Ortega Orders Truce to Get Contras to Disarm : Nicaragua: He urges the United States to halt all aid to the rebels. Honduras is asked to shut their camps.

In a move that could finally end the war with the Contras, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega decreed an immediate halt to offensive operations by the Sandinista army Wednesday, two months before he is to leave office.

The cease-fire came hours after Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, who upset Ortega in Sunday’s presidential election, joined the Sandinista government in urging the U.S.-backed guerrillas to disarm at once and return to civilian life.

“The president has decided to order a unilateral halt to offensive military operations with the aim that the counterrevolutionary forces demobilize immediately,” a message from Ortega’s office said.

He urged the United States to cut all aid to the rebels and asked Honduras to close rebel camps in its territory. U.S. military aid to the Contras ended two years ago, but Congress continued to fund “humanitarian aid” for the rebels. That aid ran out Tuesday.

Sandinista troops have waged an offensive against about 3,000 Contras inside Nicaragua since Ortega ended a 19-month-old cease-fire last Nov. 1. Because the rebels never officially renounced the cease-fire, Ortega’s decision restored a mutual suspension of hostilities.

The quick succession of events indicated that a final settlement of the war, which has claimed about 30,000 lives in eight years, is a priority of both the defeated incumbent and the president-elect and could be one of the first fruits of Chamorro’s stunning electoral victory.

That prospect appeared to gain Wednesday when the Contras expressed a willingness to negotiate with Chamorro on their insistence on keeping their arms until her government takes effective control of the army and security forces from the Sandinistas.

A rebel spokesman in Honduras, Alejandro Acevedo, said the Contras prefer to remain intact as a fighting force to ensure that Ortega hands over power as scheduled on April 25. “But under the right conditions, we would be willing to demobilize sooner,” he added.

“All the repressive structures that caused this war have to disappear,” he said. “Violeta has magnificent intentions, but up against a totalitarian regime it takes more than good intentions. It takes deeds and real guarantees. Thousands of lives are in play.”

Acevedo said that the rebel high command, which met Wednesday in Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital, set up a commission to meet with Chamorro’s 14-party National Opposition Union (UNO) and press their conditions for disarming.

Alfredo Cesar, a former Contra leader who became Chamorro’s chief campaign strategist, confirmed that informal contacts with the rebels are under way.

Chamorro broadcast her appeal to the rebels Tuesday night after Ortega, in a speech to thousands of Sandinista militants, made the rebels’ disarmament a prime condition for a “peaceful transfer” of power to her coalition. She said: “The causes of this civil war have disappeared. There is no reason for more war.”

At her first news conference as president-elect on Wednesday, Chamorro called the cease-fire “a step forward in the reconstruction of the country.”

Rebel spokesman Acevedo also welcomed Ortega’s decision to resume the cease-fire but said the rebels will urge international observers to monitor it. The day after the election, rebel commanders ordered their forces inside Nicaragua to avoid combat, he said.

The Contra war, which has battered the economy and divided Nicaraguans, began three years after the Sandinista guerrillas overthrew the Somoza dictatorship in 1979. The Contras have lost strength since Congress cut their military aid, but about 10,000 are still in arms, most of them in Honduras, held together in part by food and other non-military supplies from the United States.

Under a Central American peace accord signed last August in Tela, Honduras, the rebels were to turn their arms over to a task force of observers from the United Nations and Organization of American States so that Nicaragua’s elections could proceed peacefully. It also committed both sides to a cease-fire.

But after the rebels refused to lay down their arms, Ortega ordered his army last Nov. 1 to resume the offensive, ending a cease-fire that had held since March, 1988.

At her news conference, Chamorro said that when Ortega visited her home Monday to concede defeat, she chided him over his decision last year to resume the war.

“Look, Daniel, if you had complied with your commitments at Tela, you would have won (the election),” she recalled telling him. “You didn’t end the war, so now we have to do it ourselves.”

But Chamorro’s aides admit that it will not be easy for her, either. While she identified with the Contra cause, and one of her sons served briefly as a Contra civilian leader, rebel military leaders view her with suspicion, fearing that she might prove too weak and allow the Sandinistas to keep too much power, especially in the army.

A final settlement of the Contra war has become entwined with negotiations between UNO and the Sandinistas over the army’s future. The Sandinistas have said they will resist any changes in the army unless the war ends, but the Contras want to see changes before they disarm.

Cesar, the UNO strategist, said one solution might be for the Contras in Honduras to surrender their arms now to a U.N. peace-keeping force being set up there but remain in their border camps until they are satisfied with conditions in Nicaragua.

On the other hand, Honduran President Rafael Leonardo Callejas, called Tuesday for the Contras to disband and leave his country quickly.

Talks between an UNO transition team and a Sandinista delegation led by Gen. Humberto Ortega, the president’s brother, are to start this week.

Chamorro made it clear Wednesday that she will remove Gen. Ortega as defense minister and replace him with a civilian. She has also pledged to abolish compulsory military service as one of her first official acts, depoliticize the 70,000-member army and reduce it “according to the economic capacity and social needs of the country.”

While the Sandinistas have characterized the transition talks as negotiations, Chamorro insisted that those plans are not negotiable.

“According to the constitution of the republic, it is I who will rule from now on,” she declared.

Apparently to avoid conflict with the Sandinistas, however, her advisers have decided recently that the army will not be reduced below the levels of other Central American armies and that former Contras will not be incorporated unless they disarm, accept amnesty and join up like any other volunteer.

In addition, Chamorro has vowed to declare a general amnesty that would make Sandinista soldiers and police officers immune from prosecution for any crimes committed during the revolution.

Cesar said Chamorro’s government will control the army through civilian management of a reduced military budget. But other opposition goals, such as removing Sandinista military instruction and diversifying foreign military aid, would have to be negotiated with a Sandinista officer corps that would remain mostly intact, he said.

Virtually all officers above the rank of captain are Sandinistas who fought as guerrillas against the Somoza dictatorship in the 1960s and 1970s. Sandinista nationalist ideology is part of basic training. The army is not only the Sandinistas’ power base but a testing ground for new militants.

In an interview late last year, Col. Oswaldo Lacayo, a member of Gen. Ortega’s staff, conceded that while the army is dominated by Sandinistas, it could evolve into a truly national army “with the participation of all patriotic sectors.” But he warned that if the opposition came to power and adopted an “anti-popular program,” such as reversing the Sandinista land-reform program, the army would resist.

Boudreaux reported from Managua and Wilkinson from Tegucigalpa.