Lawmaker’s Mission May Heighten Profile of Cyprus

Seeking relief from NATO’s bombs, Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic has turned to a lawmaker from a tiny island nation with its own recent history of ethnic bloodshed.

Spyros Kyprianou, the parliament speaker of Cyprus who arrived in Belgrade on Thursday to try to free three captured U.S. servicemen, represents a country with close ties to the United States and solid credentials for joining the European Union.

But in the fight over Kosovo, few people in Europe are cheering harder for Milosevic than the Cypriots. And few leaders are more articulate than Kyprianou in condemning the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s air assault on Yugoslav and Serbian forces.

With that unusual profile, Kyprianou is being backed by the United States and its allies in his delicate mission to free the servicemen, who were seized March 31 by Yugoslav troops.

Success would mean instant star status for Kyprianou’s little country. It also might lead to wider diplomatic moves to end the fighting in Kosovo and later, perhaps, refocus Western attention on Cyprus’ own unsettled conflict between ethnic Greeks and Turks.

Failure, on the other hand, would make Kyprianou the latest on a long list of statesmen drawn into meetings with the wily Yugoslav leader only to be duped, frustrated or used to keep his enemies off balance.

The initiative is a surprise twist in the 2-week-old bombing campaign and a dramatic moment for Cyprus. As Kyprianou headed for Belgrade, the Pentagon was sending a medical evacuation plane to Larnaca, the island’s main airport, to meet the lawmaker’s return flight; it is supposed to whisk the soldiers, who looked bruised and battered on Serbian television last week, to a NATO air base in Ramstein, Germany.

“I want to be cautious,” Cypriot Foreign Minister Yiannakis Kasoulides said Thursday night. “I’m not going to express anything about whether I think [the mission] will succeed until I hear that the Americans are on the plane coming out of Belgrade.”

The three soldiers--Staff Sgt. Andrew Ramirez, 24, of East Los Angeles; Staff Sgt. Christopher J. Stone, 25, of Smith’s Creek, Mich., and Spc. Steven Gonzales, 21, of Huntsville, Texas--were captured while patrolling to protect neighboring Macedonia from the trouble in Kosovo.

Cyprus’ government is supporting the mission to free the soldiers but says that Kyprianou, an opposition leader, arranged it on his own.

The 66-year-old British-trained lawmaker, who was Cyprus’ president from 1978 to 1988, leads a centrist party and craves the limelight. His vocal condemnation of NATO airstrikes is in tune with public opinion here but has irritated Cyprus’ conservative government, which favors a low-key, even-handed approach.

Ties between Cyprus’ ethnic Greek majority and Yugoslavia’s Serbs go way back. They share the Christian Orthodox faith and a history of struggle against outside oppressors, starting with the Muslim Ottoman empire. They were allies in both world wars. Since the Balkan wars of the early 1990s, Milosevic has reportedly evaded U.N. economic sanctions by parking billions of dollars of Yugoslav state funds in offshore Cypriot accounts.

Milosevic has won support from the Cypriot and Greek governments for a cessation to the bombing by playing the “Orthodox card”--declaring a truce in Kosovo for this weekend’s Orthodox Easter holiday.

Hinting for the first time that he might free the U.S. soldiers, Milosevic asked three visiting Orthodox bishops from Greece last week to urge their government, a NATO member, to act as an intermediary. The Greek Foreign Ministry said it was interested.

But that avenue closed abruptly after Greek Defense Minister Akis Tsohatzopoulos stunned Belgrade by condemning what he called its “ethnic cleansing” campaign against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. “The initiative lasted a few hours,” a Greek official said. “Then they took their suggestion back.”

That left Cyprus, not a NATO member, as Milosevic’s best potential go-between in the West. At a midnight meeting Tuesday, his ambassador in Cyprus persuaded Kyprianou to travel to Belgrade.

The understanding, Kyprianou told Cypriot officials before leaving the next day, was that Milosevic would free the soldiers without conditions. But as soon as Kyprianou flew from Cyprus to Athens en route to Belgrade, “the Yugoslavs changed their tune,” asking for a 24-hour cease-fire and other conditions, a Cypriot official said. The flight from Athens to Belgrade was delayed a day.

Things got even cloudier Thursday. Kyprianou finally reached Belgrade, only to hear Serbia’s deputy prime minister, Vojislav Seselj, declare that freeing the soldiers during “an undeclared war” with America “is out of the question.” Kyprianou was to meet Milosevic today.

Even so, Kasoulides, the Cypriot foreign minister, said Kyprianou phoned him from Belgrade late Thursday and was still hopeful.

So were ordinary Cypriots, who followed the lawmaker’s journey on radio and television. Some voiced anger that the West is throwing its might into stopping Milosevic after having allowed Turkey to seize the northern third of Cyprus in a 1974 military invasion, expel thousands of ethnic Greeks and create a Turkish enclave.

Greek Cypriots said they hoped that any Cypriot role in freeing the soldiers would oblige President Clinton and his allies to press harder for a reunification of the island under ethnic Greek majority rule and a withdrawal of Turkey’s 35,000 troops.

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Trounson reported from Paphos, Boudreaux from Rome.