Sports brings people together. People in all of our countries are tired of ideological differences, of going back into the past all the time. - Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović

What I want to do is work together with all my female and male colleagues and work with the media in terms of our substance and not our form. Let us not divide ourselves into men and women.

I remember how much I yearned for democracy, when I was a girl growing up in the communist Yugoslavia. How much I wanted to escape the oppression, lack of freedom and lack of individual choice. This is what motivated me to become an exchange student in the US. Upon return, it was even more difficult to tolerate the failed economic policies, the lack of values, of respect, of democratic institutions and inequality before the state and the law. Thus, I joined the moment for an independent Croatia that wanted to become part of the democratic family of nations.

I called upon everyone in the spirit of what I've said to refrain from using the term "the Western Balkans." I do know that it won't disappear from the jargon so easily, that it is a technical term that is used by very many institutions and in documents, but I believe that we should clearly start to call this part of Europe, experience it as it -- what it really is, and this is Southeast Europe.