Contra Aid Still Needed, U.S. Says : Rebels Demand Civic Opposition Role in Talks

Nicaraguan rebels said Sunday that they will not accept a Sandinista government offer of face-to-face peace talks unless it allows civic opposition parties to take part as well.

A senior rebel leader, Aristides Sanchez, reaffirmed the rebels’ position a day after President Daniel Ortega, under pressure from other Central American leaders, agreed for the first time to hold direct talks with rebel negotiators on a cease-fire.

Clinging to Sandinista policy, Ortega said Saturday that the talks must deal exclusively with the military logistics of a cease-fire. He said that the Sandinistas will never hold political negotiations with the Contras.

Rebels’ Demand Underscored

By insisting on a role for civic opposition parties, the rebels underscored their demand for major political concessions as a price for ending the six-year-old war.

“We cannot separate the process of reaching a cease-fire from the demands of the civic opposition for the democratization of Nicaragua,” Sanchez said in a telephone interview from Miami. “That is why the civic opposition must be included in the talks.”

A Sandinista official Sunday called the rebel demand unacceptable.

“This is a U.S. strategy to thwart the peace talks,” he said. “No sooner do we agree to direct negotiations than the Reagan Administration ups the ante.”

Hurts Truce Prospects

The deadlock over the scope of talks appears to rule out significant progress toward a truce before a scheduled vote in Congress early next month on new U.S. funding for the Contras. The Reagan Administration is expected to argue that further military pressure is needed to force the Sandinistas to make political concessions.

The dispute has also poisoned the political atmosphere in Nicaragua just as Ortega suspended a wartime state of emergency in an effort to sway the congressional vote. The suspension was announced here Saturday at the end of a Central American summit meeting.

Since Friday, Sandinista security police have arrested five leaders of the Nicaraguan Democratic Coordinate, a legally registered conservative coalition, for having met in Guatemala earlier this month with Contra leaders to join forces for the peace talks.

Defending the arrests, Ortega and other Sandinista officials said the five politicians were being asked under questioning to renounce ties to the insurgency or face conspiracy charges.

Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo of Nicaragua, the mediator in two rounds of indirect peace talks last month, called Sunday for release of the five in the name of “reconciliation and peace.”

Cardinal Seeks Assurances

The Roman Catholic leader said he had spoken to neither the Contras nor the government about the rebels’ newest demand and would resume his role as mediator in the face-to-face talks only if both assure him that they want a settlement.

“Many times the intention in talking is for propaganda, to show that they are talking, without an intention to resolve the problem,” he told reporters after Mass in Managua, the Nicaraguan capital.

Ortega agreed to suspend the state of emergency and talk directly to the Contras as a result of pressure exerted on him at the two-day summit by other Central American presidents to comply with their Aug. 7 peace agreement.

The five-nation accord had given Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua until Jan. 4 to negotiate cease-fires, give amnesty to political opponents, make specific democratic reforms and deny aid and sanctuary to insurgents fighting to topple neighboring governments.

Nicaragua went into the summit refusing to end emergency rule or grant amnesty unless Honduras and El Salvador submitted to on-site inspections by neutral observers who would seek and denounce Contra installations on their soil.

Extension Was Proposed

President Oscar Arias Sanchez of Costa Rica, architect of the peace plan, proposed a 30- to 45-day extension of the deadline for compliance so the inspection teams could be organized.

The Arias proposal would also have specifically urged the Guatemalan and Salvadoran governments to renew failed peace talks with leftist guerrillas before the new deadline.

Guatemala supported the initiative but Honduras and El Salvador, the closest U.S. allies in the region, rejected it, participants in the meeting said.

“The United States put pressure on them because it did not want to give Nicaragua any more time,” a Costa Rican official said. “It did not want to let the Sandinistas off the hook before the vote” on Contra aid.

Salvadoran and Honduran officials denied acting under pressure.

Objections by El Salvador blocked a proposed resolution calling on the United States to cut off aid to the Contras, participants said.

Forced to Move Alone

In the end, Nicaragua was forced to move by itself to comply with the accord or face a higher risk of new Contra aid, while other countries were spared of a specific deadline for complying.

The final summit document contained only a general exhortation to all governments “to comply immediately, in a public and evident way,” with their unfulfilled commitments.

“The accord is becoming less and less of the comprehensive document we signed in August and more of a weapon against Nicaragua,” said a Costa Rican official who was mildly disappointed with the outcome.

The peace plan, for which Arias won last year’s Nobel Peace Prize, was aimed primarily at halting the war in neighboring Nicaragua. Arias said he told Ortega at one point during the summit: “The future of Contra aid is in your hands.”

According to Central American officials, the outcome of the aid vote will depend not only on the Sandinistas’ conduct of cease-fire talks but also on their ability to tolerate a new political climate without emergency laws to ban political rallies or hold prisoners indefinitely without charge.

Many Could Be Freed

Nicaraguan lawyers said that as many as a third of the 8,000 or so political prisoners could be eligible for freedom unless they are charged with crimes in the next eight days. They also noted that Ortega is obliged to abolish the special People’s Tribunals that condemn about 90% of the prisoners accused of subversion.

Opposition leaders in Nicaragua viewed the arrests of their five colleagues as a warning to discourage political activism. The opposition is trying to take advantage of deep economic unrest in Nicaragua to demand constitutional reforms that would end Sandinista party control of the army and other state institutions while barring Ortega from reelection in 1990.

The Sandinistas have also been worried by the prospect of an “internal front” that supports the Contras, similar to the civilian support network that helped their own guerrilla insurgency come to power in 1979.

The arrested political leaders include Alberto Saborio, president of the Nicaraguan Bar Assn., and Mario Rappaccioli, a Conservative who is vice president of the Democratic Coordinate. Also detained were Julio Icaza Tijerino, a Conservative, and two Social Democrats, Agustin Jarquin and Duilio Baltodano.

At the meeting in Guatemala, they and six other opposition leaders, who remain outside the country, agreed to form a joint negotiating position, opposition leaders said. But they denied any formal alliance with the Contras.

Nicaraguan officials said the opposition strategy violates the spirit of the Central American peace accord, which calls for cease-fire talks to end insurgencies and internal political dialogue between governments and unarmed groups.

The shift in opposition strategy came after 14 anti-Sandinista parties, six of them members of the Democratic Coordinate, broke off political talks with the government for its refusal to submit proposed constitutional amendments to the National Assembly.