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200<br />

ChApter 3<br />

launched a drive imposing restrictions on the ownership of land in<br />

Kosovo and Metohija: the land was declared state property and could<br />

therefore not be registered as privately owned.<br />

The Serbian attitude to Albanians was expressed in its most radical<br />

form by Vaso Čubrilović, a noted Serbian scholar and political<br />

figure, in 1937 in “The Expulsion of the Albanians,” a report submitted<br />

to the National Defense Institute.<br />

Čubrilović criticized the government for “wanting to apply<br />

Western methods in dealing with the huge ethnic problems in the<br />

unsettled Balkans.” He stressed that the Turks had brought to the<br />

Balkans the rule that the sword alone decided who won and who lost<br />

his power and nobility, as well as his home and estate, and that early<br />

Serbian leaders such as Karađorđe, Miloš, Mihailo, and Jovan Ristić<br />

had merely “purged Serbia of the foreign element and populated her<br />

with their own people.” The colonization drive had failed principally<br />

because<br />

the best land remains in the hands of the Albanians. … It was a mistake<br />

not to have expelled the Albanians to Albania during their revolt<br />

shortly after World War One and not to have dispossessed them of the<br />

land to which they had no title issued by the Turks. Instead, our state<br />

has accustomed them to the Western European notion of private estate,<br />

something they did not have before. In this way, we prevented ourselves<br />

from carrying out nationalization … Unless we square accounts with<br />

them, we shall face formidable irredentism in twenty to thirty years …<br />

which is bound to throw into jeopardy our possessions in the south. 326<br />

“If Germany can evict tens of thousands of Jews, and if Russia<br />

can transfer millions from one end of the continent to another,<br />

then no world war is going to break out over a hundred thousand<br />

evicted Albanians,” Čubrilović wrote. He suggested a strategy<br />

326 Vasa Čubrilović, The Expulsion of the Albanians, Memorandum presented in Belgrade on<br />

March 7, 1937, Arhiv Vojnoistorijskog II-F2-K-69

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