NEURALGIA BETWEEN ORAL HISTORY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY ON THE EXAMPLE OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR IN KOSOVO AND METOHIA: A CASE STUDY ORAL HISTORY KOSOVO

Abstract

Albanians, interlocutors of the Oral History Kosovo project, most of whom are contemporaries of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and the war period, have a negative memory of the Kingdom. They state that Albanians were victims of agrarian policy / colonization and forced emigration, that is, that they were prevented from normal cultural development by denying them the right to education in their mother tongue. However, the facts show that much less land was taken from the Albanians for the purposes of agrarian reform / colonization than they think, then that emigration to Turkey was on a smaller scale due to the inability of the state to finance it and, finally, that the Albanian minority had the right to education in the mother tongue exclusively in private schools, which was the dominant pattern in many European countries (and in Albania for the Slavic minority). The Albanians, the interlocutors admit, welcomed the occupiers, the Germans and Italians, as liberators, because they freed them from the hated Serbian administration and enabled them to be educated in their mother tongue, in which “Greater Albania” was promoted unhindered. After all, the period of occupation was a time of absolute Albanian domination over the Kosovo Serbs, as evidenced by numerous crimes committed against them. On the other hand, there are numerous Albanian testimonies about the alleged crimes of the communist regime against the defeated Albanians-ballists in 1944–1945. and the newly mobilized Albanians in Bar in 1945. The interlocutors do not make an ideological difference between Serb-chetniks and Serb-communists, treating them simply as Serbs and as such fitting them into the archetype of the enemy who is “taking” Kosovo from them. Also, those Albanians in the service of the occupiers are perceived as fighters for the national cause. That nazism and fascism were not definitively eradicated in Kosovo in 1944 is also evidenced by the later coquettishness of the communist system and the ideologically defeated Albanian movements in Kosovo.