Pro-Turkey Minister Brings Turks To Kosovo To Raise Non-Serb Population

Map of the Vilayet of Kossovo within the Balkans (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Describing the recent population census in Kosovo member of the leadership AAK, Melihate Temkolli, was quoted by reporters as saying that it was a process that has left many problems unsolved. In a press conference at the weekend she accused the Minister of Public Administration, Mahir Jagxhillar, of increasing Kosovo Turks.

"Minister Jagxhillar transported Turks (into Kosovo) by bus to register (for the census), thereby violating international rules and standards on population census" Temkolli stressed.

RTK noted in a dispatch that Temkolli also mentioned that she had evidence of this wrongdoing and which shows that Minister Jagxhillar was involved.

Jagxhillar minister has not commented about this for the moment.

Earlier in the week m-magazine quoted the Director of the Office of the Government of Serbia for Kosovo Aleksandar Vulin, as saying in an interview that the census will determine exactly how many Serbs are living in Kosovo. "What we always insist on, and it will be soon, is to find out how many of us there are, how many of us actually live in Kosovo” said Vulin in an interview to Most television. He stressed that the abuse must stop in obtaining "Kosovo supplement", and there will be a control over spending in Kosovo.

Kosovo is a region in southeastern Europe that was part of Serbia. This region was a part of the Ottoman Empire from 1455 to 1912, at first as part of the eyalet of Rumelia, and from 1864 as a separate province (vilayet). During this time, Islam was introduced to the population. The Serbian position is that archives reveal an overwhelming Serbian demographic majority in Kosovo, which was reversed by the end of Ottoman rule, as Banac summarised: "Ottoman raids, plunder, slaving forays, as well as the general devastation caused by constant wars uprooted large numbers of Serbs even before the Great Serb Migration". This was followed by the transplantation of Albanian pastoralists from the highlands of Albania to the fertile valleys of Kosovo. However, Anscombe highlights that the most common archives – those derived from the Ottomans – do not clarify unequivocally the "ethnic" character of the region's inhabitants, because the Ottomans classified their subjects along religious lines (millets).

Anscombe according to Wikipedia, suggests that records show that the demography of Kosovo was very much mixed and that both Serbian and Albanian ethnic groups dominated. However, historiography clarifies that "there is no conclusive evidence that a people unambiguously identifiable as "Albanian" constituted the majority of the population in Kosovo prior to the Ottoman occupation".

Even the relatively "pro-Albanian" history written by Noel Malcolm concedes that "the region probably had a predominantly Orthodox Christian and Slavic population from the eight to the mid-nineteenth centuries". Allowing for the possibility of some connection between the regions inhabitants prior to successive Slavic/ Serbian inflows, the Albanians who 'returned' to Kosovo in modern times were certainly not the same people, having interbred extensively with Vlachs, Slavs, Greeks and Turks. Whilst there is little evidence of ethnic Albanian institutional presence in medieval Kosovo, this might be because they were often baptised into Orthodox Christianity and subjected to a process of "Serbianisation".

Prior to Islamification, the Albanians might have existed as transhumance pastoralists inhabiting Balkan highland areas, like the Vlachs, engaging in a symbiotic existence with the predominantly agricultural Slavs who inhabited the valleys and plains.

In the 19th century, there was an awakening of ethnic nationalism throughout the Balkans. This systematised the underlying ethnic tensions into a broader struggle of Christian Serbs against Muslim Albanians. The ethnic Albanian nationalism movement was centred in Kosovo.

(source RTK, m-magazine, wikipedia)