ترحيل_الألبان_1877–1878
عشية النزاع بين صربيا والعثمانيين (1876-1878)، عاش عدد معتبر من الألبان -وأحيانًا على نحو مدمج وفي القرى بشكل أساسي- وبعض الترك الحضر (بعضهم يمتلك إرثًا ألبانيًا) مع الصرب ضمن سنجق نيش. خلال الحرب، اختلفت ردة فعل الألبان تجاه القوات الصربية المتقدمة وفقًا للمنطقة، فتراوحت بين إبداء المقاومة والفرار إلى الجبال القريبة وكوسوفو العثمانية. رغم طرد القوات الصربية معظمَ هؤلاء الألبان، فقد سُمح ببقاء عدد ضئيل في وادي يابلانيكا حيث يعيش أحفادهم اليوم. انتقل الصرب القادمون من منطقة نهر لاب إلى صربيا خلال الجولة الأولى من الأعمال العدائية عام 1876 وبعدها، في حين أعاد اللاجئون الألبان منذ عام 1878 تزويد قراهم بالسكان. استقر اللاجئون الألبان أيضًا على طول الحدود العثمانية الصربي في الشمال الشرقي، وفي مناطق حضرية، وفي ما يزيد عن 30 مستعمرة أُقيمت وسط كوسوفو وفي جنوبها الشرقي. . "As these Niš refugees waited for acknowledgment from locals, they took measures to ensure that they were properly accommodated by often confiscating food stored in towns. They also simply appropriated lands and began to build shelter on them. A number of cases also point to banditry in the form of livestock raiding and "illegal" hunting in communal forests, all parts of refugees' repertoire... At this early stage of the crisis, such actions overwhelmed the Ottoman state, with the institution least capable of addressing these issues being the newly created Muhacirin Müdüriyeti... Ignored in the scholarship, these acts of survival by desperate refugees constituted a serious threat to the established Kosovar communities. The leaders of these communities thus spent considerable efforts lobbying the Sultan to do something about the refugees. While these Niš muhacirs would in some ways integrate into the larger regional context, as evidenced later, they, and a number of other Albanian-speaking refugees streaming in for the next 20 years from Montenegro and Serbia, constituted a strong opposition block to the Sultan's rule."; p.53. "One can observe that in strategically important areas, the new Serbian state purposefully left the old Ottoman laws intact. More important, when the state wished to enforce its authority, officials felt it necessary to seek the assistance of those with some experience, using the old Ottoman administrative codes to assist judges make rulings. There still remained, however, the problem of the region being largely depopulated as a consequence of the wars... Belgrade needed these people, mostly the landowners of the productive farmlands surrounding these towns, back. In subsequent attempts to lure these economically vital people back, while paying lip-service to the nationalist calls for "purification," Belgrade officials adopted a compromise position that satisfied both economic rationalists who argued that Serbia needed these people and those who wanted to separate "Albanians" from "Serbs." Instead of returning back to their "mixed" villages and towns of the previous Ottoman era, these "Albanians," "Pomaks," and "Turks" were encouraged to move into concentrated clusters of villages in Masurica, and Gornja Jablanica that the Serbian state set up for them. For this "repatriation" to work, however, authorities needed the cooperation of local leaders to help persuade members of their community who were refugees in Ottoman territories to "return." In this regard, the collaboration between Shahid Pasha and the Serbian regime stands out. An Albanian who commanded the Sofia barracks during the war, Shahid Pasha negotiated directly with the future king of Serbia, Prince Milan Obrenović, to secure the safety of those returnees who would settle in the many villages of Gornja Jablanica. To help facilitate such collaborative ventures, laws were needed that would guarantee the safety of these communities likely to be targeted by the rising nationalist elements infiltrating the Serbian army at the time. Indeed, throughout the 1880s, efforts were made to regulate the interaction between exiled Muslim landowners and those local and newly immigrant farmers working their lands. Furthermore, laws passed in early 1880 began a process of managing the resettlement of the region that accommodated those refugees who came from Austrian-controlled Herzegovina and from Bulgaria. Cooperation, in other words, was the preferred form of exchange within the borderland, not violent confrontation."