Athens, 21 Oct (Tirana Echo) – The bilateral commission on the cemeteries of Greek soldiers fallen in Albanian territory during the 2nd World War has met in Athens this week, despite the toughened political rhetoric between Greece and Albania in recent days.
The bilateral commission led by Albanian General Dede Prenga and Greek Air Force General Themistoklis Burolias discussed on several unresolved technical issues which stand on the way of Greek military cemeteries being built in southern Albania.
Greece wants Albania to agree on the escavation of remains and construction of several cemeteries in honor of Greek soldiers fallen during the Italian-Greek war of 1949 across southern Albania which at the time was under Italian fascist occupation.
The issue being discussed at a bilateral level, has often been subject to controversy and national sensitivities as previous digging missions revealed that remains of normal Albanian families (children included) were being passed for Greek remains instead. Some critics on the Albanian side claim that Greek troops invaded southern Albania and that any more cemeteris help the cause of some Greek nationalist movements advocating for territorial claims over southern Albania, which they refer to as ‘Northern Epirus’.
This has raised suspicions on the exact number of fallen soldiers with numbers varying between 5000 to 12,000. Greece has asked Albanian authorities permission to digg in 696 different sites where it hopes to find remains of fallen soldiers.
The Albanians have been reluctant to give in, under pressure from the Cham Party PDIU whose representatives condition Greek cemeteries with the construction of Cham victims cemeteries in Greek territory, in memory of several thousands Cham ethnic Albanian community members who were masacred and forcefully kicked out of Greece in 1944.
The Commission has met after fierce rhetorical ping-ponging between the two foreign ministers in distance over several ‘open issues’ between Greece and Albania which in addition to the Greek cemeteries include the delimitation of the continental shelf in the Ionnian Sea, the ‘Cham Issue’ which Greece refuses to recognize, the revision of historical text books and the abrogation of the ‘State of War’ law which Greece still maintains in force against Albania since 1940.
The Italo-Greek war goes back to 1940 when Benito Mussolini, seeking to expand Italian control over the Mediterranean, launched an invasion of Greece from southern Albania. The Greeks resisted well thanks to British military intelligence and pushed Italian fascist forces back into Albanian territory, helped also from Albanian communist partizans, where during the winter the fighting settled into a bloody stalemate. After several offensives from Italian General Ugo Cavallero in 1941, the aitalo-Greek war was overshadowed by the German invasion of Yugoslavia, Albania and Greece.
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