Chameria issue

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The Chameria issue is an issue which has been raised by Albania since the 1990s over the expulsion of Muslim Cham Albanians a few thousands of whom had collaborated with the occupation forces, from the Greek province of Epirus between 1944–1945, following the Axis defeat in World War II. This policy, like the expulsion of 12 million ethnic Germans [1] in the aftermath of the war had been instigated and planned by the British and American Allied command[2] [3] while hostilities were still taking place although its implementation caused more suffering than was envisaged.

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[edit] Background

Following the defeat of Ottoman forces in the region and the Balkan Wars of 1913, an international boundary commission awarded the northern part of the region of Epirus to Albania, and the southern part to Greece, based on their overall populations, leaving Greek and Albanian minority areas either side of the border. Most of the Cham-populated border area to the far northwest , except for a few Cham villages assigned to Albania, came under the Greek half. Most of the Muslim Cham population was part of the population exchange between Greece and Turkey under the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923.

The remaining 20,000 [4], Muslim Cham Albanians of Greece were subjected to discrimination that increased under Ioannis Metaxas. Tensions were exacerbated at the time of World War II. Albania was annexed by Italy in 1939, and when the later invaded Greece in 1940 it did so from Albania using several thousand native Albanian auxiliaries. Following the conquest of Greece by Nazi Germany, the Italians, whose zone of occupation included Epirus, recruited a large number of Muslim Cham citizens to assist them.

[edit] Muslim Cham Collaboration

While no number of Muslim Chams were responsible for atrocities against ethnic Greeks, some were only passive collaborators, distrusting Greeks and simply supporting the realization of a Greater Albania under the Italian occupation regime.

During the Axis occupation the Muslim Chams set up their own administration and militia, part of the fascist Balli Kombetar organization, at Thesprotia and collaborated closely with both the Italians and — when Italy capitulated - the Germans. [3]. Cham units committed, alongside the Wehrmacht, a number of atrocities on their ethnically Greek fellow citizens burning houses and villages. [4],killing several hundred ethnic Greeks and forcing thousands to flee their homes[5].

Muslim Cham units also played an active part in the Holocaust in Greece, including the round-up and expulsion to Auschwitz and Birkenau of the 2,000 strong Romaniotes Greek-Jewish community of Ioannina in April 1944 [6]. As the Germans and their allies began to lose ground to the anti-Nazi militias in 1944, and started retiring in Albania, many hundreds of Chams followed them. [4] [5].

[edit] Muslim Cham Expulsion

The Muslim Cham exodus began in October 1944 as many hundreds fled with the Nazi forces into Albania [5]. In 1944 the right-wing EDES resistance group attempted to co-opt the Muslim Cham guerrillas and recruit them against ELAS [4], but their overtures were rebuffed.

This precipitated the Muslim Chams’ forced expulsion, organized by EDES's leader Napoleon Zervas, under the instigation and authorisation of the British Military Mission in Greece, headed by Colonel Chris Woodhouse, who reported that:

Encouraged by the Allied Mission I headed, Zervas drove the Chams out of their homes in 1944. The majority fled to find shelter in Albania. Their eviction from Greece was carried out with large-scale bloodshed. Zervas's work was followed in March 1945 with a large scale massacre of the Filiates Chams that cannot be excused. The result was the eviction of the undesirable Albanian population from their land. [2]

Beginning on June 27, 1944, while Greece was still under German occupation, and continuing through March 1945, EDES resistance fighters, operating under British orders to expel and punish the Nazi collaborators, launched a series of attacks on Muslim Cham villages in Epirus, killing several hundred Chams and causing 18,000 to flee to Albania or Turkey.

Joseph Jacobs, head of the US Mission in Albania (1945-1946) wrote:

In March 1945 units of Zervas's dissolved forces carried out a massacre of Chams in the Filiates area, and practically cleared the district of the Albanian minority. According to all the information I have been able to gather on the Cham issue, in the fall of 1944 and during the first months of 1945, the authorities in north-western Greece perpetrated savage brutality by evicting some 25,000 Chams - residents of Chameria - from their homes. They were chased across the border after having been robbed of their land and property. Hundreds of male Chams from the ages of 15 to 70 were interned on the islands of the Aegean Sea. In total 102 mosques were burnt down.

According to Stathis Kalyvas, professor of Political Science at Yale University these expulsions are "undoubtedly a case of ethnic cleansing" [7] an opinion with which Mark Mazower agrees[4] adding that their case is "analogous" to that of ethnic Germans expelled during and after WWII and that the acts were organized by "local military powerbrokers and only afterwards ratified, as it were, by the beleaguered Greek state far away in Athens"[1]

[edit] Aftermath

A large number of the predominantly Muslim Cham refugees settled in villages of southern Albania, where today their descendants claim to number about 200,000 [5]. A Muslim Cham association (the Cham Political Association, CPA, in Albanian: Shoqëria Politike Atdhetare "Çamëria"), has been set up in Albania which claims a number of 2,800 dead and over 35,000 evicted although these figures are not supported by historians, like Victor Roudometof [8] or Mark Mazower [4], who put the number of evictees at 18,000. In 1994 Albania passed a law that declared the 27th of June The Day of Greek Chauvinist Genocide Against the Albanians of Chameria and built a memorial at the village of Konispol. In 1999 the president of the CPA, Hilmi Saqe, stated that: :These massacres were almost at the same level as those of the Holocaust on the Hebrews[9]

The Greek government refuses to allow them to resettle in Greece considering them to have lost their citizenship for collaboration (1,910 Muslim Cham collaborators were convicted in absentia by the Greek Special Court on Collaborators [3]) after evidence was brought of their war crimes and/or (under a law stricken in 1998) as having left Greece as non-ethnic Greeks (either on the part of them personally or their ancestors from whom they would ordinarily have acquired it). The Greek government also refuses to negotiate over the properties formerly belonging to the Cham beys (Muslim feudal lords), considering them lawfully confiscated for the same reasons.

In terms of international law their status is that of Czech and Polish citizens of German ethnicity who were evicted from their homes after WWII as the result of their association with Nazi Germany. The later have also formed associations demanding restitution of their properties and repatriation. In that instance and again under the auspices of the victorious American and British forces over 12 million ethnic Germans were evicted from their homes with close to a million perishing in the process.

[edit] References

  1. ^ a b Dr.Mazower's article for the History Cooperative
  2. ^ a b John Melior Stevens, Christopher Montague Woodhouse, Lars Bærentzen, British Reports on Greece 1943-1944, 1982, Museum Tusculanum Press, ISBN 8788073203
  3. ^ a b c Russell King, Nicola Mai, Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers,The New Albanian Migration, p.67, and 87
  4. ^ a b c d e f M. Mazower (ed.), After The War Was Over: Reconstructing the Family, Nation and State in Greece, 1943-1960, p. 25
  5. ^ a b c d Miranda Vickers, The Cham Issue - Albanian National & Property Claims in Greece, paper prepared for the British MoD, Defence Academy, 2002
  6. ^ M. Mazower, Inside Hitler's Greece
  7. ^ Dr. Kalyvas' article on the issue (in Greek)
  8. ^ Victor Roudometof, Collective Memory, National Identity, and Ethnic Conflict Greece, Bulgaria, and the Macedonian Question, p.181-182 The figure of 30,000 is adopted from the Cham associations without checking the other sources used in the discussion in this chapter.
  9. ^ Speech by Hilmi Saqe, OSCE Istanbul Summit, unrelated fringe meeting, 18 November 1999

[edit] See also

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