In 1933, several visits by the Turkish foreign minister Tevfik Rüştü Aras to Belgrade in talks with the Yugoslav foreign ministry discussed the deportation of Muslims from the area of Yugoslavia that had been designated as South Serbia to Anatolia.[12] In 1938, Aras and his Yugoslav counterpart Milan Stojadinović after five years of negotiations signed a joint convention regarding the migration of Muslim Turks to Turkey.[12] The agreement referred to the proposed relocation of 40,000 families between 1939 and 1944 in accordance with regulations and requirements such as being fluent in Turkish, exclusion of Romani and targeting municipalities in Kosovo and western Macedonia for the migration process.[13] Rural communities were to be mainly targeted and properties of those people deported was to be liquidated in Yugoslavia, while the journey to Anatolia from the port of Thessaloniki would be funded by Turkey and monitored by a joint Turkish-Yugoslav commission.[14] Archival and printed literature from the period show the agreement to have been a misleading and deceptive document in its wording and intent as the outcome was for the removal of the Albanian population to Turkey.[14] During the negotiation of the bilateral convention Atatürk met with Yugoslav authorities and later submitted the agreement to the Turkish parliament for ratification.[14] In July 1938, some 5 months before the death of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the Turkish parliament refused to ratify the agreement and with the onset of the Second World War, the measure was not reconsidered.[4][15] Of all those who settled in villages where Albanians became or are the only population, the language has been retained to various degrees, whereas in ethnically mixed areas language retention has been obsolete.[6]