"Dusan T.Batakovic. The Kosovo Chronicles " - читать интересную книгу автора

Metohia and Kosovo, accustomed to extreme subordination and absolute
submission to the local land holders, received the new order wholeheartedly.
The destruction of the Yugoslav state, which they never took as their own,
was received with vindictive ardor. In the first few months of the
occupation, some ten thousand colonist houses were burned in night raids and
their owners and families expelled. Colonist estates were ploughed afresh in
order that every trace of Serbian presence be eradicated and in the event of
their return, to render difficult the recognition of their estates. The
destruction of colonist villages according to a plan was to help show
international commissions after the war, when new borders would be drawn,
that Serbs never lived there. An ethnic Albanian leader from Kosovo,
Ferat-bey Draga, said that the "time has come to exterminate the Serbs ...
there will be no Serbs under the Kosovo sun".¹ Orthodox churches
were burnt and destroyed and graveyards desecrated. Ethnic Albanians sought
to eradicate every trace of Serbian presence in these areas. During the war,
some 100,000 colonists and indigenous Serbs fled for Serbia and Montenegro
ahead of Albanian terror, and some 10,000 were killed.² Along
with this, under a plan of the Italian government, adopted before the
occupation of Yugoslavia, began an extensive settlement of Albanians from
Albania on the estates of the expelled colonists. Their number is roughly
estimated at 80,000-100,000; the first postwar estimate put it at about
75,000.³
The insurrection against the occupier in mid-May, 1941, was raised by
Serbian officers under the command of Colonel Draza Mihailovic, who
organized the Chetnik (guerrilla) movement throughout Yugoslavia:
his
troops, organized throughout the country, were proclaimed by the government
in exile the Yugoslav army in the homeland, and he was made general and
minister of war. Two weeks after Hitler's assault on the Soviet Union,
Yugoslav communists stirred up an uprising at Moscow's call, which, under
the mask of a people's liberation struggle, was in fact a movement for a
revolutionary shift of power. After initial talks with Mihailovic's
Chetniks, Tito's Partisans set out on a long and bloody civil war. Although
there were several collaborationist regimes in the country with strong
military formations, the Partisans - the military force of the CPY, saw the
Chetniks as their arch-enemy who incorporated the state and political
continuity of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.
In the civil war that ensued, Kosovo and Metohia assumed a secondary
role. The Chetnik movement, organized into two Kosovo corps (about 1,500
men), operated in mountainous regions on the outskirts of Kosovo and
Metohia. Cooperation between the occupational Italian forces and the
Albanian voluntary gendarmery left no room for their stronger military
engagement and protection of the Serbian population. The persecuted Serbs
sought refuge in occupied Serbia, where they were received first by the
commissariat administration and then a special refugees commissariat under
the regime of General Milan Nedic.⁴
Metohia, which was settled by primarily Montenegrin colonists, had many
followers of the CPY, though at the outbreak of the war its membership
comprised a mere 270, including some two dozen ethnic Albanians. Even though
the CPY condemned in numerous declarations prior to the war the Greater