Clinton Cheers Plans for Cyprus Talks

Buoyed by the announcement that long-divided and occasionally warring Greek and Turkish Cypriots had agreed to resume talks intended to bring about their reconciliation, President Clinton began a daunting 10-day mission Sunday to promote democracy and political stability in Europe’s troubled southeastern corner.

In a carefully orchestrated announcement, relayed by the United Nations and by the White House staff already in Ankara while Clinton flew here, leaders of the Greek and Turkish Cypriots said they would resume preliminary talks suspended two years ago.

The talks are intended to produce “meaningful negotiations” toward resolving the decades-old division of Cyprus. Progress on Cyprus is one of the president’s remaining, and major, foreign policy goals during his final year in office.

“I hope these Cyprus talks will bring us one step closer to a lasting peace,” the president told reporters aboard Air Force One. “A negotiated settlement is the best way to meet the fundamental interests of the parties, including real security for all Cypriots and an end to the island’s division.”

“A very hard road lies ahead. The Cyprus problem has been with us for a long time--far too long,” he added. “But today, we have new hope.”

Clinton arrived here in the Turkish capital just before midnight on a trip to the edges of the Continent’s most politically and economically ragged neighborhoods.

With a last-minute stop scheduled in Kosovo at the trip’s end Nov. 23, Clinton will have touched down during the past six months at nearly half a dozen countries or provinces that were once part of Yugoslavia, taunting Slobodan Milosevic from the corners of the former Yugoslav federation.

The Greek Cypriot leader, Glafcos Clerides, and the Turkish Cypriot leader, Rauf R. Denktash, last met two years ago. Clerides is the president of Cyprus. Denktash is the president of the self-declared Turkish Cypriot state, where Turkey has deployed about 30,000 soldiers and which is recognized only by Ankara.

Since 1974, the Mediterranean island south of Turkey has been divided into the government-controlled southern two-thirds and the Turkish Cypriot northern third. In the past, Denktash has insisted on international recognition of the Turkish Cypriot territory as the price for resuming talks.

The White House and the United Nations announced that the two sides will confer in New York on Dec. 3. Under the protocol established for the talks, they will be in separate rooms, with a diplomat, Alfred H. Moses, the U.S. presidential special envoy to Cyprus, shuttling between them.

The decision to resume the talks “is an important and encouraging step,” Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger, Clinton’s national security advisor, said aboard Air Force One.

But the tenuous nature of the potentially budding relationship was evident hours later when unconfirmed reports circulated that Denktash was already backing away from the agreement.

Earlier efforts at even preliminary negotiation have quickly failed, and Clinton said he wanted the new round “to last long enough to get to direct negotiations and a substantive result.”

The U.S. goal is the creation of an internationally recognized state made up of the two communities--Greek and Turkish--with a high degree of autonomy, said David C. Leavy, a spokesman for the National Security Council.

The Clinton administration sees three factors contributing to the apparent willingness of the two leaders to resume their talks: a thaw in Greek-Turkish relations, stemming at least partially from what is being called “seismic diplomacy” as each country has helped the other after recent earthquakes; the approach of Turkey and Cyprus to the cusp of membership in the European Union; and economic stagnation in the Turkish Cypriot community.

The Turkish Cypriots, a senior administration official said, “have a standard of living that is significantly less than that of people on the southern part of Cyprus. Bringing them back into the world through a settlement would make for a major improvement in their lives.”

Clinton’s trip is scheduled to take him Tuesday to Izmit, Turkey, where an earthquake in August killed 17,000 people--another temblor, in nearby Duzce, killed more than 300 people last week--and then to Istanbul, Turkey; Athens; Florence, Italy; Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria; Skopje, the Macedonian capital; and, finally, Kosovo, a province of the dominant Yugoslav republic, Serbia.

The journey is heavy on summitry: The president will meet the leaders of 53 countries, members of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, on Thursday and Friday in Istanbul--among them, possibly, President Boris N. Yeltsin of Russia.