Osmo Vatres
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Osmo Vatres (b. May 20, 1957) was born in the village of Ribijoc near Zepa and Rogatica in Yugoslavia (now Bosnia and Herzegovina). His father was Jakup and his mother Hadzira. He began primary education in Vratar, continued with four years of secondary school in Borika, and attends high school in Rogatica. In high school he began his first social activities as secretary of the Municipal Conference Association in Rogatica and became the president of local mountaineering association. He took part in many mountaineering competitions with great success, winning a couple of gold medals for his hometown Rogatica. Than he moved to Sarajevo, where he completed technical high school and began law studies. His social-political work began in Sarajevo, first as a member of the youth conference of the Federal Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, where he initiated many youth voluntary activities in Sipad (1981) and Drvar (1985) and organised many sport and cultural manifestations. As a sportsman he was very successful, especially in mountaineering and orientation, where won three gold medals in republic competitions. He edited an orientation book of reference for the Sjemec mountaineering association in Rogatica. One of his last activities there was the establishing a memorial monument of USAOJ (Union of Anti-Fascist Youth of Yugoslavia) in Bihac as the leader of Youth Union of the SFRJ (Social Federal Republic of Yugoslavia). Just before destabilization of the SFRJ, Vatres organized a peace mission on a national level as the president of the student association of law students of Yugoslavia. He put forth all his effort to prevent the destabilization of the SRFJ, but his mission ended unsuccessfully.
During the ensuing war he moved first to Italy and then to Munich, Germany, where he lives now. He initiated the publishing of the student newspaper Valter in Bosnia and Herzegovina together with his friend Dejan Mastilovic, the president of the Student Association of Bosnia. He worked as an independent journalist and became a member of many world and European media associations.
Recently Vatres and his friends founded the Balkan Club of Peace (Balkan Klub Mir), with its head quarters in Skopje, and began publishing the Balkan Review (Balkanska revija),the official magazine of the club.
Book - Misija Mira - Introduction Osmo Vatres’s manuscript could be called confessional chronicle about one past time offering serious documentary structure and many nostalgic thoughts. Vatres follows intentionally chronological order of events, thematically nearing to lyrical expression and we can freely say that his nostalgia about good life is really honest and that author of this book never stopped believing in friends and amazing power of that magic. In fact was it not possible that everything that happened to end differently. Those are the thoughts of the author. Vartes has tried with group of friends to point out a danger of war. He galloped with his group named ¨Misija mira¨(Peace mission) from Belgrade to Zagreb, than from Zagreb to Ljubljana and Skoplje, Priština, Podgorica, Sarajevo, Novi Sad and Ohrid to meet the political leaders of that time in order to find together with them ¨the peace solution¨ which was obviously not possible. Exceptionally warm and occasionally touchy story, which will bring us back to the time when we were fighting for peace and humanity with diplomacy over war and to agree upon peaceful solution. It is clear now that the strains of the author and mission of peace were deeply sustainable and for that reason this book is needed as a proof of dementia in one period of time, which will forever remain as a never healing scar for all of us and as a lesson for new generations to live in peace and unity with their neighbors and not on the sides of a gun
