Authored by Petrit Latifi

PART TWO HERE.

According to the publication “BIBLIOTHÈQUE DES PEUPLES BALKANIQUES: 10 M.D. SKOPIANSKI Ancien rédacteur du Journal Macédonien, La Patrie, LES ATROCITÉS SERBES d’après les témoignages américains, anglais, français, italiens, russes, serbes, suisses”, published in 1919, Serbian and Greek troops committed numerous atrocities against Albanians.

“CHAPTER III Persecutions and Atrocities Continue

Executions of Albanian and Turkish prisoners at the fortress

Every day, these peculiar “guardians of legal authority” brought hundreds of Turks and Albanians to the fortress, where the “strong-willed”—upon simple denunciation by the comitadjis, the new “knights of the dagger”—without proof or investigation, were mercilessly and shamelessly shot in the fortress courtyard.

The higher military authorities turned a blind eye to all these horrors, which could hardly contribute to the development of Christian civilization in a Muslim country. They say there is nothing more dangerous than a slave who breaks his chains and can give vent to his age-old hatred. Now, the Serbs’ chains were heavy and they wore them for a long time; that alone can excuse their ferocity.”

PART TWO: Serbian Atrocities in Albania. CHAPTER ONE

“For what Belgrade and its protectors and friends described as simple repression, the execution of a few unruly individuals, were in reality mass massacres of populations, without distinction of age or sex, massacres coldly conceived and prepared even before the declaration of war on Turkey.

It was an entire people who were being exterminated; hundreds of villages were being methodically sacked, burned, and whose populations were annihilated; Those who escaped the sword and fire—for the victims numbered in the hundreds, most of them young children, thrown alive into the fires that consumed what had been their homes—died of hunger and cold in the mountain caves where they took refuge to escape the bloodthirsty rage of these beasts with human faces.”

Atrocities by Voia Tankossitch (Voja Tankosic)

“All this took place on Belgrade’s orders; the comitadjis of Voia Tankossitch led the way, spreading terror and death. In the absence of a Turkish army, which had not existed in Albania since the Kumanovo affair, it was on the harmless populations that the Serbs exercised this power.

Even the mothers of the same sex wanted to play their part in this slaughter. Was it not at one of the official receptions at the Konak in Belgrade, just a few days before the declaration of war, that a great lady—great in rank, but alas! not in heart—cried out in a voice loud enough to be heard by all the saber-wranglers who surrounded her: “Above all, don’t leave any!”

So literally that it became the obsession of the wounded in the delirium of fever, like this young and brilliant officer, son of a high dignitary of the kingdom, who, brought wounded to Belgrade, never stopped shouting: “Kill them! Kill them all! Don’t leave any!” This was the order he had received when leaving Belgrade, and he had scrupulously executed this order everywhere he went, and he could not forget it even on his bed of pain.”

Serbian atrocities in Elbasan, Tirana and Spas

“Thus, the truth was distorted and the new devastations and massacres perpetrated by the Serbs during this military outing, which brought them back for the second time, within three years, to the shores of the Adriatic, were almost glossed over. For, faithful to their traditional Albanian policy, the Serbs once again spread terror among the population and littered the country with new ruins in their wake. The military censors, friendly toward them, did not reveal much about this new Serbian activity in Albania.”

Mr. Geo-Fred Williams witnessed thousands of Albanians starving

“Speaking at the same meeting, Mr. Geo-Fred Williams, the eminent politician and generous philanthropist, said: “When I came away, thousands of Albanians were starving, though innocent of any wrong.” Another means of exterminating the die-hard Macedonians and Albanian non-citizens was provided to the Serbo-Montenegrins by the World War.

Under the guise of strategic necessity, they assigned Macedonian or Albanian contingents, incorporated into their army, to the most exposed points of the war front, always taking care to keep them under machine-gun threat, ready to crack down on any inclination to retreat or desert”.

Quote by Mr. Geo. Fred Williams on Serbian massacres of Albanians

“On the same date, the Boston Herald, written by Mr. Geo. Fred. Williams, wrote: “I believe in a God of punishment and vengeance.
Whoever has wielded the sword will perish by the sword; the stench of German war gas must have the same flavor for the Serbian trenches as the stench of Albanian corpses with which the Serbs strewn their passage through Albania.”

Serbian poet Voislav Ilyich (Vojslav Ilic) poetry of hatred against Albanians

“Moreover, the Serbs’ hatred of the Albanians, whose greatest crime is to find themselves on the Adriatic Sea, is the subject of a formal education in Serbia. From a very young age, children are instilled with a phobia of the Albanian, along with other equally edifying and noble facts. Poetry, that music of words which, like the other, should soften morals, itself plays a part in this. In his “Selected Battle Songs,” the Serbian poet Voislav Ilyich sings of the exploits of the seven fierce butchers of Belgrade who massacred 24 Albanians”.

Serbian atrocities decreased when the Commission was expected

“Individual lives were truly at a low price during these months of war, and private property was of no value. Theft had become as common as rape… where the Commission was expected (this was after the conclusion of Bucharest, as in Eastern Thrace), we saw a Bulgarian newspaper note that the horrors had diminished.”

Serbian newspaper Targoviski Glassnik oppossed an international investigation of Serbian atrocities

“On the other side, on the Albanian border, where these horrors were about to begin again, they (the Serbs) were careful to oppose the Commission’s passage. (Emphasis added.) A Serbian newspaper (the Targoviski Glassnik) even raised a question on this subject… saying that an international investigation… was, in its view, a limitation of sovereignty, an intervention in the rights of the State.”

Greek law of 1914 which allowed the seizing of Albanian lands

“The Greeks, for their part, proceeded in a similar manner. By a law promulgated in 1914, Greece had given a virtually legal appearance to the seizure of the buildings and lands of the Muslims of Macedonia and the Albanians of Epirus and the regions of southern Albania that the London Conference had assigned to it”.

PART TWO HERE.

Reference

https://www.strumski.com/books/m.d.skopiansky_atrocites_serbes.pdf