Contras Told to Go Home Peaceably - Central America: An international commission meets with the Nicaraguan rebels in Honduras and tells them they have no more reason to fight.

A joint commission of the United Nations and the Organization of American States has told thousands of Nicaraguan Contras that they have outlived their purpose as a fighting force and should go home peaceably.

The commission delivered the diplomatic message, which was extraordinary for its bluntness, to more than 2,500 rebel troops and commanders assembled Thursday at Contra camps in Yamales, Honduras, near the Nicaraguan border.

“You can only stay as long as the Honduran government lets you,” Francesc Vendrell, a U.N. official representing the secretary general’s office, told the Contras. “You are Nicaraguans and not the objects of a (U.S.) policy that is anachronistic and has been abandoned by the country that helped you.”

Vendrell also told a group of Contra commanders, “You know the situation: the Contras are not going to be reactivated.” Later he said to reporters that the Contras’ presence in Honduras “ceased to have any raison d’etre.”

The Contra troops, many of them heavily armed, stood in formation, listening silently to the speech in a steady drizzle. Afterward, one high-ranking Contra commander described the troops as “stunned.”

Although diplomats and analysts have said for months that the Contras’ days are numbered, the message has been slow in reaching the troops, whose leaders have often vowed to keep fighting as long as the leftist Sandinista regime retains power in Nicaragua.

There are thought to be 8,000 to 10,000 Contras encamped in Honduras, with another 3,000 to 8,000 operating inside Nicaragua. Since August, the Contras are believed to have deployed nearly 2,000 more troops inside Nicaragua, and reports of clashes between Contra and Sandinista forces have risen sharply in recent weeks.

The visit Thursday by the commission, which was established under a Central American peace accord to dismantle the Contra camps in Honduras and disarm the rebels voluntarily, marked the first time that Contra troops, many of whom are young and little educated, have been told in such blunt terms by diplomatic officials that the United States and the Central American presidents are tired of their struggle. Although the commission has no means to force the Contras to lay down their arms and go home, it represents the combined diplomatic force of the Central American countries.

But Contra commanders, in speeches and remarks to the commission, condemned the Sandinista government and indicated little willingness to bargain for a peaceful return to Nicaragua. “The reason why the Nicaraguan people have given up their work and machetes and picked up their guns is to get rid of this Marxist-Leninist system which is failed, obsolete and anachronistic,” said Enrique Bermudez, the Contras’ top military commander.

The five Central American presidents signed an agreement Aug. 7 in Tela, Honduras, calling for the voluntary disarming and repatriation of the Contras. They asked that the U.N.-OAS commission be set up.