Contras to Start Giving Up Arms and Disbanding

Heeding a face-to-face appeal by Nicaragua’s Roman Catholic prelate, Contra leaders agreed Friday to end their war against the Sandinista government and start disbanding their 12,000-member U.S.-backed guerrilla army.

The vaguely worded agreement, signed in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, obliges all rebels based in that country to hand their weapons to an international peacekeeping force by April 20, five days before Sandinista President Daniel Ortega turns over power here to a newly elected pro-American government.

But it set no deadline for armed rebels inside Nicaragua, who make up at least one-fourth of the Contra force. Under the accord, they would concentrate in cease-fire zones under international supervision, turn in their weapons and return to civilian life.

A top Contra commander, Oscar Sovalbarro, signed the accord with Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo and two representatives of Nicaraguan President-elect Violeta Barrios de Chamorro after six hours of talks at a Honduran air base.

Their communique, read aloud by Obando y Bravo, said Chamorro’s victory in the Feb. 25 elections “allowed a triumph of the people’s will to establish a democracy” after eight years of rebel efforts to oust the Sandinistas by force.

“This permits us to declare emphatically that we have decided to begin the process of general demobilization of our forces, starting with the disarming of those who remain in Honduras,” the agreement said.

Ortega embraced the cardinal upon his return to Managua and said he would instruct the Sandinista army to respect the agreement. He joined with the Contras, the political opposition and the Honduran government in describing it as historic.

“If the letter of this accord is applied, there will not be a single armed Contra in Nicaragua by April 25,” he said, insisting on an interpretation not explicit in the communique. “In conditions of peace, we can then confront the grave economic and social problems that affect all Nicaraguans.”

But the Sandinista leader expressed concern over the absence of the top rebel commander, Israel Galeano, from the talks. He also said that hundreds of rebels had infiltrated from Honduras into Nicaragua in recent weeks, apparently intent on eluding any agreement to close their camps in Honduras.

“I am sure there are some who want to stir up the troops to continue the war,” Ortega said. “But this agreement has to be respected because it interprets a national consensus that the war must end.”

Since his electoral defeat, Ortega has pressed insistently for rebel disarmament as a condition for a peaceful hand-over of his power by his revolutionary government. After his victorious rival joined last month in urging the Contras to come home in peace, Ortega restored a cease-fire, and leaders of Chamorro’s National Opposition Union began talks with Contra commanders.

The United States, which financed and trained the Contras, and the Honduran government, their increasingly reluctant host, stepped up the pressure for disarmament. Vice President Dan Quayle met with rebel leaders last week and Honduran President Rafael L. Callejas arranged Friday’s talks, sending an air force jet to carry the negotiators from Nicaragua.

It was the presence of the cardinal, the Nicaraguan most trusted by many Contra fighters, that apparently swayed rebel leaders. Entering the talks, he declared that “the time has come for the guns to be silenced.”

“He’s the person they respect,” said Aristides Sanchez, a leading civilian adviser to the rebel commanders. “They are religious and he has been their protector.”

The rebels, concerned about their safety as civilians in Nicaragua, greeted negotiators with a long list of demands, including one that Sandinista forces be disarmed along with their own fighters.

That demand was dropped, Sanchez said, after Chamorro adviser Antonio Lacayo assured them that the new president will exercise full control over the armed forces after taking office.

“It will be the duty of the new government of Nicaragua to watch out for the security of our people,” Sovalbarro told reporters.

The Contra war, which has claimed nearly 30,000 lives, began three years after Sandinista guerrillas overthrew the Somoza dictatorship in 1979. The insurgency began to fizzle after the U.S. Congress ended military aid in February, 1988.

After a Contra-Sandinista peace accord signed two years ago Friday broke down, Central American presidents began pressing the rebels to disarm, in exchange for free elections in Nicaragua. The latest regional accord, last Aug. 7, created a task force of peacekeeping observers from the United Nations and Organization of American States.

Distrustful of those organizations, the rebels agreed Friday to accept them as long as Obando y Bravo worked with them. Ortega said a small U.N. peacekeeping force already here will be expanded and start drawing the cease-fire zones, while a joint commission of Contra leaders and Chamorro aides works out details of the peace accord.