Sandinistas Offer Concessions After House Acts

The government, in response to the defeat in the U.S. House of Representatives earlier Wednesday of all proposals for aid to the rebels fighting the Managua regime, announced two conciliatory gestures Wednesday night--the departure date of 100 Cuban military advisers and the arrangement of a pardon for 107 prisoners charged with “counterrevolutionary crimes.”

The government, which said the Cubans will leave May 2, had announced plans for their departure Feb. 27 but without setting a date. The regime says there are 800 Cuban advisers in Nicaragua, but Washington puts the number at about 3,000.

The prisoner release is a new development, but the announcement gave no other details.

The Managua government, other than welcoming the latest move by the House, made no direct comment on its action Wednesday in effectively killing all congressional efforts to provide $14 million in aid of any type for the contras.

But earlier, President Daniel Ortega called a similar aid-killing vote in the House on Tuesday a “favorable gesture that can help advance the search for a peaceful solution in the region.”.

In recent weeks, the Managua government campaigned publicly against passage of Reagan’s request for $14 million for the contras. The Sandinistas were hosts to congressional delegations here, sent their own representatives to Washington and made a series of conciliatory statements, all aimed at influencing the vote.

Confirming the Premise

Nicaraguan authorities maintain that the American public and Congress oppose U.S. official help to the contras, and they see votes in Congress against Reagan’s proposal as confirming that premise.

The government was disappointed by Tuesday’s action in the Senate, which approved Reagan’s plan after the President promised that only humanitarian aid would be given to the contras and that the Administration would reopen bilateral talks with the Nicaraguan government.

“We consider humanitarian aid an indirect way of giving the contras needed help to kill Nicaraguans,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Angela Saballos said.

A government communique Wednesday said: “We like to think that the rejection (Tuesday) by the House of Representatives of the illegal covert war represents an effort on the part of the American people and Congress to open a road that leads to full respect . . . for international law.”

Bases in Two Countries

The United States funneled about $80 million in military aid to the contras in a controversial covert program before funding was cut off by Congress effective last summer. For more than three years, contra groups, operating from bases in Honduras and Costa Rica, have been battling to overthrow the Sandinista regime.

In recent weeks, Ortega has made a series of conciliatory gestures to the United States, conditioned on an end to future U.S. funding for the contras. These were generally a repetition of earlier Sandinista proposals: negotiations on arms limits in Central America and an easing of press censorship in Nicaragua.

Ortega on Wednesday repeated a Sandinista argument that the debate in Congress over aid to the contras is in itself “illegal and immoral” because it involves intervention in the affairs of a sovereign nation.

Touching Same Theme

The government’s communique touched the same theme: “The simple fact that the Congress of a country that declares itself democratic and respectful of law discusses the possibility of continuing to finance military activities . . . against a sovereign country constitutes an attitude that flagrantly violates the most elemental norms of international coexistence.”