Gathering Clouds: The Roots of Ethnic Cleansing in Kosovo and Macedonia - Early Twentieth-Century Documents

by Robert Elsie

The present volume endeavours to throw some light on the historical dimension of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. It consists of a collection of texts, written from 1912 to 1944, which make it evident that ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and Macedonia was a cornerstone of Serbian Government policies from the moment Serbian forces seized Kosovo and much of Macedonia from the Ottoman Empire in 1912-1913.

246 pages, Paperback

First published February 6, 2015

About the author

Elsie was a writer, translator, interpreter and specialist in Albanian studies. He studied at the University of British Columbia, graduating in 1972 with a diploma in Classical Studies and Linguistics. In the following years, he continued his post-graduate studies at the Free University of Berlin, at the École Pratique des Hautes Études and at the University of Paris IV: Paris-Sorbonne, at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies in Ireland, and at the University of Bonn, where he finished his doctorate on Linguistics and Celtic Studies in 1978 at the Linguistics Institute.

From 1978 on, Elsie visited Albania several times with a group of students and professors from the University of Bonn. For several years, he also attended the International Seminar on Albanian Language, Literature and Culture, held in Prishtina, Kosovo. From 1982 to 1987, he worked for the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Bonn, and from 2002 to 2013 for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, in particular as an interpreter for several noted cases including the trial of Slobodan Milošević.

As a translator Robert Elsie offers the reader “a selection of songs from the best known cycle of Albanian epic verse”.

Reviews

[Corbin Routier · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is fascinating to look back at history and wonder how atrocities were committed. The more books I have read, the more I have noticed that the perpetrators, usually, spoke their mind before events occurred. The documents collected in this volume speak to such ideas, of men who want minorities removed, of states who value their citizens to support their bureaucracy rather than have the bureaucracy support the people, of actions repeated over decades, each individually scorned but when taken as a whole should be abhorred.

Page 7 - "The present volume endeavors to throw some light on the historical dimension of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and Macedonia. It is a collection of five seminal texts, written from 1913 to 1944, which demonstrate that ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and elsewhere was a cornerstone of Serbian government policies from the time Serbia took over Kosovo from the Turks in 1913... The first report, Albania's Golgotha, dates indeed from 1913 at the time of the Balkan Wars... This work, originally published in German, is a compilation of rare news reports which seeped out of Kosovo at the time... The second report... originally written in French and entitled The Situation of the Albanian Minority in Yugoslavia, is a memorandum addressed to the League of Nations in 1930 by three Catholic priests... The three concluding reports, by Serb authors, document the ideology of ethnic cleansing and its support among members of the Serbian intellectual community at the time. The Expulsion of the Albanians of 1937 and The Minority Problem in the New Yugoslavia of 1944 are works of the noted Bosnian Serb scholar and political figure Vaso Cubrilovic (1897-1990). As a student in 1914, Cubrilovic had participated in the assassination in Sarajevo of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary, the event which precipitated the First World War... Equally blunt in its ideology is the Draft on Albania written in 1939 by the well-known Bosnian Serb... Ivo Andric (1892-1975)... In 1961, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature."

Page 9 - "... I would like to stress that this book is not conceived or intended as an indictment of the Serbian people as a whole. They, too, have been victims... At the most, this volume is simply an attempt to elucidate some of the historical factors which allowed many of them to be manipulated in recent years... and with such devastating results."