Carter Wins Accord for Calm Nicaragua Campaign

Former President Jimmy Carter said Saturday that he had persuaded Nicaraguan authorities to take firmer steps to prevent pre-election violence, including the use of police against hecklers at anti-government rallies.

Ending a four-day visit here, Carter announced that the Supreme Electoral Council will issue a directive to prevent the kind of rioting that disrupted a gathering of the National Opposition Union last Sunday and left one person dead and more than a dozen injured.

“My task here has been to try to make sure this doesn’t happen again,” Carter said after talks with leaders of the Sandinista government and the 14-party opposition union known as UNO. “I think I can assure you that the Sandinistas, the UNO and others are determined not to see a repetition of this violence.”

The former President said the directive will prohibit alcohol and weapons at political rallies and mandate that police be stationed about 50 yards away to intervene in case violence erupts.

Sandinista police failed to intervene for more than two hours in last week’s disorders in the town of Masatepe, 30 miles south of here, as hundreds of UNO supporters clashed with pro-Sandinista hecklers in a street battle involving sticks, stones and machetes. The police inaction drew criticism from the United Nations and the Organization of American States, which, like Carter, are monitoring the election campaign.

Carter said his second visit here this year was prompted by “great concern” that the incident could lead to further unrest and disrupt the scheduled Feb. 25 elections.

Last May, Carter denounced elections in Panama as fraudulent after ballot boxes and vote tally sheets were stolen and altered by supporters of Gen. Manuel A. Noriega, the military strongman. Carter is now leading a group of 16 current and former Western Hemisphere heads of government invited by the Sandinista government to judge the fairness of the electoral process here.

The Bush Administration, which helps finance UNO, and the Washington-based Center for Democracy, a bipartisan group invited to observe the campaign, blamed the Sandinistas for last Sunday’s violence.

But Carter, endorsing a report by OAS observers at the scene in Masatepe, said there was “confusion and violence on both sides” making it “impossible to say exactly that one party was responsible and the other was completely blameless.” The problem, he said, was the lack of a clear policy on handling disorders.

Carter tried to get the ruling Sandinista Front, the UNO and other parties to sign a voluntary agreement to avoid violence and tone down inflammatory campaign rhetoric. The effort failed when the Sandinistas offered a campaign-policing plan that excluded several UNO demands, including the separation of the police from Sandinista party control.

Instead, the government sent its plan to the five-man electoral council, which is expected to issue the directive Monday, coupled with a call for a campaign truce. The council has jurisdiction over the police until after election day, and Carter said the proposed directive was also endorsed by the Interior Ministry, which ultimately controls the police force.

“My expectation is that all political parties will endorse the directive,” Carter said. “And even if they don’t like it, they will have to comply because it carries the weight of law.”

Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, UNO’s presidential candidate, told a campaign rally later Saturday that she welcomed the initiative.

“I will be the first to applaud this call for nonviolence and civility,” she declared. “I urge all those who want me elected president not to be provoked, not to respond with a stone for a stone and to educate the Sandinistas to be citizens who respect the ideas and rights of others.”

However, another UNO leader, Agustin Jarquin, criticized Carter as “naive” for trusting the electoral council. Carter said the council’s actions “have been without blemish. . . . They have done a perfect job and should be given full support from UNO.”

Jarquin said the council has failed to stop the government from ordering state workers, vehicles and buildings to be used in the Sandinista campaign. He said the police were harassing UNO candidates and that Sandinista-run newspapers had ignored electoral council directives to stop slandering the opposition. The UNO, he said, is seeking a broader pre-election agreement than the directive Carter arranged.

“If Carter believes the Supreme Electoral Council is impartial, he is being naive,” Jarquin said. “We lament his position because it tends to disqualify his mission in Nicaragua.”

Carter said the UNO’s lone representative on the council had concurred in all but five of the council’s 110 decisions so far, and those exceptions were minor matters. But he expressed concern over reports of intimidation against UNO activists.

Citing another opposition concern, he called on the Sandinistas to stop their campaign tactic of linking UNO to U.S.-backed Contras. He said that Chamorro and her campaign aides had clearly condemned Contra military attacks and called for disbanding the rebel force. However, he accused Chamorro’s newspaper, La Prensa, along with the pro-Sandinista press, of inflammatory campaign coverage.