Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [235]
The Supreme Council granted an audience to Turkhan Pasha on February 24. “Very, very old and sad,” reported Nicholson. “The Ten chatter and laugh while this is going on. Rather painful.”37 The Albanians threw themselves on the mercy of the Peace Conference and, in particular, on the Americans. “They trust,” their written statement said, “that the principle of nationality so clearly and solemnly proclaimed by President Wilson and his great Associates will not have been proclaimed in vain, and that their rights—which have, up to now, been trampled underfoot—will be respected.”
The Albanians challenged the Greek claims, producing their own statistics. Where Greece counted 120,000 Greeks in the south, the Albanians could find only 20,000. Religion was not an indicator of anything; Christian or Muslim, all Albanians were united in a love of their homeland, and had been for centuries. The Greeks claimed to be more civilized than Albanians, yet they had committed appalling atrocities. So had the Serbs. During the war, the Albanians had done whatever they could to help the Allies. Albania ought not to lose any territory; in fact, in strictest justice, it should be given the parts of Serbia, Montenegro and Greece where Albanians were in a clear majority.
The Albanian claim included Kosovo, a relatively prosperous farming area on Albania’s northwest frontier, where, the Albanian delegates said, Albanians had been since “time immemorial”; the Serbs, who also claimed Kosovo, had not arrived until the seventh century. Moreover, Serbia, which had controlled Kosovo since 1913, had behaved appallingly. There would be trouble in the future if Albanians had to live under Serb rule.38 (Serbs were saying the same thing about the Albanians.)
Whatever the rights and wrongs of the past (always a difficult matter to establish in the Balkans), it was clear that the Albanians had a good case. The majority of the population of Kosovo was Albanian. But for Serbs Kosovo was their Runnymede, their Valley Forge, and their Lorraine. Kosovo was where, in 1389, the Ottomans had defeated the Serbs and brought them under Muslim rule. It was at once a defeat and, paradoxically, the Serbs’ great victory, celebrated annually down through the centuries. Legend had it that a saint, in the form of a falcon, offered the Serbian prince a choice between winning the battle on earth and winning in heaven; he chose the latter and, although he died, his salvation and that of the Christian Serbs was assured. “This region was undeniably a part of the great Serbian Empire in the thirteenth century,” said House’s assistant Bonsal. “Should it be restored to Belgrade now? Should California and New Mexico be restored to Spain or Mexico? I don’t know.” One solution might be a simple exchange of populations. “All would be well if friendly relations could be established between the disputants, but unfortunately all the experts say this is impossible; on this point at least they are in full agreement.” 39
Kosovo did not become an issue in 1919 because the powers saw no reason to enlarge Albania’s borders in any direction. Albania was weak, its government ineffectual. What did it matter if some half-million Albanian farmers lived under Serbian or Yugoslav rule?