fualuacidn del programa

Despite the general anarchy, rapid progress was made. On 1 May 1889, Kosovo's first Albanian-language school was opened in Prizren, although it was still illegal to teach in the Albanian language- The Ottoman government had been alarmed by the Albanians1 drive not only for political but also for cultural autonomy as the spirit of the Prizren League lived on through intensive cultural activity. Some thirty

Albanian-language newspapers and journals were established in the years up to 1908 within the Empire and abroad, and some Albanian-language schools were opened. Educationally, Islam had hindered rather than helped the majority of Albanians, since all religious communities within the Empire had their own schools except the Albanians, who were taught as Turks. If the people were to be united, new schools had to be non-denominational. 27 From 1902, new laws made possession of an Albanian book and even the use of Albanian in correspondence a punishable offence. Thus all the Albanian-language schools were closed. The Albanians responded by forming secret societies to promote the teaching of their language, which the Greek ecclesiastical authorities also

suppressed-2 6Ibid.. p. 58.

27The first Albanian school for boys, both Christians and Muslims, was opened in Korea in 1885. The first Albanian school for girls was founded in 1891, again in Korea. Before long, however, the Porte decided

to curtail Albanian educational activities, and the Muslim pupils were forced to leave the school. The Orthodox clergy also put pressure on parents to withdraw their children by threatening them with excommunication.

-56-A few years before the founding of the Prizren League, several -56-Albanian intellectuals in diaspora centres such as Bucharest and Istanbul had gathered to discuss the pressing question of an Albanian

orthography, and the creation of Albanian schools inevitably raised this question in an acute form.

Differences of opinion had arisen between those favouring the Arabic script, while others preferred the Greek and yet others the Latin alphabet. At this time a number of different alphabets based on the Latin, Greek or Arabic scripts were in use, adding further to the division. So exasperated was Vasa Pasha

Effendi, a Catholic from Shkoder and an advocate of the Latin alphabet, that he wrote in a poem:

"Albanians, you are killing your brothers, you are divided into a hundred parties. Some say I am a

Christian, others, I am a Turk, yet others I am a Latin, I am a Greek or a Slav or something else. But you are brothers all of you. The priests and Hodjas have confused you, unite in one faith; the faith of

Albanians is Albanianism. ff

Since Serbs were in the Orthodox millet, they were not recognised as a separate national group, and thus the independent Bulgarians sought to present all Serbian schools as Bulgarian. However, under an

Imperial decree on education issued in 1896, the Serbs in Kosovo and other Ottoman regions could open their own schools and thus indirectly acquired recognition of their nationality. The first Serbian bookshop opened in Pristina in 1893. Following the death of the Greek Metropolitan Meletije, a Serb, Archsyncellus Dionisije Petrovic ( 1896-1900) was consecrated to the Raska-Prizren bishopric through the joint effort of the governments of Serbia and Montenegro, bolstered by Russian diplomacy in Istanbul. On orders from the Serbian government, the new metropolitan carried out a wide reorganisation in ecclesiastical and educational institutions, opened new schools, renewed teaching staff, created new church-school communities and united activists on national affairs. 29 These seedbeds of national propaganda were springing up throughout Kosovo and Macedonia as Serbia and Bulgaria contended for influence over the population. The Greek-Ottoman war of 1897 marked the approaching disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. By 1898 the position of the Serbian peasant in Kosovo was parlous. Much of the Albanian unrest in Kosovo was believed to have been stirred up by the Austro-Hungarian intelligence services

28Vasa Effendi, La Verite sur I'Albanie et les Albanais, Etude HistoriQue et Critique, Paris, 1879, p. 98.

29Batakovic, Vie Kosovo Chronicles, p. 132.

-57-in order to provoke sufficient chaos for Vienna to -57-intervene and occupy the region.

Travelling through southwest Kosovo shortly afterwards, the English anthropologist Edith Durham summed up the tenuous presence of the Serbs in Kosovo and the Albanians1 determination to rid the province of its remaining Slav element:

The Albanians are almost solely Albanophone, whereas the scattered Serbs usually speak both languages and when addressed in Serb often replied at first in Albanian. Were it not for the support and instruction that has long been supplied from without, it is probable that the Serb element would have been almost, if not quite, absorbed or suppressed by this time.

Ineradicably fixed in the breast of the Albanian...is the belief that the land has been his rightly for all time. The Serb conquered him, held him for a few passing centuries, was swept out and shall never return again. He has but done to the Serb as he was done by.1 ££

Durham also noted how the Serbs tried to maintain a foothold in the district of Prizren:

The school, a fine building, recently enlarged and repaired, holds a hundred students. Many come from Montenegro even. I went over it sadly. It seemed sheer folly to make a large and costly Serb theological school in a Muslim Albanian t o w n , and to import masters and students, when funds are so urgently needed to develop free Serb lands.1 £i

Leon Trotsky, a war correspondent for Pravda during the Balkan Wars, wrote:

The Albanian villages are much better, much richer than the Serbian ones. The Serbs, even the rich ones, don't build fine houses in villages where there are Albanians. If a Serb has a two-storey house he refrains from painting it so that it shan't look better than the Albanian houses.' ££

In the new century the movement for Albanian administrative autonomy gathered momentum. It was now generally realised that the Porte would be unlikely to grant the Albanians administrative autonomy of its own accord, and the various Albanian leaders therefore decided to take matters into their own hands by

organis-ing sporadic and random raids on isolated Slav settlements and Ottoman garrisons. In May 1901 Albanian bands pillaged and partly burned Novi Pazar, Sjenica and Pristina. The Serbian populations suffered most, through their proximity to Albanians who, when occupying Kolasin, massacred a considerable number of Serbs. 33 In an attempt to halt the killings of Slavs, a group of Albanian notables from Pec and Djakovica arrived in Belgrade at the invitation of the Serbian government. Among them was the Pec leader Mehmed Zaim. There they were lavished with gifts of money and arms and promised assistance in their struggle against the Porte if they would help to end violence in Kosovo.

At the end of 1902 Russia opened a consulate in Mitrovica, nominally to protect the Slavs from violence, but in reality to monitor more closely Austria-Hungary's increasing influence over the Albanian Catholic population. Alarmed at the rapid weakening of Ottoman authority, the Powers hastily tried to effect a new series of reforms they had drawn up, through which means they hoped to ease the plight of the

beleaguered Christian population and perhaps diffuse an explosive situation. Nevertheless, even though a Christian gendarmerie was eventually introduced, its men were not allowed to carry arms and spent their days lounging around the police stations, the objects of scorn to Muslim Albanians. The Kosovars, conservative by inclination and suspicious that foreign interference favoured the Slavs, vehemently opposed the AustroRussian programme of reforms for Macedonia, which involved their own lands. In particular, they could not tolerate the idea of having Christian Slav gendarmes policing their territories. In March 1903 they rose in revolt and occupied Vucitrn and Mitrovica, where they attacked the Ottoman garrison. The Porte dispatched various commissions to conciliate them, but they would not listen. The newly-appointed Russian consul in Mitrovica, Grigorie Stepanovic Shtcherbin, was assassinated on 31 March by an Albanian.

For the Serbs this murder was a national tragedy. They had seen him as a protector and a representative of the power they had hoped would end the anarchy and violence. The train bearing his coffin was

accompanied by several thousand Serbs, and religious ceremonies were held in churches throughout Kosovo. 34 The forces sent by the Porte to implement the reforms paid little heed to the continuing

3 3Skendi, The Albanian National Awakening, p. 2 0 1 .

34Batakovic, The Kosovo Chronicles, p. 153.

-59-lawlessness. If the Muslim Albanians attacked the Serbs as Orthodox Christians, it was because they resented seeing government positions, under the reforms, pass from Muslim to Christians, who till then had been under their rule - and these Christians had a Serbian state to back them. 35 The disorders now spread rapidly to Pristina, the Sandjak of Novi Pazar and the northern part of the vilayet of Shkoder, but were, as usual, rudimentary and uncoordinated. Drita, the Albanian diaspora newspaper in Sofia,

described the real situation effectively and succinctly: 'Gjakova fights and dies, while Peja is in ignorance.

In Lume houses are in flames, while other places hear nothing about it.1 36 In response to the deteriorating situation, on 2 August 1903 some 25,000 Macedonian Slavs also staged an uprising orchestrated bv the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation, IMRO, which aimed to seize the vilayet of Monastir ( Bitola) and so liberate Macedonia from the Ottomans. With most of the central Balkans now in revolt, the Porte sent in the bashibazouks, most of them Albanian, to crush the various uprisings, which they did with great brutality.

With the murder of King Alexander Obrenovic in 1903, the Karadjordjevic dynasty returned to the Serbian throne, and this signalled a new period of independence vis-a-vis Austria-Hungary. Petar Karadjordjevic abruptly changed Serbia's foreign policy in favour of a pro-Russian stance and renewed national

propaganda among Serbs living under Ottoman rule. As a result Serbia immediately found itself in conflict with Vienna and the Porte over the reform issue. In response Austria-Hungary stepped up its propaganda among Albanians, who m turn responded by instigating incessant revolts and uprisings. Armed rebellions had also now become a chronic feature of daily life throughout Macedonia as Bulgarian, Greek and Serbian bands continued their fight to gain territory for themselves and impose their nationality on the territory's inhabitants.

As the situation in Macedonia worsened, a Committee for the Liberation of Albania was hastily formed in Monastir to inject some sense of direction into the fragmented Albanian political movement. At the

beginning of 1906, a branch of the Committee was established in Djakovica, headed by, among others, the great chieftain Bajram Curri ( 1862-1925), a native of that place. Committees

3 5Skendi, The Albanian National Awakening, p. 295.

3 6Ibid.. p. 213.

-60-were also established in the other Albanian-inhabited vilayets. Not long afterwards the Albanians formed their own guerrilla bands known as cheta. The Ottoman Empire was now well into its death throes. Sultan Abdul Hamid pathetically embodied all the spiritual despair, all the moral decadence, all the physical

degeneracy of his regime. Over the whole spirit of the Hamidian Empire, over its barren reforms and equally barren reactions hung this gloom of despair, this shadow of impending death.

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