A year has passed since Goran, a man with a big heart, left us. He was a peace activist and a true fighter for human rights.
With his constant struggle for our better tomorrow, he managed to dissolve the resistance and animosity that people showed in their first encounters towards our joint future. He never understood building peace as a job or a task but as a mission of his life. When someone has a mission, there are no working hours and such a person tries to be available to everyone who needs him. Goran lived like that, as a true missionary of peace.
His closest friends say that Goran did not build peace according to the rules of peace manuals or textbooks, although he knew a lot about theoretical approaches to peace and taught a large number of activists. Goran believed that people are not driven by nicely worded conventions and declarations, but by an open heart and mind. He believed that people were willing to hear, appreciate, and accept the other and the different, whether they agreed with him or not.
Goran lived peace and radiated peace. Every conversation, every performance, every gesture was a note in the composition of peace that he tirelessly performed among the ethnically divided audience. He was aware that every step he took was one pebble in the mosaic of peace that he painstakingly built together with other peacemakers.
Because of his work and commitment to the path of peace, his name has become synonymous with the Peace Network and peacebuilding in BiH. USAID proudly supported Goran’s work and on the anniversary of his death, we pay tribute to Goran, a true hero of peace.
