquie/441 : Usküb, le 17 janvier 1913, n°3, le
consul français Carlier au MAE, au sujet de la misère des populations musulmanes dans sa région

Paramythia en grec. Il s’agit d’une région où habitaient jusqu’à la deuxième guerre mondiale des membres de la communauté albanophone, des Tsams. Sur le destin de cette communauté en Grèce du XXe siècle, voir Eleftheria Manta, Οι μουσουλμάνοι Τσάμηδες της Ηπείρου, (Les Tsams musulmans d’Epire, 1923-2000). Thessalonique, Editions de l’Institut d’études sur la péninsule d’Haemos, 2004 et Mark Mazower, After the war was over : reconstructing the family, nation and state in Greece, 1943-60, Princeton University Press, 2000.

Archives du Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, correspondance consulaire, Janina/31: Janina, le 11 mai 1913.

René Lebault, « La férocité des Albanais », Le Petit Journal, le 30 décembre 1912