New Storm Clouds Over El Salvador : Human rights reports rock military

These are tense days in El Salvador. A U.N. peace agreement signed last Jan. 16 was to have culminated this week with the disarming of guerrilla forces that have fought a series of U.S.-backed governments for 12 years. Instead, the agreement is in danger of falling apart.

On Tuesday Salvadoran President Alfredo Cristiani accepted a proposal by U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali to delay the scheduled demobilization from Oct. 31 to Dec. 15. That is a wise step--even a courageous one. Not only are the Salvadoran armed forces unhappy over the U.N. peace plan, they are also smarting from efforts to investigate human rights abuses that they carried out over the course of the savage civil war.

SLOW DISARMAMENT: Progress has been slow. To date the rebels have disarmed only about 40% of their 8,000 soldiers, taking weapons mainly from boys and old men.

For its part, the Salvadoran government had begun to reduce what was once a 55,000-man army. But recently military leaders suspended the dismantling of some elite army units.

They used the slow rebel demobilization as an excuse, but some U.N. observers suspect that the military fears that the human rights investigations could lead to a wholesale purge of guilty officers.

Two separate human rights commissions have been at work under the peace agreement. One is investigating the record of all of the military’s 2,300 officers with an eye toward removing the worst human rights violators. The second is probing specific human rights abuses. Last week, both panels issued profoundly important reports.

Though still officially stamped secret, the report on the officer corps is reliably reported to recommend the dismissal of more than 110, including the nation’s defense chief and several other high-ranking military men. That would be quite a setback for a military that had expected only some low-ranking officers to be singled out.

Compounding the stunning impact of that secret report was the finding of the human rights “truth commission,” as it is commonly known, regarding one of the most controversial incidents of the war, the El Mozote Massacre. Using forensic evidence, the commission has confirmed that 792 Salvadoran peasants, including women and children, were killed by army troops in December, 1981.

COUP RUMORS: The combined effect of those two reports has the still-powerful military reeling and talking about a possible coup. It is vitally important that Washington, which continues to provide most of El Salvador’s military aid, make it clear that any such attempt would be utterly unacceptable.

When Cristiani and rebel leaders reached their tentative peace agreement last New Year’s Eve, everyone knew that difficult negotiations still lay ahead. But only now is it becoming evident just how hard, and dangerous, the work of bringing peace to El Salvador will be. Both the United States and the United Nations must stay the course if the momentum for peace is to be maintained.