1945 massacre in Yugoslavia
The Bar massacre () was the killings of an unknown number of mostly ethnic Albanians from Kosovo by Yugoslav Partisans in late March or early April 1945 in Bar, a municipality in Montenegro, at the end of World War II.
Massacre.
By 1942, the city of Bar became a home of many Serbs and Montenegrins and other refugees who were forced to flee from Kosovo and to escape the violence done by Albanian units. Many of these joined the Partisan forces and participated in their activities in Bar.
The victims were Albanians from Kosovo, who hid in the mountains in order to avoid being mobilized into the Yugoslav Partisans. These men were captured, then assembled in Prizren and marched on foot in three columns to Bar where they were supposed to receive short training and then sent off to the front. The march took the rugged mountain ranges of Kosovo and Montenegro to reach its destination. Upon arrival locals reported that these men, who had marched a considerable distance, were "exhausted" and "distressed". The column of men which stretched a few kilometres were then gathered on the Barsko Polje. At one point, in Barsko, one of the Albanians from the column attacked and killed one of the Yugoslav officers, Božo Dabanović. Very soon after that somebody from the column threw a smuggled bomb at the commander of the brigade. This created a panic among the Partisans. The guards watching over the recruits then fired into the crowd killing many and prompting the survivors to flee into the surrounding mountains. In another case, several hundred Albanians were herded into a tunnel, near Bar, which was subsequently sealed off so that all of those trapped within the tunnel were asphyxiated.
Yugoslav sources put the number of victims at 400 while Albanian sources put the figure at 2,000 killed in Bar alone. According to Croatian historian Ljubica Štefan, the Partisans killed 1,600 Albanians in Bar on 1 April after an incident at a fountain. There are also accounts claiming that the victims included young boys. Other sources cited that the killing started en route for no apparent reason and this was supported by the testimony of in his 1949 trial. Themeli was a Nazi collaborator who later worked as an important official of the Sigurimi, the Albanian secret police. After the massacre, the site was immediately covered in concrete by the Yugoslav communist regime and built an airport on top of the mass grave.
References.
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