Anti-Albanian sentiment
The goal of the forced expulsions and massacres of ethnic Albanians was statistic manipulation before the London Ambassadors Conference which was to decide on the new Balkan borders.
[14] After the Second World War, thousands of Cham Albanians in Thesprotia, Greece were victims of forced migration and ethnic cleansing by the National Republican Greek League (EDES) from 1944 to 1945.
[15][16] The term "Albanophobia" was coined by Anna Triandafyllidou in a report analysis called Racism and Cultural Diversity in the Mass Media published in 2002.
[17] Although, the first recorded usage of the term comes from 1982 in The South Slav journal, Volume 8 by Albanian author Arshi Pipa.
[17][20][21] The stereotype by some in Greece of Albanians as criminal and poor has been subject of a 2001 study by the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights (IHFHR) and by the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC).
Furthermore, the EUMC found that undocumented Albanian migrants "experience serious discrimination in employment, particularly with respect to the payment of wages and social security contributions".
[30] In March 2010, during an official military parade in Athens, Greek soldiers chanted "They are Skopians, they are Albanians, they are Turks we will make new clothes out of their skins".
[31] Albanophobia in Greece is primarily due to post-communist migration as well as the fact that until the mid 2000s, Albanians formed the primary immigrant population.
[32][33] Albanophobia in Italy is primarily related to the Albanian immigrants mainly young adults who are stereotypically seen as criminals, drug dealers and rapists.
The "Sheep's Poster" designed by the SVP attracted international attention and was again described by many immigrant organisations in Switzerland as discriminatory.
A study by the Federal Office for Migration justifies this with in part low vocational qualifications among the older generation and the reservations that Albanian youth are exposed to when entering the world of work.
This also has implications for the social assistance rate, which is higher for ethnic Albanians, with significant differences depending on the country of origin.
In recent years, there has been a significant increase in the number of Albanians arriving in the UK, many of them via small boat crossings from France.
[49] Right-wing politicians have capitalized on public fears regarding immigration, often using inflammatory language that paints migrants as criminals or "invaders."
[52] By June 2022, the number of Albanian inmates had fallen to 1,336, but their proportion rose to 14%, maintaining the highest percentage of the foreign prison population in the UK.
These men were then assembled in Prizren and marched on foot in three columns to Bar where they were supposed to receive short training and then sent off to the front.
[59] Other sources cited that the killing started en route for no apparent reason and this was supported by the testimony of Zoi Themeli in his 1949 trial.
[61] After the massacre, the site was immediately covered in concrete by the Yugoslav communist regime and built an airport on top of the mass grave.
[67] The protest turned violent when the mob started hurling stones and also attacking Albanian bystanders and police officers alike.
[70] According to the United States' Country Report on Human Rights 2012 for Macedonia "certain ministries declined to share information about ethnic makeup of employees".
The same report also added: "...ethnic Albanians and other national minorities, with the exception of ethnic Serbs and Vlachs, were underrepresented in the civil service and other state institutions, including the military, the police force, and the intelligence services, as well as the courts, the national bank, customs, and public enterprises, in spite of efforts to recruit qualified candidates from these communities.
"[71]The origins of anti-Albanian propaganda in Serbia started in the 19th century with claims made by Serbian state on territories that were about to be controlled by Albanians after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.
[72] By the late nineteenth century, Albanians were being characterized by Serbian government officials as a "wild tribe" with "cruel instincts".
[73] whereas politician Vladan Đorđević described Albanians as "modern Troglodytes" and "prehumans who slept in the trees", still having "tails" in the nineteenth century.
[74] Throughout the 1930s, a strong anti-Albanian sentiment existed in the country and solutions for the "Kosovo question" were put forward, and it involved large-scale deportation.
[78][77] According to historian Olivera Milosavljević, part of the modern intellectuals in Serbia wrote about Albanians mainly within the framework of stereotypes, regarding their "innate" hatred and desire for the destruction of Serbs, which was a product of their dominant characteristic of "primitivism" and "robbery".
[83] In 2012, Vuk Jeremić, Serbian Minister of Foreign Affairs, while commenting on Twitter about the Kosovo dispute, compared Albanians to the "evil Orcs" from the movie The Hobbit.
[84] During 2017, amidst a background of political tension between Serbia and Kosovo, Serbian media engaged in warmongering and anti-Albanian sentiment by using ethnic slurs such as "Šiptar" in their coverage.
