Contras Try to Regain Initiative, Offer New Peace Plan

Breaking sharply with the terms of a preliminary peace agreement, Contra leaders Thursday offered to lay down their arms by February under a new plan that calls for rewriting Nicaragua’s constitution.

The Sandinista presidential spokesman, Manuel Espinoza, dismissed the proposal as “damaging, provocative and totally senseless” and said it was unacceptable as a basis for negotiations.

Rebel leaders outlined their proposal at the start of three scheduled days of talks aimed at reaching a political settlement of the six-year Nicaraguan war. This is the third round of high-level talks here growing out of the preliminary peace agreement signed March 23 at the southern border outpost of Sapoa.

Since then, the rebel movement, already deprived of U.S. military aid, has been severely weakened by a leadership struggle and by its failure to achieve a follow-up agreement allowing non-lethal U.S. aid to reach its 12,000 troops inside Nicaragua. At least a third of those forces have retreated to base camps in Honduras.

With their new proposal, the rebels tried to regain the political initiative from the Sandinistas, who have outmaneuvered them in previous rounds of talks and now appear content to prolong the negotiations in the belief that the Contra movement is disintegrating.

“We have come to Managua to see if the Sapoa agreement can be saved,” Alfredo Cesar, the chief Contra negotiator, said upon arrival Wednesday night. “Sapoa is dying because the government has not complied.”

Although pledging not to resume offensive military operations, Cesar said the rebels would not extend a formal truce that expires at the end of May unless there is progress toward a final agreement. The government has offered a 30-day truce extension.

Key Points in Plan

The new rebel plan discards many elements of the Sapoa accord, which recognized the legitimacy of the Sandinista constitution. The plan would require the government, within five days, to release all political prisoners, halt the military draft, allow opponents to operate private television stations and let non-lethal aid flow to rebel troops.

The timetable the rebels accepted at Sapoa called for the Sandinistas to free at least 700 prisoners and allow the Contras to take part in a “national dialogue” on political reform as soon as rebel troops moved into designated cease-fire zones.

The military draft and the law keeping television stations in state hands were among topics to be discussed in the dialogue. The remaining 2,600 or more prisoners were to be freed when a final armistice is signed.

But this timetable was stalled last month when the two armies failed to negotiate a separation of military forces that would have moved the rebels into cease-fire zones and triggered the remaining steps of the accord.

In their new proposal, the Contras call for the Sandinistas to hold political talks with both them and internal opposition leaders. The aim of those talks would be to produce, by Aug. 1, a series of political guarantees. In that case, rebel forces would begin on Sept. 1 a five-month process of disarming and returning to civilian life.

Most of the proposed guarantees, such as the freedom of expression and the right to strike, are already contained in the constitution.

But two other points are controversial. One calls for the “separation of the army and the police,” which are led by high-ranking Sandinistas, “from all party affiliation” and their submission “to civilian authority.”

The other would require popular election of a constitutent assembly to rewrite the constitution, a Western-style charter promulgated in January, 1987, by the Sandinista-controlled National Assembly.

“The Contras are acting as if the Sapoa agreement is over and trying to start from zero,” said Deputy Foreign Minister Victor Hugo Tinoco, a Sandinista negotiator. “This is dangerous.”

A Contra spokesman, Bosco Matamoros, responded: “I find it curious that the government characterizes as provocative a proposal to bring to Nicaragua the political conditions that exist in every democratic society.”

Gen. Humberto Ortega, the chief Sandinista negotiator, refused to consider the rebel proposal “as a substitute” for the Sapoa accord but agreed to discuss some of its elements as “input” in a government proposal on ending the war, Tinoco said.

Elections Key to Offer

The offer by the government, outlined to the rebels 10 day ago, centers on the promise of free elections. It would require Contra forces to disarm by Sept. 28--three months later than it proposed last month.

Meantime, rebel leaders could join the national dialogue to negotiate terms for fair municipal elections in 1989 and presidential elections set for 1990. The government has offered to change the current law to allow opposition party representatives to sit on the commission that supervises elections.

“If they want to change the system, that can happen as a result of free and fair elections, if they win,” said Paul S. Reichler, an American legal adviser to the Sandinista delegation. “That is the government’s No. 1 item on the agenda, and it should be theirs too.”