It is not as if Serbia never made mistakes in dealing with the
Albanians. The Sultan used to govern them by sending in one year an army
against them, and in the next year asking for no recruits or taxes. The
Montenegrins, of whom the older generation was bored when it had no man
to shoot at, used to be on very neighbourly terms with them. Both these
systems the Albanians could understand. But they did not know why the
Belgrade Government in 1878--and it was a mistaken policy--should expel
a number of Albanians from the newly-won zones, thrusting them across
the frontier and putting in their place a number of Serbs who were
settled in Old Serbia. The twofold folly of this plan was not grasped at
the moment; but for several years the Serbian frontier districts were
regularly invaded and plundered. The following years of Turkish misrule,
and especially the young Turkish policy of treacherous force, which
resulted in Albanian risings every year, may possibly have caused many
Albanians to be honestly glad when the Balkan War brought the Serbs into
their country. But of these Albanians not a few would rejoice because
they hoped that with the help of the Serbian army it would be possible
to slay the members of some adjacent tribe against whom they happened to
have a feud. Perhaps the Serbs were so eager to bathe their horses in
the Adriatic that they did not notice such trifles as the destruction of
a ford, this having been done to prevent a visit from undesirable
neighbours. One might have imagined that Serbia, being well known as a
land of small peasant proprietors--where there is even a law which
forbids a peasant's house from being sold over his head; he is, under
any circumstances, assured of so much as will enable him to eke out a
livelihood--one would have thought that the Albanian _[vc]if[vc]ija_,
who is nothing more than a slave of the feudal chief, would have
rejoiced at the arrival of a liberator; and indeed, while the Serbian
troops were in Albania the peasant refused to give his lord the
customary third or half of what the land produced, and after the
departure of the Serbs he was unapproachable for tax-collectors. Who
knows whether this social readjustment, so auspiciously begun, might not
have made Albania wipe out her grievances against the Serbs and remember
only that in the Imperial days of Du[vs]an, even if he was not of the
most ancient Balkan race, there was prosperity and happiness where now
is desolation; busy merchants in the seaport towns of Albania, which
now are ruins; ships sailing in from Venice with the luxuries of all
the world and taking back with them all those good things, a half of
which Albania has forgotten how to make? And after that there had been
times of friendship with the Serb--Dositej Obradovi['c], the philologist
(one of those amiable persons who invented for the Albanians an
alphabet), tells us, for instance, how in his travels through Albania he
was assured by natives that they and the Serbs lived together as if they
were members of one family, while the Ku['c]i in eastern Montenegro had,
by a gradual process of assimilation, become transformed from Catholic
Albanians into Orthodox Montenegrins. It is told that in the wondrous
hours when the _[vc]if[vc]ija_ gloried in the soil he was about to win,
even the notoriously wild Klementi, filled with hunger for the land, ran
down from their fastnesses. But, most unfortunately, at that moment the
Great Powers decided that Albania was to be an autonomous, hereditary
State. This interrupted the movement towards reconciliation with Serbia;
and even now the Serbs will be told by many encouraging people that in
their efforts to win the regard of Albanians they have an impossible
task, that if some of them take a step towards you one day they will
rush back a dozen on the day after. These people will repeat the legend
that the Albanians have an invincible hatred for the Slavs; but the
Albanians have not forgotten how, in the course of the Middle Ages, they
were willingly open to Slav penetration--the Serbian language reached to
beyond Alessio, the small Albanian dynasties intermarried with Slav
ruling families, so that they preferred to speak Serbian, and down to
this day two-thirds of the place-names of northern Albania are of Slav
origin. One of the most important documents in this connection is a
letter from the town of Dubrovnik to the Emperor Sigismund in the year
1434. They inform the Emperor that Andria Topia, lord of the Albanian
coast, has secretaries who know nothing but the Serbian language and
alphabet. Thus when the Emperor sends him letters in Latin he is obliged
to have them translated elsewhere, and the contents of the Imperial
letters are not kept secret. So the Emperor was forced to write to Topia
in Serbian.... Long memories are not always inconvenient, and Albanian
memories are long because, until recent years, all that they knew came
from tradition--Austria and Italy had not yet become so concerned about
Albanian education that (forgetting their own illiterates in Bosnia and
Calabria) the two Allies waved into existence boys' and girls' schools
up and down the country; so desirous were they that these founts of
knowledge should be patronized that both Italians and Austrians were
prepared to pay good money and eke a supply of garments and a
gaily-coloured picture of King or Emperor, as the case might be; and
with respect to the cash, not only was each willing to pay but to pay
more than the other. Yet the Albanian is most mindful of tradition, and
he is aware that his approach to the Slav in the Middle Ages was blocked
by the inopportune arrival of the Turks; it is in the nature of man that
the Albanian was more impressed by the brilliant young States of the
early princes, with that barbarically sumptuous residence at Scutari
(the Catholics of Scutari also being in the diocese of Antivari, which
was under Serb domination) than, centuries later, when he found himself
confronted with the pitiable population of Old Serbia.
In the Sandjak the task of Yugoslavia will be relatively simple; the
Albanians who live there are not autochthonous, but arrived at the
beginning of the eighteenth century on the plateau of Pechter. These
Klementi--then very numerous--cared nothing for their Serbian origin, so
that the Patriarch of Pe['c] had to protect himself against them by
means of a janissary guard--which the Sultan permitted him to maintain
at his own expense--whereas they were attentive to the teachings of
their religion, in so far as they obeyed the Catholic missionaries who
dwelt among them and requested that in their forays they should confine
themselves to Muhammedan and Orthodox booty. One of the places they
attacked was Plav, from which they drove the population, and themselves
henceforward took to living on the fertile fields in summer, while they
spent the winter in some mountain caverns. But after seven years a large
proportion of this tribe went back to its ancestral stronghold in the
Brdo range, from which the Turks had transplanted them to the Sandjak.
This wish of theirs to go to their old home was gratified after they
had beaten off the Turks triumphantly in various engagements on the way,
and even pursued them to their trenches.... The Klementi who had stayed
on the Pechter were further depleted a few years later, when their
kinsfolk, answering the appeal of the Archbishop of Antivari, rode up
there and carried off fifty families who were on the eve of renouncing
their religion. The final group which remained became Moslem, and with
such ardour that when the Serbs of Kara George reached the Sandjak they
found that these Klementi were completely Islamized; they resisted the
Serbian army with the utmost resolution. Subsequently they attempted to
convert the Serbian population round them, but with mediocre success,
for the Klementi themselves were not too strong; moreover, they were
isolated from the other Muhammedan Albanians.
And yet certain incidents which occurred in the Sandjak during the Great
War seem to show that even there the task of dealing with the population
is a troublous one. They are conservative; one sees, for example, a
woman who has got up very early holding aloft a vessel against the sun.
This is done with the object of preventing the cows of a certain man
from giving any milk. But the man is on the alert. He shoots the vessel
out of her hand and proceeds, with an easy mind, about his business.
Frequently the Austrians disarmed these men, but it is their practice to
have more rifles than shirts, although during the occupation a rifle
cost twenty napoleons. It occurred to the Austrian Governor-General of
Montenegro, Lieut. Field-Marshal von Weber, that these Albanians were
children and, if treated well, would make useful volunteers. A party of
them was thereupon sent to Graz, where they were told that they would be
trained to fight on behalf of the Sultan. Their military education was a
trifle agitated--for instance, on their second day at Graz they thrashed
their officers--but when their training was considered adequate they
were sent to the front, and there they immediately surrendered to the
Italians. This was not the first time that a body of Albanians had gone
to Austria. In 1912, for the Eucharistic Congress at Vienna, some two
dozen of them, in their national costume and conducted by their
priests, had taken part in the procession. It is said that the financier
Rosenberg, of whom one has heard, bore a portion of the pretty large
expenses of the deputation. His title of baron dates from this period.
Austria's work among the school-children was no more successful than
among the adults. Remembering that just outside Zadar lies Arbanasi, or
Borgo Erizzo, a village of 2500 inhabitants, nearly all of whom are
Albanians, it seemed good to the Austrian authorities to procure from
that place a schoolmaster who would make suitable propaganda. There was
at Arbanasi a teachers' institute, as also an Italian "Liga" school
which was closed by the Austrians during the War, and when the
schoolmaster arrived at Plav, where the people speak Serbian, he set
about teaching the children Albanian and also making propaganda for
Italy, as he was from the "Liga" school.... That fidelity of the five
hundred men of Plav who clung, as we have related, to their religion,
had its pendant when the Austrians were engaged in constructing a road.
The custom was for a potentate of that district to procure for the
Austrians a sufficient number of men, to whom three or four crowns a day
would be paid. Any man who disregarded the potentate's summons was
thrashed by him, and thrashed in such a way that for three days he was
prostrate. The late Chief of Police at Sarajevo, Mr. Ljescovac, was
(being a Bosnian subject) administering this district during the
Austrian occupation. He tried frequently to get particulars from the men
who had been so mercilessly flogged, with a view to opening an inquiry.
Their invariable answer was: "I know nothing."
In the days of Charles, another member of the Topia family, a copyist,
who was in his service, was transcribing the Chronicle of George
Hamartolos, and twice, thinking of his master, he inserts: "God, help
Charles Topia." As we leave the Serb and the Albanian face to face,
sensitive, imaginative, tenacious people, both with very ancient claims,
we must hope that a happy solution will be found. After all Serbia,
being in Yugoslavia, is now a Muhammedan and a Catholic Power. She has
men at her disposal, such as Major Musakadi['c], a Bosnian Moslem who
deserted from the Austrian army to the Serbs, fought with them on
several fronts and received the highest decoration for valour, the Kara
George; then, after the War, he was sent by the Government to command at
Br['c]ko, a place in his native Bosnia where there is a Moslem majority.
A few of the Orthodox protested energetically that they would not have a
Moslem over them; they were received by the Minister of Justice in
Belgrade. "Gentlemen," said he, "go back to Br['c]ko and when anyone of
you has earned the Cross of Kara George I shall be glad to see him here
again." ... As in the old days, the Serbian civilization is far
superior, but this is not everything; that the Albanian is ready to meet
it with peace or war he shows clearly as he glides along in his white
skull-cap, his close-fitting white and black costume, with his
panther-like tread and with several weapons and an umbrella.
But for the various reasons to which we have alluded he is now much more
inclined to live in peace with the Yugoslav. Very differently, except if
they are charged with gifts, does he receive the Italians; even at the
moment of accepting their gifts of military material and cash he regards
them with a more or less concealed derision, for he is impressed, as we
have pointed out, by nothing so much as by military prowess and the
reverse, whereof the news is carried far and wide. At the end of
September and beginning of October 1918 two weak Yugoslav battalions of
about a thousand rifles accomplished at Tirana what the large Italian
forces could not, at any rate did not, achieve. Ten thousand Austrians
were in the town, and for three months the Italians had sat down outside
it. Then the Serbs descended on the place from the mountains; their
carts came by the ordinary road, and on arriving at the Italian lines
the drivers asked for hay; but when they explained that the rest of
their force was going round by the mountain trail the Italian commandant
refused to give any supplies to such liars. (Later on, though, he gave
them sufficient for five days.) When an Austrian officer who was
stationed in a minaret saw the Serbs coming down from those terrible
heights he was so astonished that he felt sure they must be robbers. And
after they had captured the town and the Italians conducted themselves
as if it were they who had conquered it, the Serbs took to thrashing
their allies and ejecting them from the cafes. The Italians did not
protest....