Congressman Confers With Lithuanian Leaders : Foreign affairs: Rep. Cox missed the nation’s election but later talked with its leaders about a new constitution.

As the aged bus rumbled along the road from Vilnius to Kaunas in Lithuania, Rep. C. Christopher Cox huddled at a makeshift table with the three men who are likely to draft a new constitution for an independent Lithuania.

The Newport Beach Republican handed out copies of the U.S. Constitution, the Declaration of Independence and the Federalist Papers. Then the men talked over the first perilous steps that Sajudis, the Lithuanian independence movement that triumphed in Saturday’s elections, might take toward declaring Lithuania’s independence from the Soviet Union.

In an interview Wednesday, Cox said the hours he spent on the bus were the most moving of an often frustrating mission to observe the historic Lithuanian elections.

The men on the bus--Kazimieras Motieka, Vasiliansko Stankevicius and Algirdas Saugardas --”are the founding fathers . . . of modern Lithuania,” Cox said. “These three guys literally are going to write the Lithuanian constitution.”

Cox, who has focused much attention lately on the emerging democracies of Eastern Europe, was one of four members of an official congressional delegation that returned to the United States on Tuesday after touching down in Lithuania for less than a day on its weeklong journey.

The group originally had planned to arrive in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, in time to observe Saturday’s elections, in which candidates backed by Sajudis won 72 of the 90 parliamentary contests that were decided. Runoffs are scheduled for the rest of the 141 legislative seats.

However, Soviet officials waited until Sunday to grant visas to the congressmen, who were stalled for five days in West Berlin. The group finally arrived in Vilnius late Monday.

“I’m not sure if our visas had been granted whether the world would have taken any note of our journey,” Rep. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), who chaired the delegation, said at a Wednesday press conference. “But the denial of those visas turned this into a celebrated cause.”

Added Cox: “We accomplished something that we did not set out to accomplish, and that is to draw a lot of the world’s attention to . . . Soviet heavy-handedness in Lithuania. . . . And that didn’t hurt Sajudis at all.”

As Lithuania moves toward what appears to be an inevitable declaration of independence from the Soviet Union, the lawmakers said, the United States must be ready to help, not only with money, but with intellectual and political support.

To that end, the legislators announced that they will begin enlisting members of the House and Senate in a congressional “Baltic Freedom Caucus” to help guide policy toward the three Baltic republics--Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia--that were annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940.

The United States has never formally recognized the takeover, which resulted from a pact between Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin at the outset of World War II.

“In the next few weeks and months, the United States will be called on to make some threshold decisions about the future of this area of the world,” Durbin said. “This new caucus will be an opportunity for us to share information and prepare our colleagues . . . (for) those critical decisions. . . .”

Despite concerns that U.S. support for an independent Lithuania might cause more trouble for Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, Cox said the longtime American commitment to a free Lithuania must remain steadfast.

“Our foreign policy has got to be based . . . on human rights, not on expediency,” he said. “In the past our support for the Batistas, the Shahs and the Somozas of the world has always come back to haunt us. . . .

“We have an opportunity now under our existing policy to make good on a pledge to the Lithuanian people (to support a free Lithuania) that dates to Woodrow Wilson and 1918,” when Lithuania first became an independent state.

In addition to meeting with leaders of Sajudis, Cox said he ran into half a dozen of his constituents during his 20 hours in the country. Most, like Huntington Beach college student Aidas Palubinskas and Mission Viejo businessman Richard Kontrimas, are Americans of Lithuanian descent “who heard the call of the revolution, went over there and are helping because this is such a key moment in the history of that nation.”