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 Napoleon Zervas 

""Zervas was forced to resign in 1947, when details of his contacts with the German occupation authorities surfaced"" This quote came from Wikepedia's biography of Napoleon Zervas. Other sites are more explicit and call him a Nazi collaborateur. Nowadays there are still a lot of greek people that believe that the Cham people were expelled because they collaborated with the Nazi's. However it was Zervas thet collaborated with the Nazi's that expelled them. Shouldn't this be more explicit in this article. There is a UN resolution which asks the Greek government to repatriate the cham and to give back there properties.The rest of this article is lame. I miss the following:

Copyright © 2006 Illyrians.org.
During the Conference of Ambassadors in London in 1913, the southern part of the region was cut off from the motherland and annexed to the Greek state despite the fact that people of the southern Epirus were Albanians of Orthodox and the Muslim faith. While the orthodox Albanians were targets of hellenization, the muslim Albanians were either exterminated or expelled from their ancestral lands by the Greek government.

Chams who lived in Southern Epirus (Chameria or Thesprotia as it is called by the Greeks) were the victims of the first ethnic cleansing in Europe at the end of the Second World War. The Cham tragedy is one of the most painful tragedies of the European continent. Statistical yearbook of the Greek government in 1936 showed that 26.000 Chams lived in Chameria region in Greece at that time.

As a result of the 1944-1945 ethnic cleansing and genocide, 30.000 Albanian Muslims were violently expelled from the Chameria region, and sought refuge in the Republic of Albania, where they still live. Today, there are 150.000 members of this population in Albania, a figure that has grown because of the high birth rate of the population. On the other hand, current number of Cham Albanians living in Greece is estimated at around 100.000. Yet these people are deprived of every sort of minority rights like other minorities living in Greece. To cite but one example, they can speak Albanian only in their homes.

The population of Chameria has always been ethnically Albanian: - A lot of voyagers and foreign historians wrote that Chameria had been populated by Albanians. Even the Greek historian Herodotus underscored this fact in his book Historias and called Albanians of the Chameria barbarians, a term used by the ancient Greeks to distinguish non-greek people. - The census held by the Turkish Administration in 1910 established that there were 83.000 orthodox and muslim Albanians in the region. The demographic map of the British military mission sent to the British government in London indicates that on the eve of the second World War, 75% of Chameria's population was Albanian. - The pro-Greek historian Spiro Muselimi, in his book ""Historical Sight Through Thesprotia"", edited in Joannina on 1974, wrote that ""The bishop of Thesprotia in the year 1870 translated some parts of Bible into Albanian, as the people of orthodox faith of the region did not understand any word in Greek"" .

The Greek authorities, sticking to the concept of absolute denial of the existence of ethnic groups on Greek territory, have followed a well-established chauvinistic policy and, as history recorded, they committed genocide against the Albanians of muslim faith. The racial assault on Chameria's muslim Albanians began to be first applied at the end of the Second World War, in 1944-1945, when criminal bands of the notorious General Napoleon Zervas perpetrated ethnic cleansing against them.

On June 27, 1944, Greek criminal bands resorted to the worst atrocities witnessed in this region. The terror committed against this population was beyond description. It included killings, rapes, inhuman treatment, massacre of women, babies and pregnant women. More than 1400 men, women and children were killed within 24 hours in the town of Paramithy, on Tuesday, June 27, 1944, which happened to be the date of St.Bartholomeus day for the whole Chameria.

During the June 1944-March 1945 period, 1286 persons were killed in Filat, 192 people were killed in Gumenica, 626 persons were killed in Margellic and Parga. There were hundreds of other missing persons. In the same period, as a result of Greek massacres, acts of robbery and rapes against the Albanian population of Chameria; 2900 young and old men, 214 women, 96 children were massacred, 745 women were raped, 76 women abducted, 32 children, younger than 3 years were massacred, 68 villages were razed to the ground, 5800 houses and places of worship were burned down or destroyed. Furthermore, 30.000 Albanian Muslims were violently expelled from the Chameria region who took refuge in the Republic of Albania.

The Albanian government, after the war,