ترحيل الألبان 1877–1878

يشير ترحيل الألبان 1877–1878 إلى أحداث التهجير القسري للسكان الألبان من مناطق دُمجت بإمارة صربيا وإمارة الجبل الأسود في عام 1878. انتهت هذه الحروب، إلى جانب الحرب الروسية العثمانية (1877-1878) ذات النطاق الأوسع، بهزيمة الدولة العثمانية وخسارتها مساحاتٍ واسعة من الأراضي، الأمر الذي أخذ صيغته الرسمية في مؤتمر برلين. كان هذا الترحيل جزءًا من الاضطهاد الأوسع للمسلمين في دول البلقان خلال التراجع الجيوسياسي للدولة العثمانية وخسارتها الأراضي.^[1]^[2]

عشية النزاع بين الجبل الأسود والعثمانيين (1876-1878)، كان عدد معتبر من الألبان يُقيم في سنجق شقودرة. خلال الحرب التي نشبت بين الجبل الأسود والدولة العثمانية، أعقب المقاومةَ القوية التي أبدتها بلدتا بودغوريتشا وسبوش ترحيلُ سكانهما المسلمين من الألبان والسلاف الذين انتقلوا إلى شقودرة ليستقروا فيها.^[3]

عشية النزاع بين صربيا والعثمانيين (1876-1878)، عاش عدد معتبر من الألبان -وأحيانًا على نحو مدمج وفي القرى بشكل أساسي- وبعض الترك الحضر (بعضهم يمتلك إرثًا ألبانيًا) مع الصرب ضمن سنجق نيش. خلال الحرب، اختلفت ردة فعل الألبان تجاه القوات الصربية المتقدمة وفقًا للمنطقة، فتراوحت بين إبداء المقاومة والفرار إلى الجبال القريبة وكوسوفو العثمانية. رغم طرد القوات الصربية معظمَ هؤلاء الألبان، فقد سُمح ببقاء عدد ضئيل في وادي يابلانيكا حيث يعيش أحفادهم اليوم. انتقل الصرب القادمون من منطقة نهر لاب إلى صربيا خلال الجولة الأولى من الأعمال العدائية عام 1876 وبعدها، في حين أعاد اللاجئون الألبان منذ عام 1878 تزويد قراهم بالسكان. استقر اللاجئون الألبان أيضًا على طول الحدود العثمانية الصربي في الشمال الشرقي، وفي مناطق حضرية، وفي ما يزيد عن 30 مستعمرة أُقيمت وسط كوسوفو وفي جنوبها الشرقي.^[4]^[5]^[6]^[7]^[8]^[9]

واجهت السلطات العثمانية صعوبات في تلبية حاجات اللاجئين، وتصرفت بعداء تجاه الصرب المحليين، وأقدمت على شن هجمات انتقامية. تم ترحيل السكان الألبان من هذه المناطق بأسلوب يمكن تصنيفه اليوم على أنه تطهير عرقي، إذ لم يكن الضحايا كلهم من المقاتلين، بل كان بينهم مدنيون أيضًا. بات يُشار إلى هؤلاء اللاجئين الألبان وذريتهم في اللغة الألبانية بكلمة «مهاجر Muhaxhir»، وجمعها Muhaxhirë، وهي كلمة شاملة للاجئين المسلمين (مستعارة من المفردة التركية العثمانية: Muhacir، ومشتقة من الكلمة العربية «مهاجر»). أدت أحداث هذه الفترة إلى اندلاع النزاع الصربي الألباني وتوتر العلاقات بين الشعبين.^[10]^[11]^[12]

سنجق شقودرة

عشية النزاع بين الجبل الأسود والعثمانيين (1876-1878)، كان عدد معتبر من الألبان يقيمون في سنجق شقودرة. وفي الحرب التي قامت بين الجبل الأسود والدولة العثمانية، تمكن جيش الجبل الأسود من الاستيلاء على بعض المناطق والمستعمرات على طول الحدود، في حين واجه مقاومة قوية من الألبان في أولسيني، وقوة ألبانية عثمانية متحدة في منطقتي بودغوريتشا سبوش وغوسيني بلاف. يُذكر أن مكتسبات الجبل الأسود من الأراضي كانت أصغر بكثير. تعرض بعض المسلمين السلاف والسكان الألبان الذين عاشوا قرب الحدود الجنوبية للترحيل من بلدتَي بودغوريتشا وسبوش، واستقروا من جديد في مدينة شقودرة وضواحيها. آثرت شريحة أصغر من الألبان كانت تشكّلها النخبة الثرية أن تغادر طواعية وتستقر من جديد في شقودرة بعد دمج أولسيني بالجبل الأسود في عام 1880.^[13]^[14]

معرض صور

مراجع

^ Stojanović 2010، صفحة 264
^ Jagodić 1998، para. 15.
^ Blumi 2003، صفحة 246. "What one sees over the course of the first ten years after Berlin was a gradual process of Montenegrin (Slav) expansion into areas that were still exclusively populated by Albanian-speakers. In many ways, some of these affected communities represented extensions of those in the Malisorë as they traded with one another throughout the year and even inter-married. Cetinje, eager to sustain some sense of territorial and cultural continuity, began to monitor these territories more closely, impose customs officials in the villages, and garrison troops along the frontiers. This was possible because, by the late 1880s, Cetinje had received large numbers of migrant Slavs from Austrian-occupied Herzegovina, helping to shift the balance of local power in Cetinje's favor. As more migrants arrived, what had been a quiet boundary region for the first few years, became the center of colonization and forced expulsion." ; p.254. footnote 38. "It must be noted that, throughout the second half of 1878 and the first two months of 1879, the majority of Albanian-speaking residents of Shpuza and Podgoritza, also ceded to Montenegro by Berlin, were resisting en masse. The result of the transfer of Podgoritza (and Antivari on the coast) was a flood of refugees. See, for instance, AQSH E143.D.1054.f.1 for a letter (dated 12 May 1879) to Dervish Pasha, military commander in Işkodra, detailing the flight of Muslims and Catholics from Podgoritza."
^ Luković 2011، صفحة 298. "During the second war (December 1877 - January 1878) the Muslim population fled towns (Vranya (Vranje), Leskovac, Ürgüp (Prokuplje), Niş (Niš), Şehirköy (Pirot), etc.) as well as rural settlements where they comprised ethnically compact communities (certain parts of Toplica, Jablanica, Pusta Reka, Masurica and other regions in the South Morava River basin). At the end of the war these Muslim refugees ended up in the region of Kosovo and Metohija, in the territory of the Ottoman Empire, following the demarcation of the new border with the Principality of Serbia. [38] [38] On Muslim refugees (muhaciri) from the regions of southeast Serbia, who relocated in Macedonia and Kosovo, see Trifunovski 1978, Radovanovič 2000."
^ Blumi 2013، صفحة 50. "As these Niš refugees waited for acknowledgment from locals, they took measures to ensure that they were properly accommodated by often confiscating food stored in towns. They also simply appropriated lands and began to build shelter on them. A number of cases also point to banditry in the form of livestock raiding and "illegal" hunting in communal forests, all parts of refugees' repertoire... At this early stage of the crisis, such actions overwhelmed the Ottoman state, with the institution least capable of addressing these issues being the newly created Muhacirin Müdüriyeti... Ignored in the scholarship, these acts of survival by desperate refugees constituted a serious threat to the established Kosovar communities. The leaders of these communities thus spent considerable efforts lobbying the Sultan to do something about the refugees. While these Niš muhacirs would in some ways integrate into the larger regional context, as evidenced later, they, and a number of other Albanian-speaking refugees streaming in for the next 20 years from Montenegro and Serbia, constituted a strong opposition block to the Sultan's rule."; p.53. "One can observe that in strategically important areas, the new Serbian state purposefully left the old Ottoman laws intact. More important, when the state wished to enforce its authority, officials felt it necessary to seek the assistance of those with some experience, using the old Ottoman administrative codes to assist judges make rulings. There still remained, however, the problem of the region being largely depopulated as a consequence of the wars... Belgrade needed these people, mostly the landowners of the productive farmlands surrounding these towns, back. In subsequent attempts to lure these economically vital people back, while paying lip-service to the nationalist calls for "purification," Belgrade officials adopted a compromise position that satisfied both economic rationalists who argued that Serbia needed these people and those who wanted to separate "Albanians" from "Serbs." Instead of returning back to their "mixed" villages and towns of the previous Ottoman era, these "Albanians," "Pomaks," and "Turks" were encouraged to move into concentrated clusters of villages in Masurica, and Gornja Jablanica that the Serbian state set up for them. For this "repatriation" to work, however, authorities needed the cooperation of local leaders to help persuade members of their community who were refugees in Ottoman territories to "return." In this regard, the collaboration between Shahid Pasha and the Serbian regime stands out. An Albanian who commanded the Sofia barracks during the war, Shahid Pasha negotiated directly with the future king of Serbia, Prince Milan Obrenović, to secure the safety of those returnees who would settle in the many villages of Gornja Jablanica. To help facilitate such collaborative ventures, laws were needed that would guarantee the safety of these communities likely to be targeted by the rising nationalist elements infiltrating the Serbian army at the time. Indeed, throughout the 1880s, efforts were made to regulate the interaction between exiled Muslim landowners and those local and newly immigrant farmers working their lands. Furthermore, laws passed in early 1880 began a process of managing the resettlement of the region that accommodated those refugees who came from Austrian-controlled Herzegovina and from Bulgaria. Cooperation, in other words, was the preferred form of exchange within the borderland, not violent confrontation."
^ Jagodić 1998، para. 29.
^ Jagodić 1998، para. 16–27.
^ Jagodić 1998، 11.
^ Jagodić 1998، para. 4, 9.
^ Stefanović 2005، صفحات 469–470. "In 1878, following a series of Christian uprisings against the Ottoman Empire, the Russo-Turkish War, and the Berlin Congress, Serbia gained complete independence, as well as new territories in the Toplica and Kosanica regions adjacent to Kosovo. These two regions had a sizable Albanian population which the Serbian government decided to deport. The Serbian Army Commander insisted that Serbia 'should not have its Caucasus' and the Prime Minister argued that the Albanian minority might represent a security concern. In 1909, Serbian intellectual Jovan Hadži-Vasiljević explained that the major motivation for the 1878 deportation was also to 'create a pure Serbian nation state' by 'cleansing' the land of the non-Christians, as 'the great Serbian poet Njegoš argued'. Hadži-Vasiljević was here interpreting Njegoš rather loosely, as Njegoš work focused on the Slavonic Muslims and not on Albanian Muslims. The ominous implication was that Albanians, as non-Slavs, were not even capable of assimilation. While the Serbian state authorities repeatedly attempted to assimilate the Slavonic Muslims, they refrained from attempting to 'Serbianize' the Albanians. While both security concerns and the exclusive nationalist ideology influenced the government's policies, there was also some Serbian resistance to the 'cleansing' of the Albanians. General Jovan Belimarkovic opposed the deportation and offered his resignation to the government over this issue and journalist Manojlo Đjorđjević also condemned these policies and argued that Serbia should have pursued a policy of peaceful reconciliation towards the Albanians. In Toplica the Albanians were encountered, and we had nothing more important to do but to expel these warlike, but hard-working people from their homes. Instead of making a peace with them as the defeated side – they were without any good reason pushed across the border – so that they'll settle on the other side as the enemies of everything Serbian, to become the avengers towards those who pushed them from their homes. Despite some voices of dissent, the Serbian regime 'encouraged' about 71,000 Muslims, including 49,000 Albanians, 'to leave'. The regime then gradually settled Serbs and Montenegrins in these territories. Prior to 1878, the Serbs comprised not more than one half of the population of Nis, the largest city in the region; by 1884 the Serbian share rose to 80 per cent. According to Ottoman sources, Serbian forces also destroyed mosques in Leskovac, Prokuplje, and Vranje." ; p.470. "The 'cleansing' of Toplica and Kosanica would have long-term negative effects on Serbian-Albanian relations. The Albanians expelled from these regions moved over the new border to Kosovo, where the Ottoman authorities forced the Serb population out of the border region and settled the refugees there. Janjićije Popović, a Kosovo Serb community leader in the period prior to the Balkan Wars, noted that after the 1876–8 wars, the hatred of the Turks and Albanians towards the Serbs 'tripled'. A number of Albanian refugees from Toplica region, radicalized by their experience, engaged in retaliatory violence against the Serbian minority in Kosovo. In 1900 Živojin Perić, a Belgrade Professor of Law, noted that in retrospect, 'this unbearable situation probably would not have occurred had the Serbian government allowed Albanians to stay in Serbia'. He also argued that conciliatory treatment towards Albanians in Serbia could have helped the Serbian government to gain the sympathies of Albanians of the Ottoman Empire. Thus, while both humanitarian concerns and Serbian political interests would have dictated conciliation and moderation, the Serbian government, motivated by exclusive nationalist and anti-Muslim sentiments, chose expulsion. The 1878 cleansing was a turning point because it was the first gross and large-scale injustice committed by Serbian forces against the Albanians. From that point onward, both ethnic groups had recent experiences of massive victimization that could be used to justify 'revenge' attacks. Furthermore, Muslim Albanians had every reason to resist the incorporation into the Serbian state."
^ Uka 2004d، صفحة 52. "Pra, këtu në vazhdim, pas dëbimit të tyre me 1877–1878 do të shënohen vetëm disa patronime (mbiemra) të shqiptarëve të Toplicës dhe viseve tjera shqiptare të Sanxhakut të Nishit. Kjo do të thotë se, shqiptaret e dëbuar pas shpërnguljes, marrin atributin muhaxhirë (refugjatë), në vend që për mbiemër familjar të marrin emrin e gjyshit, fisit, ose ndonjë tjetër, ato për mbiemër familjar marrin emrin e fshatit të Sanxhakut të Nishit, nga janë dëbuar. [So here next, after their expulsion 1877–1878 will be noted with only some patronymic (surnames) of the Albanians of Toplica and other Albanian areas of Sanjak of Nis. This means that the Albanians expelled after moving, attained the appellation muhaxhirë (refugees), which instead for the family surname to take the name of his grandfather, clan, or any other, they for their family surname take the name of the village of the Sanjak of Nis from where they were expelled from.]" ; pp. 53–54.
^ Malcolm 1998، صفحات 228–229. "This period also saw a deterioration in relations between the Muslims and Christians of Kosovo. The prime cause of this was the mass expulsion of Muslims from the lands taken over by Serbia, Bulgaria and Montenegro in 1877-8. Almost all the Muslims (except, as we have seen, some Gypsies) were expelled from the Morava valley region: there had been hundreds of Albanian villages there, and significant Albanian populations in towns such as Prokuplje, Leskovac and Vranje. A Serbian schoolmaster in Leskovac later recalled that the Muslims had been driven out in December 1877 at a time of intense cold: 'By the roadside, in the Gudelica gorge and as far as Vranje and Kumanovo, you could see the abandoned corpses of children, and old men frozen to death.' Precise figures are lacking, but one modern study concludes that the whole region contained more than 110,000 Albanians. By the end of 1878 Western officials were reporting that there were 60,000 families of Muslim refugees in Macedonia, 'in a state of extreme destitution', and 60-70,000 Albanian refugees from Serbia 'scattered' over the vilayet of Kosovo. Albanian merchants who tried to stay on in Niš were subjected to a campaign of murders, and the property of those who left was sold off at one per cent of its value. In a petition of 1879 a group of Albanian refugees from the Leskovac area complained that their houses, mills, mosques and tekkes had all been demolished, and that 'The material arising from these demolitions, such as masonry and wood, has been sold, so that if we go back to our hearths we shall find no shelter.' This was not, it should be said, a matter of spontaneous hostility by local Serbs. Even one of the Serbian Army commanders had been reluctant to expel the Albanians from Vranje, on the grounds that they were a quiet and peaceful people. But the orders came from the highest levels in Belgrade: it was Serbian state policy to create an ethnically 'clean' territory. And in an act of breath-taking cynicism, Ivan Yastrebov, the vice-consul in Kosovo of Serbia's protector-power, Russia, advised the governor of the vilayet not to allow the refugees to return to Serbia, on the grounds that their presence on Ottoman soil would usefully strengthen the Muslim population. All these new arrivals were known as muhaxhirs (Trk.: muhacir Srb.: muhadžir), a general word for Muslim refugees. The total number of those who settled in Kosovo is not known with certainty: estimates ranged from 20,000 to 50,000 for Eastern Kosovo, while the governor of the vilayet gave a total of 65,000 in 1881, some of whom were in the sancaks of Skopje and Novi Pazar. At a rough estimate, 50,000 would seem a reasonable figure for those muhaxhirs of 1877-8 who settled in the territory of Kosovo itself. Apart from the Albanians, smaller numbers of Muslim Slavs came from Montenegro and Bosnia."
^ Gruber 2008، صفحات 142. "Migration to Shkodra was mostly from the villages to the south-east of the city and from the cities of Podgorica and Ulcinj in Montenegro. This was connected to the independence of Montenegro from the Ottoman Empire in the year 1878 and the acquisition of additional territories, e.g. Ulcinj in 1881 (Ippen, 1907, p. 3)."
^ Tošić 2015، صفحات 394–395. "As noted above, the vernacular mobility term 'Podgoriçani' (literally meaning 'people that came from Podgoriça', the present-day capital of Montenegro) refers to the progeny of Balkan Muslims, who migrated to Shkodra in four historical periods and in highest numbers after the Congress of Berlin 1878. Like the Ulqinak, the Podgoriçani thus personify the mass forced displacement of the Muslim population from the Balkans and the 'unmixing of peoples' (see e.g. Brubaker 1996, 153) at the time of the retreat of the Ottoman Empire, which has only recently sparked renewed scholarly interest (e.g. Blumi 2013; Chatty 2013)." ; p. 406.

[Stojanovic264-1] Stojanović 2010، صفحة 264

[FOOTNOTEJagodić1998para._15-2] Jagodić 1998، para. 15.

[Blumi246-3] Blumi 2003، صفحة 246. "What one sees over the course of the first ten years after Berlin was a gradual process of Montenegrin (Slav) expansion into areas that were still exclusively populated by Albanian-speakers. In many ways, some of these affected communities represented extensions of those in the Malisorë as they traded with one another throughout the year and even inter-married. Cetinje, eager to sustain some sense of territorial and cultural continuity, began to monitor these territories more closely, impose customs officials in the villages, and garrison troops along the frontiers. This was possible because, by the late 1880s, Cetinje had received large numbers of migrant Slavs from Austrian-occupied Herzegovina, helping to shift the balance of local power in Cetinje's favor. As more migrants arrived, what had been a quiet boundary region for the first few years, became the center of colonization and forced expulsion." ; p.254. footnote 38. "It must be noted that, throughout the second half of 1878 and the first two months of 1879, the majority of Albanian-speaking residents of Shpuza and Podgoritza, also ceded to Montenegro by Berlin, were resisting en masse. The result of the transfer of Podgoritza (and Antivari on the coast) was a flood of refugees. See, for instance, AQSH E143.D.1054.f.1 for a letter (dated 12 May 1879) to Dervish Pasha, military commander in Işkodra, detailing the flight of Muslims and Catholics from Podgoritza."

[Lukovic298-4] Luković 2011، صفحة 298. "During the second war (December 1877 - January 1878) the Muslim population fled towns (Vranya (Vranje), Leskovac, Ürgüp (Prokuplje), Niş (Niš), Şehirköy (Pirot), etc.) as well as rural settlements where they comprised ethnically compact communities (certain parts of Toplica, Jablanica, Pusta Reka, Masurica and other regions in the South Morava River basin). At the end of the war these Muslim refugees ended up in the region of Kosovo and Metohija, in the territory of the Ottoman Empire, following the demarcation of the new border with the Principality of Serbia. [38] [38] On Muslim refugees (muhaciri) from the regions of southeast Serbia, who relocated in Macedonia and Kosovo, see Trifunovski 1978, Radovanovič 2000."

[Blumi50-5] Blumi 2013، صفحة 50. "As these Niš refugees waited for acknowledgment from locals, they took measures to ensure that they were properly accommodated by often confiscating food stored in towns. They also simply appropriated lands and began to build shelter on them. A number of cases also point to banditry in the form of livestock raiding and "illegal" hunting in communal forests, all parts of refugees' repertoire... At this early stage of the crisis, such actions overwhelmed the Ottoman state, with the institution least capable of addressing these issues being the newly created Muhacirin Müdüriyeti... Ignored in the scholarship, these acts of survival by desperate refugees constituted a serious threat to the established Kosovar communities. The leaders of these communities thus spent considerable efforts lobbying the Sultan to do something about the refugees. While these Niš muhacirs would in some ways integrate into the larger regional context, as evidenced later, they, and a number of other Albanian-speaking refugees streaming in for the next 20 years from Montenegro and Serbia, constituted a strong opposition block to the Sultan's rule."; p.53. "One can observe that in strategically important areas, the new Serbian state purposefully left the old Ottoman laws intact. More important, when the state wished to enforce its authority, officials felt it necessary to seek the assistance of those with some experience, using the old Ottoman administrative codes to assist judges make rulings. There still remained, however, the problem of the region being largely depopulated as a consequence of the wars... Belgrade needed these people, mostly the landowners of the productive farmlands surrounding these towns, back. In subsequent attempts to lure these economically vital people back, while paying lip-service to the nationalist calls for "purification," Belgrade officials adopted a compromise position that satisfied both economic rationalists who argued that Serbia needed these people and those who wanted to separate "Albanians" from "Serbs." Instead of returning back to their "mixed" villages and towns of the previous Ottoman era, these "Albanians," "Pomaks," and "Turks" were encouraged to move into concentrated clusters of villages in Masurica, and Gornja Jablanica that the Serbian state set up for them. For this "repatriation" to work, however, authorities needed the cooperation of local leaders to help persuade members of their community who were refugees in Ottoman territories to "return." In this regard, the collaboration between Shahid Pasha and the Serbian regime stands out. An Albanian who commanded the Sofia barracks during the war, Shahid Pasha negotiated directly with the future king of Serbia, Prince Milan Obrenović, to secure the safety of those returnees who would settle in the many villages of Gornja Jablanica. To help facilitate such collaborative ventures, laws were needed that would guarantee the safety of these communities likely to be targeted by the rising nationalist elements infiltrating the Serbian army at the time. Indeed, throughout the 1880s, efforts were made to regulate the interaction between exiled Muslim landowners and those local and newly immigrant farmers working their lands. Furthermore, laws passed in early 1880 began a process of managing the resettlement of the region that accommodated those refugees who came from Austrian-controlled Herzegovina and from Bulgaria. Cooperation, in other words, was the preferred form of exchange within the borderland, not violent confrontation."

[FOOTNOTEJagodić1998para._29-6] Jagodić 1998، para. 29.

[FOOTNOTEJagodić1998para._16–27-7] Jagodić 1998، para. 16–27.

[FOOTNOTEJagodić199811-8] Jagodić 1998، 11.

[FOOTNOTEJagodić1998para._4,_9-9] Jagodić 1998، para. 4, 9.

[Stefanovic469470-10] Stefanović 2005، صفحات 469–470. "In 1878, following a series of Christian uprisings against the Ottoman Empire, the Russo-Turkish War, and the Berlin Congress, Serbia gained complete independence, as well as new territories in the Toplica and Kosanica regions adjacent to Kosovo. These two regions had a sizable Albanian population which the Serbian government decided to deport. The Serbian Army Commander insisted that Serbia 'should not have its Caucasus' and the Prime Minister argued that the Albanian minority might represent a security concern. In 1909, Serbian intellectual Jovan Hadži-Vasiljević explained that the major motivation for the 1878 deportation was also to 'create a pure Serbian nation state' by 'cleansing' the land of the non-Christians, as 'the great Serbian poet Njegoš argued'. Hadži-Vasiljević was here interpreting Njegoš rather loosely, as Njegoš work focused on the Slavonic Muslims and not on Albanian Muslims. The ominous implication was that Albanians, as non-Slavs, were not even capable of assimilation. While the Serbian state authorities repeatedly attempted to assimilate the Slavonic Muslims, they refrained from attempting to 'Serbianize' the Albanians. While both security concerns and the exclusive nationalist ideology influenced the government's policies, there was also some Serbian resistance to the 'cleansing' of the Albanians. General Jovan Belimarkovic opposed the deportation and offered his resignation to the government over this issue and journalist Manojlo Đjorđjević also condemned these policies and argued that Serbia should have pursued a policy of peaceful reconciliation towards the Albanians. In Toplica the Albanians were encountered, and we had nothing more important to do but to expel these warlike, but hard-working people from their homes. Instead of making a peace with them as the defeated side – they were without any good reason pushed across the border – so that they'll settle on the other side as the enemies of everything Serbian, to become the avengers towards those who pushed them from their homes. Despite some voices of dissent, the Serbian regime 'encouraged' about 71,000 Muslims, including 49,000 Albanians, 'to leave'. The regime then gradually settled Serbs and Montenegrins in these territories. Prior to 1878, the Serbs comprised not more than one half of the population of Nis, the largest city in the region; by 1884 the Serbian share rose to 80 per cent. According to Ottoman sources, Serbian forces also destroyed mosques in Leskovac, Prokuplje, and Vranje." ; p.470. "The 'cleansing' of Toplica and Kosanica would have long-term negative effects on Serbian-Albanian relations. The Albanians expelled from these regions moved over the new border to Kosovo, where the Ottoman authorities forced the Serb population out of the border region and settled the refugees there. Janjićije Popović, a Kosovo Serb community leader in the period prior to the Balkan Wars, noted that after the 1876–8 wars, the hatred of the Turks and Albanians towards the Serbs 'tripled'. A number of Albanian refugees from Toplica region, radicalized by their experience, engaged in retaliatory violence against the Serbian minority in Kosovo. In 1900 Živojin Perić, a Belgrade Professor of Law, noted that in retrospect, 'this unbearable situation probably would not have occurred had the Serbian government allowed Albanians to stay in Serbia'. He also argued that conciliatory treatment towards Albanians in Serbia could have helped the Serbian government to gain the sympathies of Albanians of the Ottoman Empire. Thus, while both humanitarian concerns and Serbian political interests would have dictated conciliation and moderation, the Serbian government, motivated by exclusive nationalist and anti-Muslim sentiments, chose expulsion. The 1878 cleansing was a turning point because it was the first gross and large-scale injustice committed by Serbian forces against the Albanians. From that point onward, both ethnic groups had recent experiences of massive victimization that could be used to justify 'revenge' attacks. Furthermore, Muslim Albanians had every reason to resist the incorporation into the Serbian state."

[Uka525354-11] Uka 2004d، صفحة 52. "Pra, këtu në vazhdim, pas dëbimit të tyre me 1877–1878 do të shënohen vetëm disa patronime (mbiemra) të shqiptarëve të Toplicës dhe viseve tjera shqiptare të Sanxhakut të Nishit. Kjo do të thotë se, shqiptaret e dëbuar pas shpërnguljes, marrin atributin muhaxhirë (refugjatë), në vend që për mbiemër familjar të marrin emrin e gjyshit, fisit, ose ndonjë tjetër, ato për mbiemër familjar marrin emrin e fshatit të Sanxhakut të Nishit, nga janë dëbuar. [So here next, after their expulsion 1877–1878 will be noted with only some patronymic (surnames) of the Albanians of Toplica and other Albanian areas of Sanjak of Nis. This means that the Albanians expelled after moving, attained the appellation muhaxhirë (refugees), which instead for the family surname to take the name of his grandfather, clan, or any other, they for their family surname take the name of the village of the Sanjak of Nis from where they were expelled from.]" ; pp. 53–54.

[Malcolm228229-12] Malcolm 1998، صفحات 228–229. "This period also saw a deterioration in relations between the Muslims and Christians of Kosovo. The prime cause of this was the mass expulsion of Muslims from the lands taken over by Serbia, Bulgaria and Montenegro in 1877-8. Almost all the Muslims (except, as we have seen, some Gypsies) were expelled from the Morava valley region: there had been hundreds of Albanian villages there, and significant Albanian populations in towns such as Prokuplje, Leskovac and Vranje. A Serbian schoolmaster in Leskovac later recalled that the Muslims had been driven out in December 1877 at a time of intense cold: 'By the roadside, in the Gudelica gorge and as far as Vranje and Kumanovo, you could see the abandoned corpses of children, and old men frozen to death.' Precise figures are lacking, but one modern study concludes that the whole region contained more than 110,000 Albanians. By the end of 1878 Western officials were reporting that there were 60,000 families of Muslim refugees in Macedonia, 'in a state of extreme destitution', and 60-70,000 Albanian refugees from Serbia 'scattered' over the vilayet of Kosovo. Albanian merchants who tried to stay on in Niš were subjected to a campaign of murders, and the property of those who left was sold off at one per cent of its value. In a petition of 1879 a group of Albanian refugees from the Leskovac area complained that their houses, mills, mosques and tekkes had all been demolished, and that 'The material arising from these demolitions, such as masonry and wood, has been sold, so that if we go back to our hearths we shall find no shelter.' This was not, it should be said, a matter of spontaneous hostility by local Serbs. Even one of the Serbian Army commanders had been reluctant to expel the Albanians from Vranje, on the grounds that they were a quiet and peaceful people. But the orders came from the highest levels in Belgrade: it was Serbian state policy to create an ethnically 'clean' territory. And in an act of breath-taking cynicism, Ivan Yastrebov, the vice-consul in Kosovo of Serbia's protector-power, Russia, advised the governor of the vilayet not to allow the refugees to return to Serbia, on the grounds that their presence on Ottoman soil would usefully strengthen the Muslim population. All these new arrivals were known as muhaxhirs (Trk.: muhacir Srb.: muhadžir), a general word for Muslim refugees. The total number of those who settled in Kosovo is not known with certainty: estimates ranged from 20,000 to 50,000 for Eastern Kosovo, while the governor of the vilayet gave a total of 65,000 in 1881, some of whom were in the sancaks of Skopje and Novi Pazar. At a rough estimate, 50,000 would seem a reasonable figure for those muhaxhirs of 1877-8 who settled in the territory of Kosovo itself. Apart from the Albanians, smaller numbers of Muslim Slavs came from Montenegro and Bosnia."

[Gruber1422-13] Gruber 2008، صفحات 142. "Migration to Shkodra was mostly from the villages to the south-east of the city and from the cities of Podgorica and Ulcinj in Montenegro. This was connected to the independence of Montenegro from the Ottoman Empire in the year 1878 and the acquisition of additional territories, e.g. Ulcinj in 1881 (Ippen, 1907, p. 3)."

[Tosic394395-14] Tošić 2015، صفحات 394–395. "As noted above, the vernacular mobility term 'Podgoriçani' (literally meaning 'people that came from Podgoriça', the present-day capital of Montenegro) refers to the progeny of Balkan Muslims, who migrated to Shkodra in four historical periods and in highest numbers after the Congress of Berlin 1878. Like the Ulqinak, the Podgoriçani thus personify the mass forced displacement of the Muslim population from the Balkans and the 'unmixing of peoples' (see e.g. Brubaker 1996, 153) at the time of the retreat of the Ottoman Empire, which has only recently sparked renewed scholarly interest (e.g. Blumi 2013; Chatty 2013)." ; p. 406.

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