The Cham conflict arose as a result of the delineation of the border between Greece and Albania at the end of the Balkan Wars. In 1912 the London Ambassador's Conference allotted the Chameria region to Greece, so today only seven Cham villages, centred on the village of Konispol, are in Albania itself. There were three distinct phases of emigration of the Cham population from northern Greece. The first occurred during the Balkan Wars 1912-1914, the second following the signing of the Turkish-Greek Convention at Lausanne in January 1923, and the third occurred at the end of the Second World War, in the period from June 1944 to March 1945, during which an estimated 5,000 men, women and children were killed. The rest of Chameria's Albanian Muslim population fled over the border to Albania where they have lived in exile ever since.
The Chams are demanding the recognition of about 4,000 Chams who disappeared as a result of those conflicts, and the property rights of about 150,000 others.3 The Chams are also building charges against Greece at the international courts, arguing that they were stripped of around US$340m-worth of properties which are worth roughly US$2.5bn at current market prices. The Greeks, however, see the Cham question as a "non existent issue".
The outbreak of the Second World War brought about a brief union (1941-1943) of Kosovo with Albania, and the possibility of the remaining Albanian-inhabited regions of the Balkans being united. In August 1940 Italy invaded Greece. In an effort to rally the Albanian people to her cause, Italy had promised the Albanians their national unity. The German-Italian agreement of 1941 stipulated the formation of a 'Greater Albania', to include the large Albanian-inhabited areas of Yugoslavia and, to a lesser extent, Greece. The Italians were able to exploit Albanian irredentist sentiment by insisting that the unification of all Albanian-inhabited lands was conditional upon an Axis victory. The Chams were subsequently armed by the Italians and co-operated with them against Greek villages controlled by Greek resistance fighters. During this period, atrocities were committed by a minority of Chams against Greek civilians, thousands of whom were forced to flee from their homes. The majority of Chams, however, were merely passive collaborators, distrusting the Italians as much as they did the Greek Royalist guerrilla force of Napoleon Zervas. In little over a year, Greek forces were able to push the Italians back over the Albanian border. There was widespread alarm amongst the Chams when the hoped-for Axis victory turned to defeat. Near the village of Vrina in southern Albania, in June 1940, the headless body of the Cham leader Daut Hoxa was discovered. It was alleged by the Italian-controlled government in Tirana that he had been murdered by Greek secret agents. Hoxha was a military leader of the Cham struggle during the inter-war years. The Greek government claimed he was merely a bandit.14 In October 1944 when the Germans began withdrawing from Greece, many hundreds of Chams also fled with them into Albania. Henceforth, the remaining Muslim Albanians in Greece were regarded by the Greeks as the enemy within.
The most infamous massacre of Albanian Muslims by Greek irregulars occurred on 27 June 1944 in the district of Paramithia, when forces of General Zervas's National Republican Greek League (EDES) entered the town and killed approximately 600 Albanian Muslims, men women and children - many having been raped and tortured before death. According to eyewitness accounts, the following day, another EDES battalion marched into Parga where 52 more Albanians were killed. On 23
September 1944, the town of Spatar was looted and 157 people died. Young women and girls were raped and those men who were still alive were rounded up and deported to the Aegean islands.16 According to statistics provided by the Chameria Association in Tirana, in total 2,771 Albanian civilians were killed during the1944-1945 attacks on their villages. The breakdown is as follows: in Filiates and suburbs 1,286, in Igoumenitsa and suburbs 192, in Paramithia and suburbs 673 and Parga
620. Sixty-eight villages with 5,800 houses were looted and then burnt. A detailed list of material losses includes 110,000 sheep, 2,400 cattle, 21,000 quintals of wheat and 80,000 quintals of edible oil, amounting to 11,000,000 kilograms of grain and 3,000,000 kilograms of edible oil.17
Source:
http://www.da.mod.uk/CSRC/documents/balkans/G109
The similarities are striking arent they?
Will Greece apply the same standarts to the Albanians of Chameria it demands for the Greeks of Cyprus?
If the expulsion of Chams can be justified by the actions of few extremists, can the expulsion of Greeks be justified by the actions of EOKA?
Will Greece continue to hold on to stolen Cham property?
and she said that when her grandfather joined tha army against italy he said that they were fighting against the italian fascist and the greek fascists
