SKOPJE, April 12 (Xinhua) -- Macedonian and Greek Foreign Ministers Nikola Dimitrov and Nikos Kotzias agreed on Thursday during their meeting in Ohrid, Macedonia to continue talks and expressed their optimism to overcome more complex issues in the future.
Greek and Macedonian diplomacy chiefs talked for the first time on the legal framework and the steps to be followed.
"This was a dialogue with great understanding of each other's needs and our challenge is how to unite the concerns of both countries and find a way to overcome them," declared Dimitrov.
Moreover, Dimitrov underlined, that during the talk, bilateral working groups, on the basis of the progress made in Vienna, have harmonized the text for further cooperation in many areas and have worked on the text to remove extremism from both sides and in the preamble paragraphs of the future bilateral agreement.
Meanwhile, Kotzias confirmed that the negotiations will continue on May 4 and 5 in Thessalonik, Greece, he also noted.
According to Kotzias, there is a lot of progress made, especially in the marginalization of irredentism, but there are still few difficult issues to negotiate.
"Today we have made a positive step and we always hope that we will succeed in alleviating even the toughest problems," Kotzias said.
Macedonia is formally called the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) at the UN. However, Macedonia is also the name of a northern province in Greece and the Greek authorities are worried that the use of the same name by the neighboring state could lead to territorial claims.
During the NATO summit in Bucharest in 2008, Greece vetoed FYROM's application to enter the alliance without having resolved the name issue. While Macedonia has renewed its efforts to join the EU and NATO, Greece has signaled that its position remains unchanged.
