[16] The Carnegie Commission, an international fact-finding mission, concluded that the Serbian and Montenegrin armies perpetrated large-scale violence for "the entire transformation of the ethnic character of regions inhabited exclusively by Albanians".

[17] Cohen, examining the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace report, said that Serbian soldiers cut off the ears, noses and tongues of Albanian civilians and gouged out their eyes.

[23][24][9] American relief commissioner Willard Howard said in a 1914 Daily Mirror interview that General Carlos Popovitch would shout, "Don't run away, we are brothers and friends.

[41] Anna Di Lellio writes that the Serbian expansion campaign forced Albanians to accept a Serb nationalist ideology which made them feel like a minority in their homeland.

[59] General Božidar Janković forced the city's surviving Albanian leaders to sign a statement expressing gratitude to Serbian King Peter I Karađorđević for their liberation.

[77][64] In 1913, the paper Radničke novine published an article from the Albanische Korrespondenz, reporting that after atrocities had been committed by Serbian troops in the village of Fshaj, the Malesori tribesmen took arms.

A report of the International Commission cited a letter from a Serbian soldier who described the punitive expedition against the rebel Albanians: My dear Friend, I have no time to write to you at length, but I can tell you that appalling things are going on here.

[90] On 21 November 1912, he wrote letters to Paris, London, Berlin, Rome and Petrograd: "The behavior of the Serbian army towards the Albanian people does not belong to any international human rights norm, but after the occupation of the countries they choose no means of dealing with it anymore.

[100] Edith Durham wrote about refugees from Peć after the Serbian army entered the city in 1913: An Ipek man, well educated and of high standing, told of what happened there.

[103] The Ibar Army under General Mihailo Zivkovic entered the sanjak and pacified the Albanian population with "soletudinem faciunt pacem appelant" ("They make a desert and call it peace").

[112] American relief commissioner William Howard said in a 1914 Daily Mirror interview that Serbian troops destroyed 100 villages (with 12,000 houses) in Dibra, and 4,000 to 8,000 Albanians were burned, bayonetted or shot to death.

[122] Durham encountered front-line soldiers such as a Serb officer who viewed his time in Kosovo as "heroism" and "nearly choked with laughter" as he talked about "bayonet[ing] the women and children of Luma".

[122] Trotsky's Serbian friend said that Skopje had become a military camp, and Serb peasant troops looted food, livestock and doors and windows from Albanian houses.

[134][24] Trotsky wrote several dispatches describing the atrocities: "An individual, a group, a party or a class that is capable of 'objectively' picking its nose while it watches men drunk with blood, and incited from above, massacring defenceless people is condemned by history to rot and become worm-eaten while it is still alive".

[135] A British Foreign Office report noted a telegram from the Italian consul in Skopje: "Atrocities being committed by Serbian troops and their evident intention of extirpating as many of the Albanian inhabitants as possible".

[133] The engineer wrote that the sound of gunfire began early in the day and continued until late; prisoners were treated badly, and officers were shot without trial:[133] "An order was issued to soldiers in certain places to kill all Albanians from the age of eight years upwards with a view to extermination.

[139] However, historian Alan Kramer regards the Carnegie Commission report as a "remarkably well-documented and impartial investigation, coolly sceptical of exaggerated claims, reached conclusions that have not been improved to this day.

[142] Austro-Hungarians said that although there was often "a great deal of exaggeration" of data in their possession,[142] accounts from verified witnesses confirmed the mass killings of women and children, wide-scale looting and the razing of villages.

[142] In Skopje, the Austro-Hungarian consul Heimroth sent his assistants into the field numerous times to examine news of atrocities before sending reports (such as "Gausamkeiten der Serben gegen Albaner") to Vienna.

[145] Heimroth said that he had received more complaints of wartime violence then he had in the Russo-Japanese War, and a conflict officially aimed at liberating fellow Christians from Sharia Law was being concluded with an attempt to exterminate all non-Serbian and non-Eastern Orthodox inhabitants.

[145] Observations by "reliable" and "non-partisan" informants who witnessed the events "left no doubt", Höpken says, that extensive violence (such as the razing of homes and villages and forced population movements) occurred.

In an italicized section before the newspaper article, Elsie writes that the Central Powers were "hostile to Serbia's expansion into the southern Balkans and shocked at its Albanian extermination policies.

[3][59][170][63] Historian Mark Mazower writes that despite the "careless talk of 'exterminating' the Albanian population", the killing of "perhaps thousands of civilians" by Serbian armed forces in the provinces of Kosovo and Monastir was "prompted more by revenge than genocide".

[173][174] In January 1913, the French consul Maurice Carlier wrote to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in France of the miserable conditions of the Albanian population living in the territories occupied by the Serbian army.

[175] On December 29, 1912, the Italian paper La Stampa published an article about the Serbian troopers massacre of Albanian women and children hiding in Prochaskas consulate: "The door was broken down.

[178] French general Frédéric-Georges Herr reported on 3 January 1913 that "in the Albanian massif, the numerous massacres that bloodied this region reduced the population to strong proportions.

[157] Dedijer equated Serbian actions (such as Nikola Pašić's description of eyewitness accounts as foreign propaganda) with those of European colonial armies in South America and Africa.

[157] The British and German press published articles about the large number of Albanian deaths in Albania and Kosovo, and the attempts by the Serbian government to conceal the reality from its people by censorship.

I saw women and children dying of hunger.The Habsburg envoy in Belgrade said that Serbian authorities sponsored and tolerated harsh treatment of Albanians (pillaging, arson, and executions) in the "liberated lands".

[193] The German newspaper Frankfurter Zeitung obtained reports corroborated by impartial European observers that massacres were committed against various local communities in Macedonia and Albania by Bulgarians, Serbs and Greeks.