Officials from the Great North Run and Great Manchester Run races in the United Kingdom will travel to Podujevë in Kosova next week to help two heroic young girls, critically injured in the war in 1999, to stage a race in their home town to honour the hundreds who died there and raise funds for a unique memorial peace park.
Saranda and Jehona Bogujevci, now 21and 18, were discovered barely alive in June 1999 by British Army surgeon Lt Col David Vassallo when Kosova was liberated.
Despite multiple machine gun wounds, the girls and three younger cousins had clung on to life in a pile of bodies after a paramilitary unit forced 21 women and children into a secluded garden close to their home in Podujevë and opened fire. Sixteen died including their grandmother, mothers, siblings and cousins. The youngest victim was just 20 months.
David Vassallo pioneered the use of tele-medicine sending internet images of the children’s injuries to specialists throughout the world. With the assistance of the British Army, the girls were evacuated to Manchester where after years of surgery and physiotherapy they were able to make a remarkably good recovery and marked this by competing in the Great Manchester Run last May. They invited Lt Col Vassallo to run with them and he was delighted to accept.
Now, through the auspices of the ‘Manchester Aid to Kosovo’ charity organisation, the girls have set up the Manchester Peace Park, a nine hectare site in Podujevë, and will be taking part on August 11 in the first ever Great Manchester Peace Park Run, staged in the town to raise funds for the development of the park.