Manchester Aid to Kosovo

The industrial region of Podujeva in the north east of Kosovo does not receive many visitors. The town suffered badly during the war in the late 1990s and since then the trains have stopped running and the economy has collapsed. Unemployment is sky high and the dusty streets are full of young people with nothing to do and nowhere to go. The single mention the town gets in the only guidebook to the newly independent state is to warn travellers not to bother going there.

It’s in this unlikely destination that a group of volunteers from ‘Manchester Aid to Kosovo’ have become a familiar sight to the locals. For six years they’ve been travelling to the region with the goal of building a ‘Peace Park’ for the people of the town. It’s been a huge task that at various times has involved the cream of the Manchester music scene, troops from NATO and landscape architects from the Eden Project. And this month a group of volunteers returned to the town with the aim of taking delivery of a massive shipment of trees and plants and transforming a corner of this run-down town into a haven of peace and tranquillity.

It’s an admirable goal, but one that was inspired by a terrible tragedy. In 1999 Serb forces marched into the town and executed sixteen members of the Bogujevci and Duriqi families in the garden of the house where they were sheltering. Five cousins – Saranda, Fatos, Jehona, Lirie and Genc Bogujevci – survived the shooting and were medically evacuated to Manchester. Their plight inspired the creation of ‘Manchester Aid to Kosovo’ (MAK), a charity originally formed to deliver a shipment of aid to the thousands of refugees who had fled the violent conflict.

Living in Manchester, the cousins were struck by the green spaces available to city dwellers in England and proposed a similar park be created in their hometown as a symbol of peace and reconciliation. Money was raised by Kosovan athletes taking part in the Manchester 10k run and the Cohesion Live concert on Platt Fields Park in 2006. Cornwall’s Eden Project also agreed to help by designing the park and held their own gigs by Badly Drawn Boy and Ian Brown to raise money.

Finally a deal was made with the local authority who donated a patch of land on the site of a long abandoned railway siding. To the surprise of the group they were also granted a large area of adjoining woodland too – in total a 22-hectare site that would require an enormous effort to transform into a tranquil English park. The initial signs weren’t promising – the area was strewn with litter and surrounded by a muddy ditch. The local farmers brought their cows down to graze on the dusty grass and behind the site stood a concrete grain silo, a remnant from the days of communism which was used as a sniper tower during the war. Like green spaces around the whole of Kosovo, the land had to be checked for landmines and unexploded shells.

But during their visits over the last few years the MAK team have gradually transformed the area by building wooden fences, a paved arena and even a playground – the only one for many miles around and swarming with local children. They even managed to secure the services of the United Nations Development Project (UNDP) who employed local labourers to lay new paths through the woodland, which has become a popular spot for courting couples to find privacy away from their family homes. As the park has taken shape only one crucial element was missing – trees, shrubs and flowers. That’s why this latest trip was organised.

Paul Guest, a paramedic from Urmston, is chairman of the group. He’s been to the region around a dozen times now and by the middle of the week he says they’ve a lot to be proud of: ‘The guys have been working since we arrived. We’ve repaired the fences where the cows kept getting through. We’ve dug all the holes. The only problem is we haven’t got our trees yet!’. The plants, due to arrive on site on Monday from Italy, have been held up at the border – a five hour drive away. No-one is sure when or if they’ll be allowed into the country.

Jane Knight is the landscape architect for the Eden Project who designed the park – not an easy task. ‘We knew it was to built over a long period of time by volunteers. We wanted it to be ambitious but we also had to keep it simple’. Choosing the right kind of trees also proved tricky: ‘It gets very cold in winter and very hot in summer, so we’ve been looking at trees that grow well in continental climates, that are really hardy and will survive the harsh conditions’. It is these English oaks, maples, and hollies that are now stuck hundreds of kilometres away.

While they are waiting the team get busy securing three truckloads of soil. It arrives full of an invasive weed called couch grass. Jane says if they were in England the soil would be ‘going right back where it came from – but this is Kosovo so things are different’. Instead the tonnes of soil have to be sifted by hand. The uneven ground also needs to be levelled off – backbreaking work until a JCB arrives. The driver offers to do the work for free because his digger was a gift from the British army after the war. ‘Thanks Tony Blair!’ he shouts. After months of negotiation the local council have agreed to pay for the construction of a stone humpback bridge at the entrance of the park and this soon starts to take shape. While this is going on the team’s local fixer – a laconic municipal employee called Hajdin – makes endless phone calls to cut through the red tape and to get the trees into the country. ‘They should be here tomorrow’, he shrugs, ‘but this is Balkan time we are talking about’.

In the evenings the group eat at one of the town’s two main restaurants. The menu is heavy on traditional meat dishes and the walls are adorned with pictures of local Kosovo Liberation Army guerrilla fighters. But the atmosphere is friendly and the local ‘Peja’ beer goes down well. The team are staying several kilometres out of town, at a hotel on picturesque Lake Battlava. The proprietor has the strong alcohol of raki on his breath and mutters about military service as he fires up the petrol generator – like the rest of Kosovo the electricity supply is subject to frequent power cuts. In summer this area is heaving with Kosovan holidaymakers, but it’s off-season and the only signs of life along the shore are stray dogs scavenging in the rubbish around the empty kebab stalls. Despite this the tourism potential for the area is plain to see and the wonderful scenery hints at a more positive future for this region.

The trees finally turn up over two days late. There’s huge relief that they’ve arrived but there’s another problem – because of a mix up with the paperwork three times as many plants as were ordered have been delivered. Around thirty thousand pounds worth of plants arrive on site on the back of flatbed trucks. The volunteers suddenly have less than 48 hours before their flight home to get these 2000 trees and shrubs into the ground, fed and watered. It’s a mammoth task and the next day the park becomes a hive of activity. Paul says the whole community rallied round: ‘We’ve had dozens of children here picking up litter, and some American volunteers from a nearby school have also been helping out’.

Some of the children are more interested in being pushed around in wheelbarrows and stealing plant pots, but others work hard at planting the perimeter hedges. Even the local police lend a hand by standing guard at the park overnight to watch over the remaining trees.

By Friday everyone is exhausted. The temperature has reached 25 degrees at times and it’s hard work digging in the rough ground. The hot weather also poses a danger to the trees, but Paul has arranged for a water tanker to spray the area. Finally the last few oaks go into the earth – less than half an hour before the
team have to leave for the journey home. The mayor of the town puts in an appearance to thank the team and take advantage of the photo opportunity the new park provides. A plaque is planted in memory of Tony Collinson, one of the founders of MAK.

For Paul and the team it’s been a tough week and there’s still more work to do – but he has no regrets. ‘We wanted this to be a park for the whole community, something that they got involved with and something that their children and grandchildren could enjoy. Imagine what this place will look like in 50 or a hundred years time. It makes it all worthwhile’. The transformation is indeed astonishing. What was a piece of derelict and broken ground is now an oasis of green in an otherwise drab town. The new park has even generated jobs for the local economy as the municipality have agreed to pay wages for four gardeners and wardens.

But more important than this physical transformation is the effect it’s had on the town’s youthful population. 19 year old Armend Bajgora has been involved in the park for 6 years. He even formed his own club, the Peace Boys of Podujeva, to help out. He remembers well the first day he saw the men from Manchester arrive in town. “When I saw what the people were doing here I couldn’t believe it. This was something really special for my town. I just want to say thank you to all the people from Manchester for doing this for us, it makes me happy for our future.”