Muhaxhir, Emigrant, or Refugjat: The Politics and Identity of Albanian-Speaking Refugees in Albania in the Interwar Period

Recent scholarship argues that the earliest intellectual and legal definitions of refugeedom can be traced to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century empires, including the Ottoman empire. During the interwar period, Albanian administrators adopted former Ottoman practices of refugee resettlement, linking settlement with nation-building practices. During this period, Albania settled close to fifteen thousand refugees, mainly arriving from Greece, Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, and Turkey. The majority of these refugees were Albanian-speaking Muslims entangled in the Greek-Turkish population exchange, violence faced from de-Ottomanization and demographic engineering practices, and those not accepted by the Republic of Turkey. The paper will examine three categories used to describe refugees in the Albanian context: muhaxhir, emigrant, and refugjat. The term “muhaxhir” in Albanian–borrowed from Ottoman Turkish–referred to Ottoman Albanian communities who left their homes as refugees or were transferred from Greece, Serbia, and Montenegro to Albania, Kosovo, and Turkey beginning in the late nineteenth century through the early twentieth century. The category of “muhaxhir” was often taken up as a local identity. Simultaneously, Albanian officials alternated between the use of “emigrant” and “refugee,” blurring the boundaries in their nation-building project. The paper shows how these varying categories of “refugee” were used by the Albanian state and the refugees themselves, shaping and defining the political, cultural, and social lives of Albanian-speaking Muslim refugees in Albania. Examining diplomatic correspondences, citizenship laws, government telegrams, and refugee songs, the paper demonstrates how various terms for “refugee” were not exclusionary to one another, but encapsulate the robust religious, cultural, political, and legal experiences of refugees in a local context.