Harsh repressions in Nicaragua

Press, 8 July 1986, Page 20

Harsh repressions in Nicaragua

By

Reid G. Miller

of Associated Press in

Nicaragua’s Sandinist leaders are countering new pressure on their leftist, revolutionary Government with increasingly repressive measures of their own.

Nicaragua’s leaders responded swiftly and harshly to approval by the United States House of

Representatives of President Reagan’s request for SUSIOO million (SNZIB6 million) in military and other aid to the antlSandinist rebels known as “contras.”

Within 24 hours of the House vote, they announced a new crackdown on internal dissent and closed the country’s only opposition newspaper, “La Prensa.” “War will be met by war,” the Nicaraguan President, Daniel Ortega Saavedra, said. Some analysts compared the latest turn of events to a poker game with each side raising the ante. “If anyone thought the Sandinistas would simply fold their

hand in the face of a 100-million-dollar bet, they were deluding themselves,” said a Western diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Clearly targeted by President Ortega and the eight other commandantes who rule Nicaragua

were opposition political parties, conservative businessman, and tbe hierarchy of the Catholic Church. Although far from united, together these groups form the last remaining vestige

of open, organised dissent in this country of about 3.5 million people.

"If President Reagan has so much love for the press and some political groups ... Some cardinal or some bishop, he should stop the war,” President Ortega told a cheering crowd of

several thousand supporters in Managua. While he did' not mention them by name, President Ortega also clearly referred to Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo and Bishop Pablo Antonio Vega, both of whom have been among the Sandinists’ most severe critics. "Those who are against the people and in favour of Reagan have the option of going to Miami,” President Ortega said. “There will be no more tolerance.”

In announcing the new crackdown on internal dissent, the Sandinista leadership did not spell out the steps it intended to take to quell opposition. Opponents, however, feared the worst. The crackdown was announced by President Ortega late in June,

a day after the American vote. The government newspaper “Barricada” elaborated on the announcement in what was described as a “manifesto of the national directorate of the F.5.L.N.,” the initials of the ruling Sandinista National Liberation Front

“This new situation demands the strict and severe application of the state of emergency,” the manifesto said, adding that in the past the decree had been “applied at times with excessive flexibility.”

The state of emergency was first announced in March, 1982, shortly after the Contras staged their first major raids into northern Nicaragua from bases just across the country’s border with Honduras.

Although the 1982 emergency decree never was suspended entirely, a new state of emergency was announced last November. At that time, the Sandinists said the law was aimed at Contra collaborators in the countryside and at what they claimed was an attempt by the rebels to form urban terrorist cells. Although the Sandinists rounded up and imprisoned dozens of alleged collaborators and urban guerrillas, many observers thought the harsher measures were actually aimed at the Catholic church hierarchy.

They came at a time when Cardinal Obando y Bravo was touring the country, drawing large crowds and criticising the Sandinists at every stop. The Government retaliated by closing the church’s broadcasting station, Catholic Radio, expelling a number of foreign priests, and drafting into the army dozens of Catholic seminarians who. had been exempt from military service.

Then, as now, the emergency law prohibited public assembly, free speech and the right to f strike. An individual can be arrested and held indefinitely; without court order. < Analysts were uncertain how the new rules would be applied. Some predicted the Government initially would go after middle-level people In the political parties and the Church because they would be easy targets. Mr Gilmore Core, the secretary of’ the Social Democrat Party, said the crackdown illustrated a lack of popular support for the Sandinists.

“If they felt really strong, with popular support, they wouldn’t act this way,” Mr Core said, a sentiment echoed by Mrs Violeta Chamorro, the former publisher of “La Prensa” and at first a supporter of the Sandinistas.

The shutdown of the newspaper, Mrs Chamorro said,

Managua, Nicaragua

“demonstrates not the strength but the weakness of the Sandinista Government"

Bishop Vega, the secretary of the Catholic Episcopal Conference of Nicaragua, said the Church would have no official comment on the Government’s new action.

“What value is there in issuing a statement to the press if nobody in Nicaragua can read it?” he said.