​GREEK MINORITY IN SOUTHERN ALBANIA

Documenting the persecution and political initiatives of the Greek Minority in southern Albania

Contents

  1. Position Statement on the Greek Minority in southern Albania​​

1. Position Statement on the Greek Minority in southern Albania

The Hellenic Canadian Research Institute (the Hellenic Institute) seeks to document and report on the persecution and political initiatives of the Greek Minority in southern Albania.

The territories in southern Albania switched between Greek and Albanian control on multiple occasions since 1912. The final time that the southern Albanian region (referred to by Greeks as "Northern Epirus") was under Greek control was in 1941, just before Nazi Germany and allies Bulgaria and Italy with Albanian military support, advanced and triple-occupied Greece during World War II. By the time the war came to an end in 1945, Albania fell under the Soviet sphere of influence, with the Greek minority in the country's south finding themselves totally cut off from Greece and isolated in a very hostile communist system for the next five decades.

Although the communist regime of Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha was extremely suspicious of the Greeks residing especially by the border areas in the southern areas of his country, and although his government systematically persecuted them, he eventually recognized a very small area in the south as the "Minority Zone" for an area covering 99 villages, but he cut off all the other Greeks from the Minority Zone in a bid to "Albanize" them over time. Nevertheless, Greeks inside and outside the Minority Zone were treated in the exact same manner by the then communist Albanian state.

After the fall of communism in Albania in 1990, the cultural persecution and the suppression of the Greek language and cultural identity subsided to some degree, but the political persecution continues to this very day.

The persecution of the Greek Minority in post-communist Albania in the Minority Zone includes:

  • the arrest and imprisonment of major ethnic Greek political figures on trumped up charges of espionage, political interference, vote buying or other fabricated crimes
  • the arrest and imprisonment of ethnic Greek residents forced to confess to crimes they did not commit via psychological and physical torture
  • state-sponsored killings of ethnic Greek activists
  • the purposeful redrawing of electoral boundaries to skew the Greek Minority vote
  • the expulsion of Greek clerics
  • the incitement of Albanian ultra-nationalists to harass the Greek Minority
  • the confiscation and destruction of Greek properties by the Albanian state
  • the attempts to try to keep the Greeks in the Minority Zone cut off from the Greeks elsewhere in the country and the suppression of the Greek language and culture outside of the Minority Zone​