Sandinistas Disclose Plan to Resettle Rebels : Nicaragua: The leftist regime renews military attacks on the Contras but also offers them an olive branch.

Moving to weaken the Contras on two fronts, the Sandinista government Thursday launched scattered military offensives across Nicaragua and disclosed a plan to woo rebel soldiers back to civilian life with farmland, housing and personal security guarantees.

Accounts of the first clashes after the collapse of a 19-month-old cease-fire were sketchy but came from nine of Nicaragua’s 17 provinces. The reports indicated that the Sandinista army was massing troops in larger-than-usual numbers and attacking in some places with artillery and helicopter gunships.

Just as the war revved up, rebel leaders formally accepted a round of peace talks proposed Wednesday by President Daniel Ortega, and U.N. officials agreed to organize them in New York next week.

The talks, tentatively set next Monday and Tuesday, will be the first between the warring parties since June, 1988. They will be mediated by Javier Perez de Cuellar and Joao Baena Soares, the secretaries general, respectively, of the United Nations and the Organization of American States, a U.N. official said.

Sandinista officials said they will seek to focus the talks on a three-month-old Central American peace accord to disarm the rebels and a new Sandinista proposal for resettling them in Nicaragua. Rebel leaders said they will demand a halt to the fighting and freedom for all anti-Sandinista prisoners.

Ortega called off the cease-fire Wednesday, citing stepped-up infiltration from rebel camps in Honduras and growing attacks on government targets. On Thursday, he said he might reimpose the cease-fire if the talks make progress toward disbanding the U.S.-backed rebel army.

“But we will not discuss the cease-fire as a central point,” he added. “To re-establish the cease-fire without demobilizing the Contras would be to accept a continuation of the war.”

The five Central American presidents called Aug. 7 for dismantling the Contra camps in Honduras by Dec. 5 under U.N. and OAS supervision in return for Ortega’s guarantees of free elections in Nicaragua. But the Bush Administration and the rebel leadership have resisted the accord. They insist on keeping the army of at least 9,000 Contras intact until after the Feb. 25 vote.

Even so, the Sandinistas have drafted a detailed resettlement plan and sent it to Contra leaders in Honduras for discussion next week.

Under the plan, outlined Thursday by a Sandinista official, former Contras willing to return home would be lodged with their families in Nicaraguan shelters and fed three meals a day for three months while deciding where to settle.

Each former rebel would then be given a plot of land wherever he chose to live, transported there and provided materials to build a home and set up housekeeping. Everyone in the family would get one change of clothing and, under a three-year program, be eligible for free schooling and job training.

Addressing the Contras’ often-expressed fear for their personal safety in civilian life, the Sandinistas are offering each disarmed rebel a written amnesty document assuring that the rebel will not be “tried, punished or persecuted” for past military activity. The rebel would be free to obtain a passport, move freely within Nicaragua and join any political party.

The plan would be monitored by an international commission led by the secretaries general of the United Nations and Organization of American States, along with human rights groups who are often critical of the Sandinista government, such as Amnesty International and Americas Watch.

Sandinista officials said they have budgeted $8 million for resettling 9,000 Contra families and have received foreign donations of $23 million of the estimated $37 million needed for education and job training.

Intent on discussing the plan, the government has included the official in charge of it, Social Security Minister Reynaldo Antonio Tefel, in the six-member negotiating team that will go to New York. The team will be headed by Deputy Foreign Minister Victor Hugo Tinoco.

Oscar Sovalbarro, a member of the rebel army’s general staff, said Thursday in Honduras that the Contras agreed to attend the talks after they were assured of an open agenda and the presence of Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo, the Roman Catholic primate of Nicaragua. He did not name the rebel delegation.

The rebels demanded last month that Obando, a constant critic of the decade-old Sandinista government, be included on any commission set up to monitor a peace accord. They also insist on immediate freedom for all prisoners held by the Sandinistas for counterrevolutionary activity.

An official on the Sandinista negotiating team said this week that 846 such prisoners are being held and will be released as the Contra army disbands.

“We don’t really expect the Contras to disband by the December deadline,” he said. “All we are interested in is getting the process started by then. That will enable us to re-establish the cease-fire.”

Diplomats in Nicaragua said they expect the renewed fighting to harden the Contras’ position at the talks.

A rebel communique said Sandinista troops backed by helicopters and artillery attacked rebel positions near two villages in the Atlantic coastal region of Zelaya on Wednesday, hours after Ortega declared the cease-fire over. A Honduran radio station reported seven rebels killed by artillery fire.

The Nicaraguan Defense Ministry would not comment on those reports. But it confirmed a coordinated Sandinista ground attack on mountainous terrain held by about 30 rebels in the northern province of Nueva Segovia.

“The order we gave was to go on the offensive against the enemy who is murdering our people,” Maj. Daniel Pozo, the army chief of staff in Nueva Segovia, told the Sandinista newspaper Barricada. “We are going to hunt them, combat them and annihilate them.”

Rebel forces ambushed a civilian truck Wednesday night near Rio Blanco, a town in central Nicaragua, killing a Catholic lay worker, according to Douglas Schirch, director of Witness for Peace, a Washington-based group that monitors attacks by the Contras.

Clashes were reported Thursday along other parts of Nicaragua’s central mountainous spine and eastern coastal region, but casualty reports and other details were nearly non-existent.

It was not clear how much the fighting had escalated over its normal level during the cease-fire, when reduced Sandinista and Contra patrols skirmished an average of three times a day. That is at least one-fifth the intensity of the war at its peak in 1987.

However, unusually large convoys of Sandinista troops have been seen moving out of Managua and other towns since Oct. 28, apparently in preparation for a stepped-up offensive by the 70,000-member army.

“What the lifting of the cease-fire does is give us the possibility of organizing offensives in a more organized manner and with greater firepower,” said Lt. Col. Rosa Pasos, the army spokeswoman.

“The feelings in the Sandinista army are high,” said a foreigner with army contacts. “No army likes a cease-fire. They want to go after the Contras with both feet.”

But military specialists said they doubt that larger groupings of Sandinista soldiers will be any more effective in driving the Contras out of Nicaragua than the company-sized patrols that were the norm during the cease-fire.

As long as the rebels in Nicaragua remain in small groups and follow their orders to try to avoid combat, the specialists said, the Sandinista tactics may risk greater government losses with little gain.