By Albert Nikola
Leo Freundlich, the Jew who protested against the mass extermination of Albanians by the Serbs in 1912-1913. The Holocaust on Albanians, the Serbs killed 500.000 people. His book “The Howling Accusation” is the first evidence of the collective extermination of a European people before the Jewish one.
The massacres that the Serbs carried out in Albanian lands. Over 250 thousand Albanians massacred in the ethnic north of Albania alone, during the fall of 1912. The only copy of Freundlich’s book “The Howling Accusation”, which contains the protest against Europe, which did not react in defense of Albanians during the mass extermination of most of the Albanian people in the Balkans, was found in the library of Harvard University in the USA, in 1982, by the researcher Safete Juka, residing in America.
The Jewish writer Leo Freundlich, living in Vienna, is one of the few intellectuals who kept a collection of all the major newspapers of the time, which told about the extermination of at least half a million Albanians by the Serbs in the years 1912-1913. In revolt, he raised his voice against what he called the “Albanian Golgotha”, which was accompanied by massacres of a type the world had never known before. “I condemn the violence that is unjustly exercised against any people. He who does not do so today, should not be surprised if tomorrow he himself will become the victim of another Golgotha” – says the Jewish writer.
Only after 10 years, precisely in 1992, this book was published in three languages, thanks to the extraordinary help of the German Hans Peter Rullman, living in Hamburg. The English edition was made thanks to Mr. Steve Tomkin, a Croat born in Kosovo. The book was translated and published in Croatian by the doctor Dr. S. Leban, born in Bosnia. Meanwhile, the translation into Albanian was carried out by Riza Lahi, under the sponsorship of Xhaferr Kastrati from Kosovo and the care of the “Eurorilindja” printing house in Tirana.
Serbia, “the cat that wants to be a lion”
After the Treaty of St. Stephen, between Turkey, which had lost successive wars, and victorious Russia, the Albanian nation was put in extraordinary danger, as the Balkan ally of the Tsarist empire, Serbia, sought to expand its possessions to become a Balkan and European power, although it had a population of only 900 thousand inhabitants. But if by 1911, Russian and Serbian goals in the Balkans would fail, this was not due to the merit of the Turkish Empire, under which Albania was located, but simply to the fact that the Albanians, through the League of Prizren in 1878, did not allow such a thing and opposed it with arms. From 1906 to 1912, a series of uprisings for Albanian independence, mainly in the north of ethnic Albanian lands, were suppressed with violence and barbarity by the Turkish armies.
With the beginning of the Balkan War, Albania was half-deserted and Serbian troops, in the name of the war against the Ottoman Empire, undertook a series of invasions which were accompanied by mass massacres against a completely unarmed population, where according to the European press 250 thousand Albanians lost their lives.
Meanwhile, there is certain information that the figure could be even half a million. Of the 180 thousand square kilometers, with a population of about 2 million inhabitants, which were counted within the Albanian territories at the end of the 19th century, in the 1930s only 80 thousand square kilometers remained Albanian territories, and these for the most part outside the Albanian state.
According to modern historians, the Slavic expansion that was accompanied by massive displacement and disappearance of the ethnic populations of the above countries, which was identified with the communist expansion, later took from the German, Hungarian, Albanian, Romanian, Armenian, etc. peoples, territories covering an area of about one million square kilometers, of which one tenth belonged to Albanian territories. The Albanian ethnicity, on the verge of the destruction of the decaying Ottoman Empire, lost more than half of its territories.
The area of Tivar, Hoti, Gruda, New Bazaar, Sandzak (Novi-Pazar), Niš, the Manastri Region, added to these the loss of the provinces of Ioannina and Chameria, which were depopulated or forcibly assimilated by Greece, constitute the most savage campaign of the Albanian-Slavic expansion against the oldest people in the Balkans and Europe.
One of the books that sheds light on the mass displacement of Albanians is Leo Freundlich’s historical book “Albanian Golgotha”. A witness to the crimes of the Serbs in 1912-1913 was also “Mother Teresa”, then a child. She saw with her own eyes how the Serbs poisoned her father, while the other members of the family escaped by fleeing towards Tirana.
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(Notes by German journalist Hans Peter Rullmann)
On Easter Sunday 1913, just before the Balkan War broke out, a Viennese writer, the Israeli Leo Freudlich, published a book entitled “Accusation Records”. It includes accusatory documents that recount the massive barbarities committed by the Serbs in the northern Albanian provinces, no more than 80 years ago, or more precisely about 30 years before the Second World War. The first European Holocaust was planned and implemented by Serbia against the Albanian people. Leo Freudlich describes the events from barely October 1912 to March 1913.
In a period of less than five months, the Serbian Chetnik army and gangs; “savagely and in the most inhumane manner ever displayed by the boot of the invader, committed barbarities that are beyond description.
With hundreds and thousands of unarmed men, slaughtered, women raped, old men drowned, with hundreds of women burned and razed to the ground.” During the European wars of the 18th and 19th centuries, there was never any intention of the collective extermination of any nation. At worst, one country attempted to conquer another.
Before the Serbian war against the Albanians in 1912, no one had ever attempted to exterminate an entire people. In 1912, when the great catastrophe was happening to the Albanians, Freundlich had a premonition that the Serbian rule against the existence of an entire nation had the dimensions of a historical signal. He was aware that this sudden turn against civilization and the human spirit, as Serbia had begun, would not fade away in the future, if the world did not punish the people immediately.
Freundlih describes the massacre of Albanians
The way the Serbian army acted in 1912-1913 against the Albanians during the Balkan War also constitutes the first case of a mass disappearance of one people by another. Although the Kingdom of Serbia was informed that the International Boundary Commission would begin work on defining the borders as soon as the situation calmed down, the army of this state did not recognize the warnings of the great powers and continued the occupation of non-Serbian territories. On October 22, 1912, the Serbian infantry occupied the city of Pristina in Kosovo. It then continued the attack in two directions.
From the side of Skopje and the other from Prizren to enter the direction of the Black Drin valley. After a month, on November 20, 1912, the Serbs occupied almost all of northern Albania and on November 29, 1912, the vanguard of this army was stationed in Durrës. The war of the Serbs against the Albanians did not have an occupying character, but much more. It took on the character of ethnic cleansing, and aimed to show the world within a short time that the Albanians had disappeared from the Balkans.
Precisely for this reason, they called the Albanians Turks and with this justification they either displaced or massacred them. Freudlich describes the massacres of the Serbs in the autumn of 1912 – the spring of ’13 in the Albanian lands, Kosovo, Macedonia as follows:
“Hundreds and thousands of massacred corpses floated in the rivers. Those who could escape disease, hunger, bullets from Serbian infantry rifles and artillery shells were gathered in certain places and given a bullet to the head. Those who hid in their homes suffered the most. After detailed checks for loot and gold, they were easily found and slaughtered like wolves.
The greatest tortures were suffered by Albanian women, who were raped, then tied up, made into hoods, covered with straw and burned alive. If they were animals, their stomachs were opened with a bayonet and then the child was taken out of their womb and placed on the tip of the bayonet or the lance. After the massacre, the Serbs drank wine, sang and danced. There were cases that during the slaughter they collected the blood in cups and opened the feast with it.”
After the crimes, Edith Durham begins to hate Serbs
While ethnic Albanians were being massacred in their homes in Albania, the Englishwoman Mary Edith Durham worked for the “Macedonia Relief Organization”. When she first set foot in the Balkans, the English historian and anthropologist was an admirer of the Serbian people, like many other people in the West. But as the English member of Parliament, Aubrey Hernert, notes, “it was only the cruelty of the Serbs that turned her love into contempt”.
After the successive massacres, she decided to speak out against the Serbo-Montenegrins: “I wrapped up the gold medal that Krajl Nikola had given me, making it clear that I could not accept a medal from those who were friends with Abdul Hamid and received his decorations and money”.
“I have understood,” Durham wrote to the Montenegrin king, “that your followers are much more cruel than the Turks, and I cannot bear for a moment longer the decorations stained with the blood of innocents.” She communicated her decision to the English and Austrian press. Since she had no opportunity to meet the Serbian King Peter, she told the English press that she would save the appropriate opportunity to return the Order of “Saint Sava” to him at the first meeting.
Data on Albanians, before the Serbian massacres
Ami Bue, a French botanist, geographer and geologist, born in the city of Hamburg, Germany at the beginning of the 19th century, during the years 1836–37, undertook a journey to the Balkans, which at that time belonged to the great Turkish Empire. After returning to Germany in 1840, Bue summarized in four volumes, each with 400 large pages, his impressions of the trip to Southeast Europe. His scientific accuracy was highly appreciated even by the Serbs themselves.
Academician Aleksandër Belić wrote that; “The Books of Bue are a true encyclopedia, which cannot be compared in accuracy with any other publication of this kind”. According to the scientist, Serbia in the first half of the 19th century had less than 900 thousand inhabitants, while Albania had over 1 million and 600 thousand inhabitants. In his geographical analyses, ethnically pure Albania was an area of about 180 thousand square kilometers. On the peninsula – always according to him – there were many more Albanians than Greeks and at least twice as many Albanians as Serbs.
Chronology of Serbian crimes against Albanians
Spring 1912: About 6 thousand Albanian families are forcibly displaced from the Nish area, towards Turkey. At this time, the massacres of Montenegrins begin in the Albanian regions of Hoti and Gruda. November 12, 1912: “Daily Chronicle” writes that 2 thousand Albanians in the Albanian region of Skopje and 5 thousand near Prizren have been massacred en masse. December 1912 – The Parisian newspaper “Humanite” writes that in Drenica and Palikure all the inhabitants were drowned. A chain of mass graves has been discovered in this place, some of which have human skulls as tombstones.
At the end are the graves of those who were burned alive. During the massacres, 31 villages and towns were completely destroyed.
1913: 300 Albanians are massacred in the Luma region. The German newspaper “FRANGFURTER ZEITUNG” writes that the children were burned in straw in front of their parents, and then the parents were massacred with rifle butts and bayonets. Spring 1945 – 40 thousand Albanians are killed in the Kosovo region, on the pretext that they were anti-communists and sold out to the West. 1930 – the forced assimilation of all Albanians in Sandzak ends.
1949-50s – About 300 Albanians are forcibly removed from the Serbian border areas of Eastern Kosovo, following a Turkish-Yugoslav agreement.
1989 – Over 6000 young Albanian children are poisoned in primary schools by the Serbian army. March 1998, 32 residents of the village of Raçak in Kosovo are massacred. March – June 1999, during the war in Kosovo, 1 million Albanians are forced from their homes and over 12 women, men, children and the elderly are killed. 2000 – Eastern Kosovo (Preshevë, Medvegjë – Bujan), continues to remain occupied by Serbia, under curfew. Over 300 Albanians have been killed from the summer of 1999 to the summer of 2000, in this province.
References
Memorie.al
