„It is very difficult to leave emotions on paper, especially those that are long-lasting, those that are silent deep inside you and they come out bit by bit, and you are not even sure which one you would rather feel. Writing about nostalgia and equating this feeling with YU-Peace is not enough to describe the feeling that every young person carries within them as part of this group.
The strength of this connection is given by the fact that YU-Peace is not just a physical, determined by place and time journey – it is primarily a network of US, small people with big hearts. They are the foundations of YU-Peace, diversity, tolerance, multiculturalism, all the beauty and strength that the peoples of the Balkans carry within themselves, but what stands firmly above the earth are friendships, are people with the most beautiful smiles and the strongest hugs and love that can exists only in that world beyond borders.
I know that it may be too abstract, but for me, peace does not live in a brick that disintegrates over time, a color that fades over time or an institution that will be replaced tomorrow by another, peace lives in people and with people, peace lives every day and every hour and even in this chaos of the year in our friendships, the knots we tied when we were physically together and we never let them go again.
And yes, in the end I am just an ordinary young man from Vukovar, of course I would now love to go without thinking to Tuzla, Sombor, Srebrenica, GVU to return to my friends. I want to show how much I really don’t let them be separated by colors or flags, and especially not by corona or even the end of the world. Our peace lives beyond statistics and restrictions, not even virus can contaminate it. (…) For us today or someone tomorrow Peace is not a hobby, it is a way of life. I think the pandemic is just another test that this network as a living and active story must survive it to say how firmly it holds when even in this moment where the whole world stopped, it still tirelessly continues to be written through each of us and most importantly it continues to be heard loudly despite all the masks that cover our mouths.“

Uroš Antić, Vukovar, Croatia