Hillarysworld

Clinton will urge reconciliation for Bosnia, Serbia and Kosovo, which battled through the collapse of Yugoslavia in the 1990s and dominated the news when former U.S. President Bill Clinton was in office.

For Hillary Clinton the Balkan puzzle is a familiar challenge -- although it is now she, and not her husband, who speaks for Washington as it attempts to bring the unstable region more closely into Europe's fold.

"She is on a family mission that hasn't been completed yet," said Janusz Bugajski, director of the New European Democracies project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.

"They will not be able to say mission accomplished until all the loose ends are accounted for."

Bosnia, Clinton's first stop, is widely regarded as the least stable part of the Balkans. Just completed presidential and parliamentary elections underscored the deep ethnic divides that still split the country some 15 years after the end of a conflict which killed 100,000 people.

Clinton will meet leaders including Bakir Izetbegovic, the moderate Muslim elected as the newest member of the country's trilateral presidency, to urge cooperation to advance political and economic reforms crucial to Bosnia's EU hopes.

"European Union and NATO membership (are) Bosnia's future, but to realize that future, leaders and parties and different ethnic groups are going to have to work together more than they have in the past," Philip Gordon, the assistant U.S. secretary of state for Europe, told reporters.

Izetbegovic wants fast progress on a constitutional reform that would speed EU membership. Clinton may also meet Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik to drive home the point that Serb secession hopes are ill-advised, U.S. officials said. Dodik has not proved receptive to such a message from U.S. and European officials in the past.

Clinton will then travel to Serbia's capital, Belgrade, where she will meet President Boris Tadic and urge progress on the region's most unsettled ethnic puzzle, Kosovo.