Hasan Bej Prishtina

Hasan Bej Prishtina

Hasan Bej Prishtina (real name Hasan Berisha ; * 1873 in Vıçıtırın , Ottoman Empire , today Vushtrria, Kosovo ; † August 13, 1933 in Thessaloniki , Greece ) was an Albanian politician. Before the First World War he supported the Albanian independence movement Rilindja . In 1921 he was Albanian Prime Minister for a short time.

Life

Statue of Hasan Prishtina in front of the headquarters of the University of Pristina

Hasan Berisha, who comes from an Albanian family with large estates, studied law in Istanbul. After the Young Turkish Revolution , he was elected to the first parliament of the Ottoman Empire in 1908. At that time he changed his surname to Prishtina and took the title Bej. The new name expressed the solidarity with the city, where he had the most political supporters and friends.

When it became apparent during the First Balkan War that the Ottoman Empire would lose its last European provinces, Hasan Prishtina took part in the Albanian uprising, the aim of which was to found a state of its own. In this way, the division of the Albanian settlement area among the victors of the war, Serbia, Greece and Montenegro, was to be prevented. Hasan Prishtina organized the Albanian fighters in Kosovo in May 1912 , who now fought against the Serbian and Montenegrin troops instead of the Ottoman army .

When Albanian independence was proclaimed in Vlora on November 28, 1912, Hasan Prishtina and his followers formally submitted to the first Albanian government of Ismail Qemali , whose actual power did not even extend to Elbasan , let alone Kosovo. In 1913 Hasan Prishtina received a ministerial office, which he could not actually exercise. In the course of this year, the Serbian troops finally prevailed in Kosovo and the province was given to Serbia by the drawing of the border by the great powers at the London Ambassador Conference .

Hasan Prishtina now went to Albania and was appointed to the government by Prince Wilhelm on March 17, 1914 as Minister of Post. With the outbreak of the First World War , the Albanian state disappeared from the map just a few months later. Hasan Bej spent most of the war in Italy .

At the end of the war in 1918, a resistance movement of Albanians from Kosovo formed around Hasan Prishtina and Bajram Curri , who fought against the Serbs who were moving back into Kosovo and wanted to join the province with Albania. At the turn of the year 1918/19 it was not even certain whether the Albanian state would be reestablished at all: The division between the neighboring countries of Yugoslavia , Italy and Greece, allied with the Entente, was also discussed at the Paris Peace Conference . In October 1919 Hasan Prishtina went to Paris with a Kosovar delegation to speak at the peace conference for the annexation of Kosovo to Albania. The Kosovar delegation was not allowed to attend any official meeting and its concerns were not debated.

In 1920 Hasan Bej Prishtina was involved in organizing the Lushnya Congress . This gathering of influential Albanians agreed to restore state authority and form the first post-war government recognized throughout the country. Nevertheless, the political situation in Albania remained very unstable. There were no parties, but various interest groups, clans and tribal associations vying for power. One of these groups were the Kosovars in exile, to which Hasan Prishtina belonged. In April 1921 he was elected to the Albanian parliament for the Dibra region (there were now many Kosovar Albanians living in this border region) . He advocated support for the Albanian insurgents in Kosovo and opposed Ahmet Zogu , who was striving for power with the help of the Yugoslav government and wanted to forego Kosovo.

Hasan Prishtina was elected Prime Minister on December 7, 1921. Just three days later, Zogu forced him to give up the office by threatening to start another civil war. Hasan Bej gave in to avoid further bloodshed in Albania. In order not to snub his Yugoslav allies, Ahmet Zogu dismissed the Kosovar members of parliament - among them Hasan Prishtina - from parliament in Tirana in 1922. This measure was necessary to contain the conflict with Yugoslavia. Zogu had correctly recognized that the support of the Albanian insurgents in Kosovo would only provoke a backlash in Yugoslavia, which Albania had nothing to counter. It was clear to him that the uprising against the Yugoslav troops had no chance anyway. In February 1923, Hasan Prishtina and his Kosovar supporters were finally forced to leave Albania.

When Fan Noli became Prime Minister of Albania in the summer of 1924 , he changed his country's Kosovo policy again. He supported the sending of a Kosovar delegation to the League of Nations in Geneva, which was supposed to take legal action there over the serious human rights violations committed by the Yugoslav army and police in Kosovo. Hasan Bej Prishtina was the head of this delegation. However, the Kosovar Albanians could not achieve anything.

After Zogu had regained power in Albania in December 1924 with the help of Yugoslav mercenaries, Hasan Bej had to leave Albania forever, and of course he could not return to Kosovo. After the murder of his companion Luigj Gurakuqi , Prishtina planned an assassination attempt on Zogu. This in turn tried - like the Yugoslav secret service - to get Prishtina out of the world. As a wealthy man he bought a large house in Thessaloniki , where he lived in exile from then on. On August 13, 1933, he was murdered there by the Albanian Ibrahim Çelo on behalf of Zogu. Hasan Bej was buried near Kukës near the border with Kosovo.

Appreciation

Hasan Bej Prishtina is honored by the Albanians as an important national hero and freedom fighter. A primary school in Tirana and the University of Prishtina are named after him. On May 2, 2014 he was posthumously awarded the Order of Merit of the National Flag by Albanian President Bujar Nishani .

literature

• Peter Bartl: Albania. From the Middle Ages to the present . Pustet, Regensburg 1995, ISBN 3-7917-1451-1 , ( Eastern and Southeastern Europe - history of countries and peoples ).
• Hasan Kaleshi: Prishtina, Hasan Bey . In: Biographical Lexicon on the History of Southeast Europe . Volume 3. Munich 1979, pp. 485-489
• Michael Schmidt-Neke: Development and expansion of the royal dictatorship in Albania (1912–1939). Formation of government, mode of rule and power elite in a young Balkan state . Oldenbourg, Munich 1987, ISBN 3-486-54321-0 , ( Southeast European Works 84).

Web links

• Biography (alban.)
• Rilindja Kombëtare = Albanian national movement (covers the period up to the First World War, alban.)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Hasan Kaleshi: Prishtina, Hasan Bey . In: Mathias Bernath, Felix von Schroeder (Hrsg.): Biographical Lexicon for the History of Southeast Europe . tape 3 . Munich 1979, p. 485–489 ( biolex.ios-regensburg.de [accessed July 28, 2020]).
2. ↑ Peter Bartl: Albania. From the Middle Ages to the present . Pustet, Regensburg 1995, ISBN 3-7917-1451-1 , ( Eastern and Southeastern Europe - history of countries and peoples ).
3. ↑ Presidenti Nishani vlerëson atdhetarin e shquar Hasan Prishtina (pas vdekjes) me “Dekoratën e Flamurit Kombëtar”. (No longer available online.) In: president.al. President of the Republic of Albania , formerly the original ; Retrieved May 13, 2017 (Albanian).  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.    

predecessor	Office	successor
Qazim Koculi	Prime Minister of Albania in 1921	Idhomene Kosturi