PARIS 1919 (65 page)

As February and March wore on, the crisis between Italy and its allies made the commission's work even more difficult. The two Italian representatives tried to delay the meetings; they quibbled; they threatened to withdraw; they absented themselves, claiming illness (this caused awkward moments when other members met them dining out in Paris). The two, reported Nicolson, “are behaving like children and sulky children at that. They obstruct and delay everything. ”
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The Greek demands on Albania raised the wider issue of whether the little country, so recently created, would survive at all. Greece wanted most of the south on the basis of its own dubious nationality statistics. And, since little was simple in Paris, other issues lurked in the background. If Italy made gains in the southern Balkans, would it drop its demands at the top of the Adriatic? Would Greece back down in Albania in exchange for Asia Minor? Where did self-determination of peoples fit in?

Poor little Albania, with such powerful enemies and so few friends. It had almost no industry, little trade, no railways at all and only about two hundred miles of paved road. Albania emerged just before the war, created out of four districts of the Ottoman empire. Few outsiders ever visited it; little was known about its history or its people. Only rarely had Albanians—the great Roman emperors Diocletian and Constantine, for example—popped up in Europe's history. According to some, the Albanians were the original Illyrian inhabitants of the Balkans, who had been pushed into the poorest and most inaccessible parts by the slow sweep south and west of the Slavs. Certainly their language was different from those of their Montenegrin, Serbian and Greek neighbors. In the Ottoman empire, they were valued for their fighting abilities and their beauty.

History and geography—the tangle of mountains and valleys that stretched inland from the coast—had produced a myriad of tribes, equally suspicious of outsiders and each other. The Gegs of the north and the Tosks of the south spoke different dialects and had different customs. As elsewhere in the Balkans, the past had left in its wake religious divisions; the 70 percent of the population that was Muslim was part Sunni and part Shia; a minority were dervishes. The Christian minority was Catholic in the north and Orthodox in the south. Rules about honor and shame, of a dazzling complexity, governed daily life. In some areas, one man in five died in a blood feud.

The rare travelers who made their way into Albania by foot or on horseback tended to fall in love with the land and its people. Byron had had himself painted in Albanian costume; perhaps inevitably, he also took an Albanian mistress. At the end of the nineteenth century, the journalist Edith Durham went there on the advice of her doctor. He had told her travel was good for the nerves, but Albania was not what he had in mind. She explored the country from end to end before the war, usually on her own or with a single servant. The Albanians did not know what to make of this strange dumpy creature; in the end, they decided to treat her as an honorary man. When British soldiers were moving through eastern Albania during the war, they found that if they said “Durr-ham,” it acted as a passport.
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When Durham first encountered Albania, national feelings were stirring. An Austrian professor assembled an Albanian dictionary and grammar; this convinced literate Albanians that they might indeed be a people. After much discussion the Latin alphabet was chosen in preference to Greek or Arabic characters. Albanian books were published; folktales, histories, poetry. Albanian schools were opened, often surreptitiously. As long as Turkish rule remained relatively light, many Albanians were content to work for the Ottomans, as soldiers or administrators. When the Young Turks tried to reinvigorate the Ottoman empire just before the Great War, their heavy-handed repression provided the missing stimulus; nationalist uprisings broke out, with freedom from the Ottomans their goal. The large Albanian community abroad lent its enthusiastic support.

Independence became a matter of national survival in 1912, when it looked as if Albania's neighbors—Greece and Serbia prominent among them—were about to drive the Ottomans out of Europe altogether and divide up the spoils of war. This did not suit the Great Powers, who feared yet another war in the Balkans; so, in 1913, they created Albania. Its boundaries were drawn by an international commission, to the accompaniment of objections from the Serbs and the Greeks. When the commission visited southern Albania, a sharp-eyed journalist noticed the same people coming out at every stop carrying signs that read, “Welcome to a Greek Town.” Greek troops who were temporarily in occupation made children sing Greek songs and householders were ordered to paint their houses in the Greek national colors. Even after Greece withdrew its troops, it continued to smuggle in irregulars, who tried to stir up rebellion.

Albania's short history had been an unhappy one. Tribal chieftains, brigands, Turkish loyalists, Greek, Serbian and Italian agents all pursued their own ends against the weak central government. One figure stood out: the sinister and beguiling Essad Pasha Toptani. It was said that, although he spoke no European language properly, he knew the value of money in all of them. He had worked variously for the Ottomans, as head of the police in Shkodër (Italian: Scutari); for the Young Turks; for the Montenegrins (who had designs on the north of Albania); and for the Italians, but always for himself. His compatriots feared and hated him. When his first wife threatened to poison him for taking a second wife (he was a poor Muslim but found his religion useful at times), she was widely admired.
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Into this maelstrom the Great Powers in their wisdom plunged Wilhelm of Wied, a German prince—“a feeble stick,” in Durham's opinion, “devoid of energy or tact or manners and wholly ignorant of the country.” In an act of stupendous foolishness, the new king made Essad his defense minister. Wilhelm lasted six months before he fled back to Germany, leaving five separate regimes each of which claimed to be the government of Albania. By that point the Great War had broken out and Albania, because of its position, was almost at once drawn in. Italy reached across the Adriatic to occupy Vlorë. Greece moved into the south. When the Serbian army fell back in 1915 before the Austrians, it marched through Albania. The long history of mutual suspicion between Serbs and Albanians now had a new chapter, as Albanian brigands harried the desperate Serbs on their way to the Adriatic.
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By the war's end, most of Albania was occupied: by Serbians in the north, Italians and Greeks in the south, Italians in most of the coastal towns and French in the interior around Shkodër in the north and Korçë in the southwest, where they flew a curious flag in which the French national colors were joined to a traditional Albanian design. In the south, Greece opened schools and held elections for deputies to the Greek parliament. Serbia and Greece talked in confidence about dividing Albania between them, but that ignored Italy, which had been promised Vlorë in the Treaty of London. (In 1917 Italy had tried to grab the whole of the country but was forced to back down.) The treaty hinted at yet another arrangement: Albania parceled out among Serbia, Montenegro and Greece, with a little statelet in the middle under Italian control.
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The Albanians, in the face of these threats to their country, attempted to pull themselves together. At a meeting in December 1918, representatives from different parts of the country elected a provisional government under Turkhan Pasha, an elderly gentleman who had once worked as an Ottoman diplomat. Essad, as usual, played his own game, insisting that he was the president of Albania or, alternatively, its king. (He had spent part of the war designing a dazzling uniform for himself and covering it with decorations of his own awarding.) When the provisional government sent a delegation to Paris led by Turkhan Pasha, Essad went on his own behalf and quarreled violently with the official delegates, whom he accused, in a case of the pot calling the kettle black, of intriguing with the Italians.
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He was handicapped because he scarcely dared stir from his hotel for fear that one of his many enemies would try to assassinate him.

Albania's friends abroad, a motley crew, provided what help they could. One group hired a charming Hungarian aristocrat to lobby the Americans; unfortunately, it turned out that his main passion in life, and the subject of all his conversations, was the tooth structure of dinosaurs. The Pan-Albanian Federation of America dispatched an American missionary, who was equally ineffectual. Then there was Aubrey Herbert, a younger son of one of Britain's great aristocratic families. (His half-brother the earl of Carnarvon uncovered Tutankhamun's tomb.) He spent much of his time before the war traveling throughout the Ottoman empire, preferably, it seemed, in the most uncomfortable and dangerous conditions. He spoke several languages fluently, including Turkish and Albanian, and was an unpaid agent for the British Foreign Office. John Buchan used him as the model for the hero of
Greenmantle,
a man “who was blood brother to every kind of Albanian bandit.” The Albanians offered him their throne. Herbert turned it down but created the Anglo-Albanian Society to work for Albania's independence. Edith Durham was its secretary.
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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.”
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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.
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(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.”
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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? Occasionally, in succeeding years, the world heard rumblings of discontent. Albanian priests appeared at the League of Nations to complain that their schools were being closed. During the Second World War, with German and Italian support, Albania at last seized Kosovo; but Tito, the new ruler of Yugoslavia, seized it back at the end of the war. Albania grumbled but dared not do anything openly. And Tito's rule was relatively light compared with what came later. In 1989, seventy years after the Paris Peace Conference, Albania revived the old claims to Kosovo.

The Greek commission ignored Albania and its claims and spent most of its time trying to sort out the competing demands of Italy and Greece. Various schemes were floated; for Italy to have a mandate over the whole of Albania, or Greece one over the south. The French, mainly to block Italy's expansion, urged that Korçë in the south must go to Greece because it controlled the only road joining the Adriatic side of Greece to Greek Macedonia. There were rumors that Greece and Italy were talking again about a separate deal; that Italy was arming friendly Albanian gangs; that the French intended to remain in occupation of Korçë unless it were given to Greece. The Americans were curiously passive, perhaps because the inner circle around Wilson was absorbed with the German treaty and the worsening relations with Italy. In desperation, Nicolson came up with an absurd scheme: for Albania to be divided up, with the north linked to Serbia, a Muslim state in the center under an Italian mandate, the south under Greek rule, and Korçë the home of a Central Albanian University under American protection.
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