NATIONAL
AWAKENING AND THE BIRTH OF ALBANIA, 1876-1918
By
the 1870s, the Sublime Porte's reforms aimed at checking the
Ottoman Empire's disintegration had clearly failed. The image
of the "Turkish yoke" had become fixed in the nationalist
mythologies and psyches of the empire's Balkan peoples, and
their march toward independence quickened. The Albanians,
because of the preponderance of Muslims link with Islam and
their internal social divisions, were the last of the Balkan
peoples to develop a national consciousness, which was triggered
by fears that the Ottoman Empire would lose its Albanian-populated
lands to the emerging Balkan states--Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria,
and Greece. Albanian leaders formed the Prizren League in
1878, which pressed for territorial autonomy, and after decades
of unrest a major uprising exploded in the Albanian-populated
Ottoman territories in 1912, on the eve of the First Balkan
War. When Serbia, Montenegro, and Greece laid claim to Albanian
lands during the war, the Albanians declared independence,
and the European Great Powers endorsed an independent Albania
in 1913, after the Second Balkan War. The young state, however,
collapsed within weeks of the outbreak of World War I.
The Rise of Albanian Nationalism
The 1877-78 Russo-Turkish War dealt
a decisive blow to Ottoman power in the Balkan Peninsula,
leaving the empire with only a precarious hold on Macedonia
and the Albanian-populated lands. The Albanians' fear that
the lands they inhabited would be partitioned among Montenegro,
Serbia, Bulgaria, and Greece fueled the rise of Albanian nationalism.
The first postwar treaty, the abortive Treaty of San Stefano
(see Glossary) signed on March 3, 1878, assigned Albanian-populated
lands to Serbia, Montenegro, and Bulgaria. Austria-Hungary
and Britain blocked the arrangement because it awarded Russia
a predominant position in the Balkans and thereby upset the
European balance of power. A peace conference to settle the
dispute was held later in the year in Berlin.
The
Treaty of San Stefano triggered profound anxiety among the
Albanians meanwhile, and it spurred their leaders to organize
a defense of the lands they inhabited. In the spring of 1878,
influential Albanians in Constantinople--including Abdyl Frasheri,
the Albanian national movement's leading figure during its
early years--organized a secret committee to direct the Albanians'
resistance. In May the group called for a general meeting
of representatives from all the Albanian-populated lands.
On June 10, 1878, about eighty delegates, leaders, clan chiefs,
and other influential people from the four Albanian-populated
Ottoman vilayets, met in the Kosova town of Prizren. The delegates
set up a standing organization, the Prizren League, under
the direction of a central committee that had the power to
impose taxes and raise an army. The Prizren League worked
to gain autonomy for the Albanians and to thwart implementation
of the Treaty of San Stefano, but not to create an independent
Albania.
At first the Ottoman authorities supported
the Prizren League, but the Sublime Porte pressed the delegates
to declare themselves to be first and foremost Ottomans rather
than Albanians. Some delegates supported this position and
advocated emphasizing Muslim solidarity and the defense of
Muslim lands, including present-day Bosnia and Hercegovina.
Other representatives, under Frasheri's leadership, focused
on working toward Albanian autonomy and creating a sense of
Albanian identity that would cut across religious and tribal
lines. Because conservative Muslims constituted a majority
of the representatives, the Prizren League supported maintenance
of Ottoman suzerainty.
In July 1878, the league sent a memorandum
to the Great Powers at the Congress of Berlin, which was called
to settle the unresolved problems of Turkish War, demanding
that all Albanians be united in a single Ottoman province
that would be governed from Bitola by a Turkish governor who
would be advised by an Albanian committee elected by universal
suffrage.
The Congress of Berlin ignored the
league's memorandum, and Germany's Otto von Bismarck even
proclaimed that an Albanian nation did not exist. The congress
ceded to Montenegro the cities of Bar and Podgorica and areas
around the mountain villages of Gusinje and Plav, which Albanian
leaders considered Albanian territory. Serbia also won Albanian-inhabited
lands. The Albanians, the vast majority loyal to the empire,
vehemently opposed the territorial losses. Albanians also
feared the possible loss of Epirus to Greece. The Prizren
League organized armed resistance efforts in Gusinje, Plav,
Shkodër, Prizren, Prevesa, and Janina. A border tribesman
at the time described the frontier as "floating on blood."
In August 1878, the Congress of Berlin
ordered a commission to trace a border between the Ottoman
Empire and Montenegro. The congress also directed Greece and
the Ottoman Empire to negotiate a solution to their border
dispute. The Great Powers expected the Ottomans to ensure
that the Albanians would respect the new borders, ignoring
that the sultan's military forces were too weak to enforce
any settlement and that the Ottomans could only benefit by
the Albanians' resistance. The Sublime Porte, in fact, armed
the Albanians and allowed them to levy taxes, and when the
Ottoman army withdrew from areas awarded to Montenegro under
the Treaty of Berlin, Roman Catholic Albanian tribesmen simply
took control. The Albanians' successful resistance to the
treaty forced the Great Powers to alter the border, returning
Gusinje and Plav to the Ottoman Empire and granting Montenegro
the mostly Muslim Albanian-populated coastal town of Ulcinj.
But the Albanians there refused to surrender as well. Finally,
the Great Powers blockaded Ulcinj by sea and pressured the
Ottoman authorities to bring the Albanians under control.
The Great Powers decided in 1881 to cede Greece only Thessaly
and the small Albanian-populated district of Arta.
Faced with growing international pressure
"to pacify" the refractory Albanians, the sultan
dispatched a large army under Dervish Turgut Pasha to suppress
the Prizren League and deliver Ulcinj to Montenegro. Albanians
loyal to the empire supported the Sublime Porte's military
intervention. In April 1881, Dervish Pasha's 10,000 men captured
Prizren and later crushed the resistance at Ulcinj. The Prizren
League's leaders and their families were arrested and deported.
Frasheri, who originally received a death sentence, was imprisoned
until 1885 and exiled until his death seven years later. In
the three years it survived, the Prizren League effectively
made the Great Powers aware of the Albanian people and their
national interests. Montenegro and Greece received much less
Albanian-populated territory than they would have won without
the league's resistance.
Formidable barriers frustrated Albanian
leaders' efforts to instill in their people an Albanian rather
than an Ottoman identity. Divided into four vilayets, Albanians
had no common geographical or political nerve center. The
Albanians' religious differences forced nationalist leaders
to give the national movement a purely secular character that
alienated religious leaders. The most significant factor uniting
the Albanians, their spoken language, lacked a standard literary
form and even a standard alphabet. Each of the three available
choices, the Latin, Cyrillic, and Arabic scripts, implied
different political and religious orientations opposed by
one or another element of the population. In 1878 there were
no Albanian-language schools in the most developed of the
Albanian-inhabited areas-- Gjirokastër, Berat, and Vlorë--where
schools conducted classes either in Turkish or in Greek (see
Education: Pre-Communist Era, ch. 2).
Albanian intellectuals in the late
nineteenth century began devising a single, standard Albanian
literary language and making demands that it be used in schools.
In Constantinople in 1879, Sami Frasheri founded a cultural
and educational organization, the Society for the Printing
of Albanian Writings, whose membership comprised Muslim, Catholic,
and Orthodox Albanians. Naim Frasheri, the most-renowned Albanian
poet, joined the society and wrote and edited textbooks. Albanian
émigrés in Bulgaria, Egypt, Italy, Romania,
and the United States supported the society's work. The Greeks,
who dominated the education of Orthodox Albanians, joined
the Turks in suppressing the Albanians' culture, especially
Albanian-language education. In 1886 the ecumenical patriarch
of Constantinople threatened to excommunicate anyone found
reading or writing Albanian, and priests taught that God would
not understand prayers uttered in Albanian.
The Ottoman Empire continued to crumble
after the Congress of Berlin. The empire's financial troubles
prevented Sultan Abdül Hamid II from reforming his military,
and he resorted to repression to maintain order. The authorities
strove without success to control the political situation
in the empire's Albanian-populated lands, arresting suspected
nationalist activists. When the sultan refused Albanian demands
for unification of the four Albanian-populated vilayets, Albanian
leaders reorganized the Prizren League and incited uprisings
that brought the Albanian lands, especially Kosovo, to near
anarchy. The imperial authorities again disbanded the Prizren
League in 1897, executed its president in 1902, and banned
Albanian- language books and correspondence. In Macedonia,
where Bulgarian-, Greek-, and Serbian-backed terrorists were
fighting Ottoman authorities and one another for control,
Muslim Albanians suffered attacks, and Albanian guerrilla
groups retaliated. In 1906 Albanian leaders meeting in Bitola
established the secret Committee for the Liberation of Albania.
A year later, Albanian guerrillas assassinated Korçë's
Greek Orthodox metropolitan.
In 1906 opposition groups in the Ottoman
Empire emerged, one of which evolved into the Committee of
Union and Progress, more commonly known as the Young Turks,
which proposed restoring constitutional government in Constantinople,
by revolution if necessary. In July 1908, a month after a
Young Turk rebellion in Macedonia supported by an Albanian
uprising in Kosovo and Macedonia escalated into widespread
insurrection and mutiny within the imperial army, Sultan Abdül
Hamid II agreed to demands by the Young Turks to restore constitutional
rule. Many Albanians participated in the Young Turks uprising,
hoping that it would gain their people autonomy within the
empire. The Young Turks lifted the Ottoman ban on Albanian-language
schools and on writing the Albanian language. As a consequence,
Albanian intellectuals meeting in Bitola in 1908 chose the
Latin alphabet as a standard script. The Young Turks, however,
were set on maintaining the empire and not interested in making
concessions to the myriad nationalist groups within its borders.
After securing the abdication of Abdül Hamid II in April
1909, the new authorities levied taxes, outlawed guerrilla
groups and nationalist societies, and attempted to extend
Constantinople's control over the northern Albanian mountainmen.
In addition, the Young Turks legalized the bastinado, or beating
with a stick, even for misdemeanors, banned carrying rifles,
and denied the existence of an Albanian nationality. The new
government also appealed for Islamic solidarity to break the
Albanians' unity and used the Muslim clergy to try to impose
the Arabic alphabet.
The Albanians refused to submit to
the Young Turks' campaign to "Ottomanize" them by
force. New Albanian uprisings began in Kosovo and the northern
mountains in early April 1910. Ottoman forces quashed these
rebellions after three months, outlawed Albanian organizations,
disarmed entire regions, and closed down schools and publications.
Montenegro, preparing to grab Albanian-populated lands for
itself, supported a 1911 uprising by the mountain tribes against
the Young Turks regime that grew into a widespread revolt.
Unable to control the Albanians by force, the Ottoman government
granted concessions on schools, military recruitment, and
taxation and sanctioned the use of the Latin script for the
Albanian language. The government refused, however, to unite
the four Albanian-inhabited vilayets.
