yugoslavias implosion

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ChApter 3
The answer to such questions was that Serbs believed that Albanians
belonged to an inferior civilization and were hostile to the new
state. Unlike Germans, Hungarians, Slovaks, and others, Albanians
were not recognized as a minority. 322 In a petition on “The Situation
of the Albanian Minority in Yugoslavia” addressed to the League of
Nations in 1930, three Albanian priests—Gjon Bisaku, Shtjefën Kurti
and Luigj Gashi—alleged that
Yugoslavia has organized armed bands which are terrorizing Albanian
parts and destroying many villages. Each act of destruction is followed
by the colonization of Russian, Serb and Montenegrin settlers.
Also, the regime misses no opportunity to provoke a mass emigration of
the Albanian population to Turkey. The Yugoslav government’s reply
to the intervention of the League of Nations was that the object of the
United Committees of the Albanian irredentists was to link themselves
to Albania. 323
The attitude of the new state toward Albanians is illustrated by a
Radical Party report on the situation in Kosovo in 1921:
Local Serbs pose a major stumbling block for the consolidation of order
in those parts because they have some crazy notion that Muslims ought
not to live in a Serb state. Guided by this notion, they do not shrink
from committing all sorts of crimes against the Muslims … because
they are committing these crimes in the name of the state, they are
provoking an even greater hatred among the Muslims of the state …
322 The Yugoslav government held that minority rights specified under the 1920 Treaty of
St . Germain and other agreements only pertained to minorities who had joined the
new Yugoslav state under the peace treaties concluded at the end of World War I . Other
minorities—such as Albanians, Bulgarians, and Turks—were denied the same rights
as those who had been part of the Kingdom of Serbia before the First World War .
323 Vladimir Đuro Degan, Međunarodnopravno uređenje polozaja muslimana sa osvrtom
na uređenje drugih vjerskih i narodonosnih skupina na podrucju Jugoslavije (The
regulation of the status of Muslims under international law with reference to
that of other religious and nation-building groups on the territory of Yugoslavia),
Prilozi, VIII, Institute of the History of the Workers’ Movement, Sarajevo, 1972 .