Turko-shqiptarët
Etimologjia dhe përdorimi i termit
Shqiptarët myslimanë shpesh emërtohen dhe ose quhen nga grekët në mënyrë poshtëruese si "turq", të përfaqësuar në shprehjen "Turkalvanoi". Ashtu si me termin "turk", shprehja (e përkthyer edhe si turko-shqiptare) u përdor nga disa shkrimtarë kryesisht në shekullin e nëntëmbëdhjetë dhe në fillim të shekullit të njëzetë edhe në literaturën e Evropës Perëndimore lidhur me popullsinë shqiptare myslimane. Si e tillë, fjala turk në përdorimin e saj mori edhe kuptime nënçmuese dhe tallëse që kur zbatohej me fjalë të tjera krijuan kuptime poshtëruese të sjelljes mizore dhe çnjerëzore dhe ose të të qenit i prapambetur dhe i egër. Brenda një konteksti ballkanik gjatë shekullit të njëzetë, përdorimi i fjalës "turk" (dhe "Turqi") është përdorur politikisht për të dalluar "indigjenët" nga "të huajt" që interpretonin myslimanët e Ballkanit si "të huaj". Blumi, Isa (2013). Ottoman refugees, 1878-1939: migration in a post-imperial world. A&C Black. pp. 149-150. “It all started with war. War was the means by which new political elites in neighboring, former Ottoman territories like Bulgaria, Greece, and Serbia identified an opportunity to rewrite the demographic landscape and in turn, claim a historical association with newly “ethnically cleansed” territories. As a consequence of the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913, in particular, entire city neighborhoods were razed, names of villages changed, their inhabitants expelled, or more dramatically still, collectively “converted.” To many, the problem was that the beginning of World War I left these states not enough time to complete the ugly task of erasing the Ottoman Empire from “Christendom.” As in the Americas, an Ottoman human “refuse” lingered in independent Balkan countries where some of these “left-over” communities survive until today. Despite a long period of imposed socialism and declarations of brotherhood, Balkan Muslims lived in constant fear that one more round of “ethnic cleansing” will come sweeping through their communities. This is especially the case in Bulgaria and the former Yugoslavia, where a century now of living as “minorities” often led to opportunistic, “functional” blood-letting campaigns in the larger contexts of “national” politics. In Yugoslavia, the non-Slav Albanian Muslim (and Catholic) evolved into a bureaucratic category especially susceptible to periodic state-led expulsion campaigns—throughout the 1920s, 1935–8, 1953–67, and then again in the 1990s—that passed through the region. Invariably castigated as “outsiders” and “fifth-column” threats to national security, the labeling of entire regions of Kosovo, Novipazaar, Montenegro, and Macedonia as inhabited by generic “Muslim Albanians” often meant the organized expulsion of those communities. In order to justify such measures to an occasional outside traveler bearing witness to the violent process, or delegations sent by the newly created League of Nations at the request of Albania (a member state), the Serbian/ Yugoslav state often rolled out historians, demographers, and anthropologists. In an often repeated exercise throughout the post-Ottoman Balkans, operatives of “ethnic cleansing” campaigns resurrected the “professional knowledge” of race sciences first developed in the United States at the turn-of-the-century. In the 1920s, for instance, state authorities eager to continue a process of expulsion started in 1912—briefly disrupted by World War I—sent an army of European-trained ethnographers to “Southern Serbia” to identify those communities least likely to ever accept Serbian rule. These ethnographers and human geographers adopted many of the same racist epistemologies identified in other Euro-American contexts to identify and catalogue the “sub-human” characteristics of hybrid “Turks” whose very “nature” made efforts to assimilate them into a modernizing Serbian/South Slav society “scientifically” impossible. While these stories now make up a core aspect of Albanian (and Turkish, Greek, Bulgarian) historical memory vis-à-vis Serbia’s torment, it has usefully been forgotten that the dynamics around such systemic violence was informed by a set of ideological and disciplinary frameworks that, once instrumentalized, as by the CUP after 1910, transformed the way once heterogeneous societies interacted with each other. These same ideological principles based on racial segregation and biological hierarchies influenced the intellectual elite of the early twentieth-century world. They ultimately mobilized a so-called fertility politics to justify why violent state-led colonialization/expulsion in Yugoslavia (and earlier in Greece and Bulgaria) was necessary in order to maintain the long-term demographic balance of society. Forced expulsion, the signing of “population exchange” agreements—popularized as a diplomatic “solution” already in the immediate aftermath of the first Balkan War of 1912—and ultimately colonization were all tactics used in the Balkans, as well as throughout the Euro-American dominated world.” Me rastin e shqiptarëve, kjo herë pas here ka rezultuar me albanofobinë, stereotipet negative, diskriminimin socio-politik e deri në dhunë masive. Mertus, Julie (1999). Kosovo: How myths and truths started a war. University of California Press. p. 184-185. “The importance of the Kosovo myth to Serbian politics, as Gale Stokes has observed, “lies not in these actual histories but in its selection by the nationalists as the appropriate symbolic universe of Serbianness. It provides a vocabulary of experiences outside of time.” In 1989, the “great defeat” served as a reminder of Serbian suffering and the need for Serbs to defend even their motherland, Kosovo. Mention of the Ottoman Empire also triggered the image of the evil Turks — shorthand for all Muslims, including Kosovo Albanians (regardless of their religion) and Yugoslav (“Slavic”) Muslims, who were considered to be race traitors for converting to Islam during Ottoman rule. Milošević had long capitalized on the “vocabulary of experiences” created by the myth of Kosovo. For him, the anniversary extravaganza for the Battle of Kosovo was tailor made. He arrived at the ceremony by helicopter in a display of power and took the place of honor on a stage decorated with the emblems of Serbian nationalism — including an enormous Orthodox Cross encircled by four Cyrillic C’s (for the slogan “Only Unity/Harmony Saves the Serbs”). The entire federal leadership was in attendance to hear his warning: “Serbs in their history have never conquered or exploited others. Through two world wars, they liberated themselves and, when they could, they also helped other people to liberate themselves. The Kosovo heroism does not allow us to forget that at one time we were brave and dignified and one of the few who went into battle undefeated. Six centuries later, again we are in battles and quarrels. They are not armed battles, though such things cannot be excluded yet.” By capitalizing on the greatest myth in Serbian folklore, Milošević pitted Serbs not only against Albanians but also against the other enemy identified by the Kosovo myth: Slavic Muslims. It would be the last time the entire federal leadership would stand on the same stage in unity with Milošević.”