History of Albania - Independence of Albania (1912)

Independence of Albania (1912)

The initial sparks of the first Balkan War in 1912 were ignited by the Albanian uprising between 1908 and 1910 which were directed at opposing the Young Turk policies of consolidation of the Ottoman Empire. Following the eventual weakening of the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans, Serbia, Greece and Bulgaria declared war and sought to aggrandize their respective boundaries on the remaining territories of the Empire. The territory of what is now Albania was invaded by Serbia in the north and Greece in the south, restricting the country to only a patch of land around the southern coastal city of Vlora. The uprisings of 1910-1912, and the Montenegrin, Serbian, and Greek invasion of Albania, led to the proclamation of independence by Ismail Qemali in Vlora, on 28 November 1912. The independence was recognized by the Conference of London on 29 July 1913.

The border between Albania and its neighbors was delineated in 1913 following the decision by the Ambassadors at the Conference of London. The delineation of the new state's borders left more than half of Albanian communities outside Albania. This population was largely divided between Montenegro and Serbia (which then included what is now Kosovo and the Republic of Macedonia). A substantial number of Albanians thus found themselves under Serbian rule.

At the same time, an uprising in the country's south by local Greeks, led to the formation of the Autonomous Republic of Northern Epirus in the southern provinces (1914). The republic proved short-lived as Albania collapsed with the onset of World War I. Greece held the area between 1914 and 1916, and unsuccessfully tried to annex it in March 1916, however in 1917 it was driven from the area by Italy, who took over most of Albania. The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 awarded the area to Greece, however the area definitively reverted to Albanian control in November 1921, following Greece's defeat in the Greco-Turkish War.