At the end of the First World War, Serbian forces took repossession of Kosovo. The re-occupation was once again accompanied by brutal treatment meted out to the native Albanian majority population. One of the particularly notable instances was a massacre carried out by Serbian and Montenegrin forces in the Rugova Highlands in western Kosovo on or around 16 February 1919, in which hundreds of people were slaughtered. The following document on the bloody events was compiled for the Kosovo Committee in exile by two priests and sent to British Brigadier General George Fraser Phillips, head of the British Military Control Commission in Albania and Montenegro, in Shkodra, in the second half of 1919. It was subsequently transmitted to the Great Powers and the League of Nations. Subsequent research has suggests that there were 432 victims in Rugova that month rather than the 842 given here. Rugova was at any rate ravaged and cleared entirely of its population. Those who survived fled into the Gjakova Highlands in Albania.
Statistics of Serbian Massacres
Committed in the Region of Rugova (District of Peja [Ipek])
[British Foreign Office document FO 608/46, preserved in the National Archives at Kew, U.K. Courtesy of Bejtullah Destani. Translated from the French by Robert Elsie.]