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Albright to Meet Yugoslav President Kostunica in Vienna
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright will meet with Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica late this month as Belgrade decided to renew diplomatic relations with the United States, US officials said on November 16.
The venue for the meeting is expected to be in Vienna, where Austria as the current chair of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) is going to host a meeting of member states' foreign ministers on November 27 and 28.
Kostunica agreed to attend the ministerial meeting when Yugoslavia was readmitted to the OSCE earlier this month and Albright would take advantage of his presence there to see him in person.
"The plan is to hold a bilateral session with Kostunica in Vienna," said one senior State Department official.
President Bill Clinton's envoy for Balkans James O'Brien arrived early this week in Belgrade for talks on resumption of diplomatic relations between the two countries, broken off when the US-led NATO force bombed Kosovo early in 1999 in an attempt to drive the Yugoslav military forces out of the Serbian province.
State Department spokesman Philip Reeker said on November 16 that a formal announcement on restoring diplomatic ties was expected in "the next few days."
"We are pleased to be normalizing relationships with the Kostunica government ...and we hope to restore the strong ties that have historically characterized the relations between our two countries and people," he said.
Reeker said the State Department was also considering changes to its Yugoslav visa blacklist that could allow a significant number of officials once barred from entering the United States.
"We are currently reviewing our guidance on restrictions on travel by former Milosevic regime officials, given obviously the new circumstances in Yugoslavia," he said.
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