They are taking place exactly in areas that were home to Albanians, among other ethnicities, for centuries. They are also omens of the troubled dream some call “Greater Kosovo,” which ultimately means “Greater Albania.”
In southern Serbia, Albanians were indigenous to territories around Nis and Leskovac, major Serbian cities some 25 miles from the present frontier of Kosovo. In the harsh winter of 1877-78 about 100,000 were driven out of the region-where they were in several places the ethnic majority-by the Serbian Army, then the victorious ally of imperial Russia in its war with the Ottoman Turks.
Remarkably, the one region the Turks held onto, permitting native Albanians to remain following the 1878 Treaty of Berlin, was the Presevo Valley, an 87-square-mile sliver where an Albanian rebel band calling itself a “liberation army” has been fighting for the last 16 months to attach it to-and enlarge-Kosovo.
Following the end of the bombing of Serbia in June 1999, that Connecticut-size province was uneasily occupied by NATO and administered by the United Nations.
The Kosovo Albanians, thanks to NATO now an overwhelming ethnic majority, are demanding total independence, as they have for more than 30 years.
Now comes Macedonia, a Slavic-majority territory which has also been home for centuries to Albanians. There, a “National Liberation Army” numbering several thousand has seized the villages and slopes of the Sar Mountain range adjacent to southern Kosovo.
Ali Ahmeti, a senior commander of the rebel band occupying the heights above the largely ethnic Albanian city of Tetovo said: “Our aim is solely to remove Slav forces from territory which is historically Albanian.”
Again, let history be the guide. In 1879 Macedonia had became a temporary resting place for 200,000 Albanians expelled from Serbia. Many were subsequently sent eastward to traditional Turkish lands, commencing an expulsion/exodus of more than 300,000 Albanians over the next eight decades.
The traffic was not all one way. In places and times when Albanians were locally supreme, hundreds of thousands of Serbs and Montenegrins were driven out of their ancestral homelands: 100,000 in World War II and 200,000 in the months after NATO’s Kosovo occupation.
The fount of this restiveness, starting 130 years ago, was always Kosovo, whose Albanians were traditionally the wealthiest and most politically ambitious. Not by accident, the first expression of ambitions for Greater Albania occurred in the southern city of Prizren, where clan chieftains gathered in 1878 to form the League for the Defense of Rights of the Albanian Nation. They sought the union of all Albanian lands under the protection of Turkey.
They came too late. Turkey was not strong enough to make meaningful concessions and was wary of people who had already begun attacking Ottoman troops.
Meanwhile, Europe’s Great Powers had already decided to divide up the southern Balkans among Slavic clients and Greece. They ignored an Albanian petition at their Congress of Berlin. When the Great Powers–principally the Russians, the British and the Austro-Hungarians–convened again on the Albanian question in 1913 in London they once more ignored Albanian wishes in favor, said Britain’s foreign secretary Edward Grey, of preserving agreement among themselves.
Instead they created a state on the Adriatic that placed more than half of the Albanians outside its borders. The remainder were left to the none-too-tender mercies of Greece, Serbia and Montenegro.
Basically, that dilemma persists today, with 3.2 million people in Albania proper; 1.5 million in Kosovo; 500,000 in Macedonia; 500,000 in Greece; 100,000 in Serbia, and 50,000 in Montenegro. Add to this a farther-flung diaspora of 1.2 million Albanians in the United States, Germany, Switzerland and other Western European countries.
By the twists of history, geography and their own clannish traditions, Albanians have never been able to create a state by themselves. Their only larger polities in the last 140 years functioned-and not very well-under foreign tutelage: Turkish, German, Italian, American and now, NATO.
In place of skilled statesmen, the Albanians of Kosovo, Macedonia, South Serbia and Montenegro are today largely dominated by gunmen.
The Liberation Army of Kosovo (UCK) of the 1990s was created with $163 million in voluntary and involuntary contributions from the huge Albanian diaspora and $250 million from the profits of the Albanian heroin cartel that dominates Europe’s drug traffic, according to Ralf Mutschke, assistant intelligence director of Interpol.
The UCK, embraced by the NATO countries during the 78-day bombing of Serbia in the spring of 1999 and then formally disbanded by NATO, has now spawned both the South Serbian and the Macedonian Liberation Armies that are now causing NATO such grief.
“Greater Albania” is only whispered by the militants as a more distant goal. But near Tetovo they already talk openly about a “Greater Kosovo.”
“This is Kosovo,” said a young man in the Macedonian town of Germo, welcoming a Western correspondent to his home on March 21.
Maybe it is time for another conference of today’s Great Powers on the subject of Greater or Lesser Albania.
