Ortega Expands Peace Offer to Contras : Nicaragua: The Sandinista leader sees ‘a great opportunity’ for accord in talks starting in New York today.

President Daniel Ortega said Wednesday that the Sandinista army will suspend acquisitions of new weapons until next April 25 if the U.S.-backed Contras accept a timetable for closing their bases in Honduras.

Ortega outlined his proposal after dispatching six Sandinista negotiators to New York for talks with Contra leaders at U.N. headquarters starting today. He instructed his team to insist on a settlement in a single round of meetings.

The talks, the first between the two sides since September, 1988, were proposed by Ortega when he ended a 19-month cease-fire Nov 1. The two moves are aimed at bringing military and diplomatic pressure on the rebels to accept their disbanding under an agreement signed Aug. 7 at Tela, Honduras, by the five Central American presidents.

“This is a great opportunity for an agreement,” Ortega told reporters Wednesday. “If no agreement is reached, then the Contras are clearly voting for more war.”

His proposal sets forth a series of steps to comply with the Tela accord, including the disarming of all Contra soldiers in Honduras by Dec. 5 and their repatriation to Nicaragua--with amnesty and resettlement aid--or to other countries as refugees.

The Contras are asked to renounce any U.S. aid after Nov. 30 that is not channeled through a commission set up to supervise the Tela accord. It is led by Javier Perez de Cuellar and Joao Baena Soares, secretaries general of the United Nations and the Organization of American States, respectively, who will mediate the talks in New York.

In addition, the Ortega proposal contains two new elements to address recent Contra demands. It would give Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo, the Roman Catholic Nicaraguan prelate who is an outspoken critic of Ortega, a role in monitoring the agreement. And it would release all prisoners held by the Sandinistas for counterrevolutionary activity as soon as half of the estimated 7,000 rebels now in Honduras are disarmed and all people held against their will in the Contra camps are freed.

Sandinista officials say there are 846 such prisoners in their jails and 1,845 captives in the camps.

But the surprise element was the proposed suspension of arms acquisitions. Sandinista officials said it was aimed mostly at the Bush Administration, which has been seeking to halt the flow of Soviet Bloc weapons to Nicaragua and to scale down the 70,000-strong Sandinista army.

“The Contras aren’t going to do anything unless the United States tells them to,” said Alejandro Bendana, a Nicaraguan Foreign Ministry official. “This is an attractive offer for the United States . . . the last chance for an honest, decent, face-saving way out.”

At Washington’s behest, the Soviet Union has suspended arms shipments to Nicaragua until after the Feb. 25 election. And Ortega has promised the Soviets that weapons obtained from other sources will be publicly catalogued.

Rebel leaders said this week that Nicaragua unloaded a boatload of weapons from Cuba last Friday. Ortega said Wednesday that if this were true, it would be confirmed in due time. He did not deny the report.

The Contras’ five-member negotiating team will be led by Enrique Bermudez, the senior rebel commander, and joined by a four-member civil-military commission. The Sandinista delegation is headed by Victor Hugo Tinoco, a deputy foreign minister.

Rebel leader Aristides Sanchez said in Miami that his side will take a proposal to the U.N. talks and disclose it today. He said the Sandinista offer is “worth careful study” but indicated the rebels want political concessions as well.

Sanchez said the rebels will also insist that their forces inside Nicaragua--about 3,000 soldiers now--be allowed to gather in cease-fire enclaves while awaiting concessions that will induce them to disarm. The Sandinista proposal offers cease-fire corridors so that rebels can retreat peacefully to Honduras and disarm there.

Ortega insisted that the Honduran government, which has played host to the rebels throughout the eight-year war, take part in the negotiations. But Honduras agreed only to attend as an observer.

Since the cease-fire ended, the army has reported few details of its new operations and only seven rebel casualties. It deployed trucks and helicopters, along with heavy artillery, toward war zones north and east of Managua. But there is no evidence of the multi-battalion sweeps that were common at the height of the war.

“We’re still in a situation of expectation,” said a European military specialist. “There’s no cease-fire, but there’s no grand offensive either. What we have is a reinforcement and an intensification of the small-scale, search-and-destroy patrols that never stopped during the cease-fire.”

Sandinista strategists are clearly hoping that the rebels, whose U.S. military aid was cut off early last year, will come to the table eager to sign. But Sanchez said it is the Sandinistas who are more eager to settle because of the negative international reaction to their decision to resume the war.

“We are in no hurry to sign a bad agreement, and that’s what the Sandinistas are offering,” Sanchez said.