Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [234]
Albania’s short history had been an unhappy one. Tribal chieftains, brigands, Turkish loyalists, Greek, Serbian and Italian agents all pursued their own ends against the weak central government. One figure stood out: the sinister and beguiling Essad Pasha Toptani. It was said that, although he spoke no European language properly, he knew the value of money in all of them. He had worked variously for the Ottomans, as head of the police in Shkodër (Italian: Scutari); for the Young Turks; for the Montenegrins (who had designs on the north of Albania); and for the Italians, but always for himself. His compatriots feared and hated him. When his first wife threatened to poison him for taking a second wife (he was a poor Muslim but found his religion useful at times), she was widely admired.32
Into this maelstrom the Great Powers in their wisdom plunged Wilhelm of Wied, a German prince—“a feeble stick,” in Durham’s opinion, “devoid of energy or tact or manners and wholly ignorant of the country.” In an act of stupendous foolishness, the new king made Essad his defense minister. Wilhelm lasted six months before he fled back to Germany, leaving five separate regimes each of which claimed to be the government of Albania. By that point the Great War had broken out and Albania, because of its position, was almost at once drawn in. Italy reached across the Adriatic to occupy Vlorë. Greece moved into the south. When the Serbian army fell back in 1915 before the Austrians, it marched through Albania. The long history of mutual suspicion between Serbs and Albanians now had a new chapter, as Albanian brigands harried the desperate Serbs on their way to the Adriatic.33
By the war’s end, most of Albania was occupied: by Serbians in the north, Italians and Greeks in the south, Italians in most of the coastal towns and French in the interior around Shkodër in the north and Korçë in the southwest, where they flew a curious flag in which the French national colors were joined to a traditional Albanian design. In the south, Greece opened schools and held elections for deputies to the Greek parliament. Serbia and Greece talked in confidence about dividing Albania between them, but that ignored Italy, which had been promised Vlorë in the Treaty of London. (In 1917 Italy had tried to grab the whole of the country but was forced to back down.) The treaty hinted at yet another arrangement: Albania parceled out among Serbia, Montenegro and Greece, with a little statelet in the middle under Italian control.34
The Albanians, in the face of these threats to their country, attempted to pull themselves together. At a meeting in December 1918, representatives from different parts of the country elected a provisional government under Turkhan Pasha, an elderly gentleman who had once worked as an Ottoman diplomat. Essad, as usual, played his own game, insisting that he was the president of Albania or, alternatively, its king. (He had spent part of the war designing a dazzling uniform for himself and covering it with decorations of his own awarding.) When the provisional government sent a delegation to Paris led by Turkhan Pasha, Essad went on his own behalf and quarreled violently with the official delegates, whom he accused, in a case of the pot calling the kettle black, of intriguing with the Italians.35 He was handicapped because he scarcely dared stir from his hotel for fear that one of his many enemies would try to assassinate him.
Albania’s friends abroad, a motley crew, provided what help they could. One group hired a charming Hungarian aristocrat to lobby the Americans; unfortunately, it turned out that his main passion in life, and the subject of all his conversations, was the tooth structure of dinosaurs. The Pan-Albanian