Goodbye Elliot Engel, here's his successor on the Foreign Affairs Committee.

Already, Gregory Weldon Meeks, will follow him into this Committee within three weeks.

Even Gregory Meeks is a connoisseur of the situation in the Balkan region, because he is an old member of the Subcommittee for Europe, Eurasia, Energy and Environment.

He is also co-chairman of the parliamentary group for the European Union and has been in Congress since 1998.

Like Engel, Meeks is a supporter of the Kosovo issue.

At the end of June 1999, Meeks was one of the co-ponsor of a resolution in Congress, congratulating and thanking US and NATO troops for the successfully bringing peace to Kosovo and stopping the brutal ethnic cleansing of Kosovo Albanians in just 11 weeks”.

In an official statement in May 2011, Meeks, as a member of the European and Eurasian Subcommittee, had congratulated the Serbian government on the arrest of war criminal indicted by The Hague tribunal, Ratko Mladic.

The arrest of Mladic represents a major step towards closing the tragic period in Western Balkan history. My thoughts are with victims of senseless violence and killings committed by Mladic and his groups throughout the region. I hope that survivors and relatives have comfort in the justice that will be put before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia at The Hague”, Meeks wrote, adding that Mladic's arrest will bring Serbia closer to EU membership and expect co-operation with Serbia and the Balkans.