Rethinking Serbian-Albanian Relations

Figuring out the Enemy

Aleksandar Pavlović, Gazela Draško, Rigels Halili, Gazela Pudar Draško, Rigels Halili, Aleksandar Pavlović, Gazela Draško, Aleksandar Pavlović, Gazela Pudar Draško, Rigels Halili

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781351273145
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Diplomacy & Treaties
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Identifying and explaining common views, ideas and traditions, this volume challenges the concept of Serbian-Albanian hostility by reinvestigating recent and historical events in the region. The contributors put forward critically oriented initiatives and alternatives to shed light on a range of relations and perspectives.

The central aim of the book is to 'figure out' the problematic relations between Serbs and Albanians – that is, to comprehend its origins and the actors involved, and to find ways to resolve and deal with this enmity. Treating the hostility as a construct of a long-running discourse about the Serbian or Albanian 'Other', scholars and intellectuals from Serbia, Kosovo and Albania examine the origins, channels, agents and mediums of this discourse from the 18th century to the present. Tracing the roots of the two ethnic groups' political divisions, contemporary practices and actions allows the contributors to reconsider mutually held negative perceptions and identify elements of a common, shared history. Examples of past and current cooperation are used to offer a critical analysis of all three societies.

This interdisciplinary publication brings together historiographical, literary, sociological, political, anthropological and philosophical analyses and enquiries and will be of interest to researchers in the fields of sociology, politics, cultural studies, history or anthropology; and to academics working in Slavonic and East European studies.

Section I

Whose land is it? The establishment of Serbian-Albanian hostility

1 Forging the enemy

The transformation of common Serbian-Albanian traits into enmity and political hostility

Aleksandar Pavlović

This chapter focuses on the representation of the Albanians in the early Serbo-Montenegrin historiography, ethnography and oral tradition from the mid- eighteenth century throughout the long nineteenth century. To be sure, by Albanians, I do not have in mind any fixed entity or identity. Apparently, such claim rests on the assumptions of the constructivist school that all modern nations are “imagined communities”, as Benedict Anderson and other constructivists have persuasively argued.¹ The Albanians are certainly not exceptions in this respect. Hence, a number of comprehensive studies investigated the process of constitutions and unification of the Albanian nation, indicating its internal contradictions and contested and shifting attitudes stretching from the nineteenth century to this day.²

Nonetheless, this does not invalidate the investigation of the patterns and ways in which the Albanians have been seen and imagined by others, or Serbs in this particular case. As I will indicate, the Serbian image of Albanians shifted rather dramatically from the mid-eighteenth to the end of the long nineteenth century, chiefly due to the religious diversity of the Albanians and the shifting political circumstances and emerging Serbian concerns over Kosovo. Thus, in the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, in Serbian culture prevailed an image of Albanians as Christians and highlanders, similar to and aligned with Montenegrins in opposing the Turks. With the shifting interest to Kosovo from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards, Serbian authors increasingly started identifying Albanians as Muslims and associating them with Turks and hence as Serbian enemies.

In order to identify common perceptions about the Albanians throughout this period, I take into consideration three types of documents. First, I will briefly consider the two programmatic texts of Serbian Romantic nationalism from the first half of the nineteenth century – Vuk Karadžić’s 1849 Srbi svi i svuda (Serbs All and Everywhere, Karadžić 1849) and Ilija Garašanin’s 1844 Nаčеrtаniје. The Albanians have a rather marginal role in those works and remain largely unknown to its authors, whereas the territories they inhabited did not figure so prominently within the Serbian national agenda of the time. The second group comprises three oldest Montenegrin histories³ and Dositej Obradović’s memoirs of his stay among the Toskas of the Southern Albania,⁴ all of which constitute rare instances when Albanians were even mentioned. The analysis of these texts shows that the educated Serbs and Montenegrins of the time were mostly interested in the Albanians from Northern Albania and the Zeta Valley, which they depict as brave warriors and heroes closely resembling the Montenegrins, with whom they often fight together against the Turks. Hence, the information about the Albanians from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century are found mostly in three Montenegrin histories written during this time, which will be the subject of discursive analysis that takes into consideration the context in which these works originated and the biographies of their authors. The third group of texts herein regarded comprises several transcriptions of popular oral songs from Serbian and Albanian oral epic tradition. In particular, I will examine the common traits in Serbian and Albanian oral and epic tradition by referring to several oral songs about Prince Marko (“Marko Kraljević and Musa the Outlaw”,⁵ and “Četobaša Mujo i Marko Kralјević”).⁶ Since Marko Kraljević is the most popular hero not only of Serbian, but of the entire Balkan oral tradition, numerous songs about him recorded in various Balkan languages spanning throughout several centuries enable us to observe from the folkloristic angle how this character and his exploits involve identity perceptions of one’s own and neighbouring communities in the Balkans. It is argued that the appreciation for particular Albanian heroes found in Serbian/Montenegrin folk oral songs and narratives, and vice versa, stems from a similar social background and shared patriarchal values among the two ethnic groups. Consequently, contemporary authors such as Marko Miljanov⁷ often insist on the shared values of heroism, hospitality and manliness among Serbs, Montenegrins and Albanians, while scholars like Valtazar Bogišić⁸ emphasize the similarities in their social institutions and way of life.

In the second part of the chapter, I focus on the discontinuity in Serbian- Albanian perceptions, which occurs with weakening of heroic discourse and strengthening of national discourse – influenced by the Eastern Crisis – in the post-1878 period. During this time, a number of factors, such as the international recognition of Serbia and Montenegro as independent countries, formation of the Albanian national movement, weakening of the Ottoman rule and territorial disputes over the present-day Kosovo and Northern Albania, gradually led to the increasingly negative and coherent image of the Albanians within Serbian culture. Thus, contemporary Serbian intellectuals abandoned the previously prevailing image of the Albanians as highlanders, Catholics and Serbian allies against the Turks, forwarding instead as the dominant figure of the Albanians as Muslims, Turkish allies and the torturers of the few remaining Kosovo Serbs. This perception coincides with the birth of the geo-political concepts of “Old Serbia” and the growing Serbian interest in the Kosovo and Northern Albanian territory.

These negative perceptions gradually evolved into systematic discourse which blended historical claims over the Kosovo territory based on its medieval history, humanitarian claims about the systematic expulsion of the Kosovo Serbs by the Albanians and demographic claims about Albanians being newcomers to Kosovo and Metohija/Dukadjin which for centuries had a stable Serbian majority, all of which thereby justifying Serbian pretentions over the Kosovo territory.⁹ Following Maria Todorova’s concept of Balkanism, I propose to use the term “Albanism” for this discourse that emerges in Serbia on the eve of the Balkans wars and, as exemplified by other contributions to this volume, remains productive ever since. In the concluding part of the chapter, I emphasize several examples of turn-of-the twentieth century intellectuals who publicly opposed these negative views of the Albanians and advocated a change in political attitudes towards them.

An Albanian as a hero, relative and friend in Serbo-Montenegrin heroic discourse

In distinction to the currently widespread view about the centennial hostility between the Serbs and Albanians, available sources from the past indicate that for centuries they did not perceive their relations as problematic, and it would be hard to find anything resembling coherent anti-Serbian or anti-Albanian discourse among them before the second half of the nineteenth century. This claim deserves some further elaboration. The books such as Maria Todorova’s Imagining the Balkans (1997) and Božidar Jezernik’s Wild Europe (2004) offer instances of Balkanism from the mid-sixteenth century. Balkanism is a term somewhat similar to Said’s orientalism. Maria Todorova defined it as a discourse that creates a stereotype of the Balkans, with politics significantly and organically intertwined with this discourse. The term Balkans is often stereotypically used as “a synonym for a reversion to the tribal, the backward, the primitive, the barbarian”.¹⁰ Moreover, one could perhaps trace these negative perceptions of the Balkan peoples further in the past, finding instances of Byzantine writers showing contempt for the “barbaric” ways of the nouveau riches Serbian or Bulgarian rulers, which then ties this all the way to Ancient Greek writers and their descriptions of the Thracians and other non-Hellenic peoples as barbaric. In short, while this external Balkanism has roots that go far back in history, internal Serbian-Albanian Balkanism is its rather recent derivation.

Prior to the mid-nineteenth century, literate Serbs showed no particular interest in Albanians, and the information about them was scarce. It is indicative, for instance, that the Albanians play no significant role in the two (in)famous founding documents of Serbian nationalism, Vuk Karadžić’s Srbi svi i svuda (Serbs All and Everywhere, published in 1849) and Ilija Garašanin’s Načertanije (The Draft, from 1844). In the opening paragraph of Srbi svi i svuda, Karadžić starts from the assumption that all people speaking the štokavijan dialect should be considered as Serbs, be they Orthodox, Muslim or Roman-Catholic. He then lists all the areas that the Serbs inhabit but mentions with regret that there is no information regarding the Serbs in Albania and Macedonia:

It is still unknown how many Serbs there are in Albania and Macedonia. During my stay at Cetinje (in Montenegro) I spoke with two men from Dibra, who told me that in those places there is many a “Serbian” village, wherein Serbian is spoken the way they speak it, that is, across between Serbian and Bulgarian, but nonetheless closer to Serbian rather than to Bulgarian.

Uprаvо јоš [sе] nе znа dоklе Srbа imа u Аrnаutskој i u Маćеdоniјi. Ја sаm sе nа Cеtinju (u Crnој Gоri) rаzgоvаrао s dvојicоm lјudi iz Dibrе, kојi su mi kаzivаli dа оnаmо imа mnоgо “srpskiјеh” sеlа, pо kојimа sе gоvоri srpski оnаkо kао i оni štо su gоvоrili, tј. izmеđu srpskоgа i bugаrskоgа, аli оpеt bližе k srpskоmе nеgо k prаvоmе bugаrskоmе.¹¹

Correspondingly, Ilija Garašanin wrote his Načertanije as a secret document outlining the strategy for the future Serbian territorial policy and expansion. Garašanin dreamed about restoring the medieval Serbian Kingdom and glory, which for the most part occupied the territories lying south from the then Serbia, but in actual fact, he provided concrete information and plans regarding Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and Southern Hungary, while these medieval lands apparently remained practically unknown to him.¹² The Albanians are thus mentioned only once in the context of his plans of tightening Serbia closer with the Montenegrins and Northern Albanians as they are the ones holding the keys to the Adriatic Sea,¹³ which is a rather modest claim compared to the later Serbian policy where Kosovo an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• Section I Whose land is it? The establishment of Serbian-Albanian hostility
• Section II The Yugoslav experiment: Serbian-Albanian relations in comparative perspective
• Section III Intellectuals and war: the mediators of (non-)national justice
• Section IV Can there be cooperation after all: cultural and political cross-border practices
• Index