BELARUS NEWS AND ANALYSIS

DATE:

18/04/2009

President Lukashenko to visit Rome -Italian FM

ROME, April 18 (Itar-Tass) - Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko will meet Pope Benedict XVI in the Vatican next week, Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini said on Friday in the corridors of an international disarmament conference in Rome.

An audience in the Apostolic Palace has tentatively been scheduled for Sunday, April the 26th.

President Lukashenko will arrive in Rome at the invitation of the Secretary of State of the Holy See Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone who paid a pastoral visit to Minsk last year. It was then when Alexander Lukashenko invited Pope Benedict XVI to visit Belarus.

The Italian foreign minister didn't comment on other details of Lukashenko's visit linked to bilateral relations between Belarus and Italy.

Observers say that last year the European Union excluded Lukashenko from its blacklist of persons banned from entry to the EU. There had been a thaw in relations between Belarus and the European Union. The Belarusian authorities made some concessions to the opposition while the European Union, in turn, lifted visa restrictions on Lukashenko and some other high-ranking Belarusian officials.

Source:

http://www.itar-tass.com/eng/level2.html?NewsID=13849177&PageNum=0

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