U.S. to Stand by Contras, Bush Vows : Humanitarian Aid Pledged Beyond March 31 Cutoff

President Bush, in his first public comment on a Central American peace initiative that he admitted took him by surprise, promised Thursday that the United States would not abandon Nicaragua’s Contras or “leave them twisting out there” in the face of a plan to disarm them and close their bases.

Talking to a small group of reporters in the Oval Office, Bush pledged to continue some form of “humanitarian” assistance to the Contras after the current $27-million aid package expires March 31.

The President said that there are both “positive” and “troubling” elements in the plan adopted Monday by five Central American presidents, which calls for disbanding the Contra military forces in exchange for promises of free elections and democratic reforms by Nicaragua’s leftist government.

‘National Reconciliation’

He said that if Managua’s Sandinista government keeps its end of the bargain in the new peace plan, it would produce the sort of democratic government that the Contras have been fighting for.

“They’re talking about national reconciliation and full freedoms, including complete freedom of the press and free and fair elections and an end to subversion,” Bush said.

But he said that the United States will be wary about taking the Nicaraguan government at its word because President Daniel Ortega’s regime has broken its promises before.

“Let’s be sure that we not leave the resistance standing alone, leave them twisting out there without fulfillment of the commitment to democracy on the part of the Sandinistas,” he said.

Kremlin Call Rejected

In the mini-press conference with the reporters, Bush also rejected the Soviet Union’s renewed call for an embargo on arms shipments to Afghanistan and urged Moscow to support a neutral, nonaligned regime in Kabul. He said that Washington would continue supplying weapons to the anti-communist moujahedeen guerrillas because the Soviet Union turned over to the Marxist government vast stockpiles of armaments before the last Soviet troops left the country this week.

Bush attempted to gloss over a festering dispute between the United States and West Germany over North Atlantic Treaty Organization plans to modernize battlefield nuclear weapons, maintaining that “we are far closer to West Germany than the public perceptions might be.”

The Bonn government opposes upgrading NATO’s short-range nuclear arsenal because most of the weapons are deployed in West Germany. Because of the weapons’ limited range and the country’s geographic position at the front-line of any East-West conflict, fired missiles would, in the event of war, probably land inside West Germany’s borders.

“I would use this opportunity to shoot down the concept that there are major divisions between ourselves and the Federal Republic (of Germany) on this question,” Bush said without providing any sort of hint about how the dispute would be resolved.

The Contras have been camped in bases on the Honduras side of the Nicaragua-Honduras border for months, surviving on non-lethal aid voted by Congress last year to pay for food, clothing and other supplies. Bush said that he is determined to provide some form of aid after the current appropriation runs out next month. But he said he had not yet decided how to do it.

“I have every intention of seeing that these people receive humanitarian support, but how that comes about, we’ll just have to wait and see,” the President said. A text of the press conference, which was attended by several reporters, was made available later.

The Administration said previously that it will not seek renewed military aid for the Contras.

The agreement signed by the presidents of Costa Rica, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua calls for drafting, within the next 90 days, a detailed plan to disarm the Contras and remove them from the bases in Honduras. The pact also calls for free and fair elections in Nicaragua before the end of next February, nine months earlier than elections were previously scheduled.

Bush said that the United States would work during the next 90 days with the Central American leaders “to see that there’s not just some fluffy promises out there, but that there’s some teeth in the promise of democratization.

“We’re talking about freedom of the press, freedom of elections, freedom of worship,” he said. “And it’s fine to spell these things out in generalities, but now let’s get down to how we proceed. What does a free and fair election mean? I want to see some certification of the election process.”

Bush candidly admitted that he had not expected the Central American presidents to act as they did, despite several recent high-level contacts.

“I wouldn’t have said that they’d do exactly what they did do,” he said. “In terms of being caught off-guard, we are in the midst of a review of our whole policy there.”