Chameria issue

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The Chameria issue is an issue which has been raised by Albania since the 1990s over the expulsion of Cham Albanians from the Greek province of Epirus between 1944–1945, during the World War II. The Greek government considers the issue closed and refuses to negotiate.

Following the defeat of Ottoman forces in the region and the Balkan Wars of 1913, an international boundary commission awarded the North of the territory of Epirus to Albania, and the South to Greece. The newly drawn borders, which left consistent minorities on both sides of the border, left almost all Chameria in what was now recognized as Greece, except for a few Cham villages assigned to Albania. Considerable numbers of Chams were forced to leave, and other were expelled to Turkey under the treaty of Lausanne in 1923.^[1]

Muslims were subjected to severe pression, that increased under the rule of Ioannis Metaxas. Tensions exacerbated at the time of World War II. Italy captured Albania in 1939, and in 1940 Greece fell to invading Italian and Germans forces, striking from Albania and Yugoslavia. Italians recruited Muslim civilians to assist in the occupation.

A large number of Chams collaborated with the Italians after occupation, as these favored them due to fierce Greek resistance to the Axis forces.^[2] A number of Chams were responsible of atrocities against Greeks, but the majority were only passive collaborators, distrusting both Italians and Greeks. As the Germans and their allies began to lose ground to the anti-Nazi militias in 1944, and started retiring in Albania, many hundreds of Chams followed them.^[3]

Beginning on June 27, 1944, and continuing through March 1945, EDES resistance fighters operating under British orders in an attempt to estabilish a mono-ethnic border as well as to punish the collaborators, launched a series of attacks on Muslim Cham villages in Epirus, killing 5,000 Chams and causing 35,000 to flee to Albania or Turkey.^[4]

Joseph Jacobs, head of the US Mission in Albania (1945-1946) wrote:

In March 1945 units of Zervas's dissolved forces carried out a massacre of Chams in the Filiates area, and practically cleared the district of the Albanian minority. According to all the information I have been able to gather on the Cham issue, in the fall of 1944 and during the first months of 1945, the authorities in north-western Greece perpetrated savage brutality by evicting some 25,000 Chams - residents of Chameria - from their homes. They were chased across the border after having been robbed of their land and property. Hundreds of male Chams from the ages of 15 to 70 were interned on the islands of the Aegean Sea. In total 102 mosques were burnt down.

A large number of the predominantly Muslim refugees settled in villages of southern Albania, where today they number about 200,000.^[5] The Greek government refuses to allow them to resettle in Greece considering them to have lost their citizenship for collaboration with the enemy and/or having left Greece as non-ethnic Greeks (either on the part of them personally or their ancestors from whom they would ordinarily have acquired it). The Greek government also refuses to negotiate over the properties formerly belonging to the Chams considering them lawfully confiscated for the same reasons.

[edit] Notes

^ Ibid.
^ Gage,Nicholas, Eleni 1996
^ M. Mazower (ed.), After the War Was Over; Reconstructing the Family, Nation, State in Greece, 1943-1960, (2000), p. 25; M. Vickers, ibid.
^ M. Mazower (ed.), ibid.; M. Vickers, ibid.
^ M. Vickers, ibid.