The exhibition “A Silent Crime: The Atrocities of Albanian Quislings Against Serbs and Jews in Kosovo and Metohija in WW2” by Nenad Antonijević, PhD, museum advisor of the Genocide Victims Museum in Belgrade, opened in the Gallery of the National Museum Kraljevo, on Saint Vitus Day, Friday, June 28th 2024, starting at 6 p.m. Along with the author, Dr. um collaborated with the exhibition. Nikola Radosavljević, as the author of the installation, and the curators-historians Nikola Miloševski and Aleksandra Mišić. The opening of the exhibition was also attended by Lav Pajkić, State Secretary at the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Serbia.
At the beginning of the opening, the audience was greeted by Darko Gučanin, director of the Kraljevo National Museum, and pointed out that the importance of this exhibition lies in the effort to objectively and responsibly show one of the turning points – the period of the Italian and later German occupation of Kosovo and Metohija, in the period from 1941 to 1944.
After that, Nenad Antonijević, PhD, the author of the exhibition, spoke about the suffering of the Serbian civilian population in Kosovo and Metohija at the hands of the Italian and German occupation authorities, but also at the hands of Quisling’s Albanian collaborators, who were mostly oriented towards the persecution and abuse of Serbs. Their terror was so terrible that neither children nor women were spared, and it included abduction of girls and women, expulsion, wounding, torture and murder, poisoning of wells, destruction of graves and erasure of borders. There is a counterpart only in crimes against Serbs in the Independent State of Croatia during the same period. At the beginning of the Second World War, the Albanians welcomed the Italian and German occupation authorities as liberators, but a large number of Quislings, after the end of the war, went over to the side of the Communist Party. Their leader, Džafer Deva, was the president of the municipality of Kosovska Mitrovica in the occupied Kingdom of Yugoslavia during the Second World War and one of the founders of the Second Prizren League. The League is a military-political association, which was formed by the German intelligence service “Abwehr” at the end of 1943 in Prizren, with the aim of creating Greater Albania. After the war, Deva went into exile. The realization of the exhibition was made possible by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Serbia and the Foundation of the Museum of Genocide Victims, and supported by the Museum of Yugoslavia, the Military Museum, the Ensemble of Folk Dances and Songs of AP Kosovo and Metohija “Wreath” and the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Priština with its temporary headquarters in Kosovska Mitrovica. After visiting the National Museum Kruševac, the Local Museum of Paraćin, the Museum of Herzegovina in Trebinje and the City Museum in Kosovska Mitrovica, this is the fifth visit of the exhibition.