Toussaint interviewed Tomas
Borge is a member of the nati National Liberation Front (FSLN the Revolution, and th leader c by taking the most intransigent positions. Should we think for example that the United States is going to say to us: "Gentlemen, we recognize your existence. We are going to stop our aid to the contras. We agree to say that you are a legitimate government. We support the autonomy plan for the Atlantic coast. We think that you are respecting human rights." Obviously, that would not be negotiating; it is a total utopia.
Tomas Borge st find a s for e. But our vereignty volution gotiable› al American peace accords in 18), our correspondent Eric orge in Managua, Nicaragua. l leadership of the Sandinista ne of the Nine Commanders of ole surviving founding he FSLN.
Regardless of negotiations, the Reagan administration's point of view will always in conflict with ours. Nonetheless, we must find a means for coexistence. We take the interests of the
United States into consideration, even if they see them in a way that is quite out of line with reality.
They are afraid that Soviet bases will be established in Nicaragua. All right, that is a concrete point on which we can come to an agreement. We can offer a pledge about that. However, they feel perfectly free to set up American bases everywhere it suits them and to station troops everywhere in the world. But it is totally intolerable to them that other countries station troops abroad.
Well, we are realists. We recognize that American imperialism exists, and we consider that we could reach an agreement that would put an end to some of the United States worries.
What is not negotiable are our national sovereignty and the existence of revolution. But it is precisely these things that are being challenged by the United States. Now, they are terribly worried because the Persian Gulf has been partially mined. But they themselves mined the port of Corinto, that is, "right under our nose"! That is the way they are! That is how unjustly they treat the rest of the world, and not just the poor countries. • What is the situation of the contras? To gauge the strength of an army, you have to look at its morale in combat and not only just its armaments. For example, shortly before the triumph of the revolution, the forces and equipment of Somoza's National Guard were intact. But a series of politico-military factors led to its defeat. On this level, the morale of our armed forces is excellent, and the same cannot be said for the contras.
The contras adopted a strategic perspective of inflicting a military defeat on the armed forces of the revolution and of taking power. They have given up this objective and adopted another — to create ideal conditions for American military intervention.
Before adopting this new strategic objective, they tried to take a stretch of Nicaraguan territory in order to set up a government, they tried unsuccessfully to occupy a city, to stabilize a contra zone in order to establish a strategic bastion. They did not achieve these objectives, evidently, since their zone of influence is in the north near Honduras. That is the real theater of the war, regardless of the fact that they have been able to penetrate as far as they have into the interior of the coun try.
It has been very important to us to understand the enemy's strategy in order to establish our own priorities. Since the contras did not manage to stabilize large compact military units, since they did not manage to get enough military personnel to form such big units and since we had more fire-power, they decided to disperse their forces. This was a temporary, tactical decision and not a strategic one.
I think that to a certain extent they succeeded in carrying off this tactical
NICARAGUA dispersal of their forces. That has led concretely to an increasing number of small armed actions in the recent period. Small armed actions reflect strategic weakness. So far this strategic weakness has not been definitive, and our immediate response has been to transform their tactical dispersal into a strategic dispersal. This means keeping from exercising centralized control over their dispersed forces.
Through our military offensive and new tactical deployments of our army, our intelligence and other forces of the Ministry of the Interior, we have succeeded in inflicting impressive human losses on the contras. For every one of our people who falls, three to four contras are made harmless. Our capacity for replacing our forces is much greater than that of the contras. Over the past two years, their military forces have decreased by more or less 50 percent.
Nonetheless, it has to be said that they have achieved a certain capacity for renewing their forces. That is, they have recruited. They recruit essentially backward peasants, either through shanghaiing people or through standard propaganda and relying on large financial resources.
However, if you remember that before their last offensive, they had a large part of their forces trained in Honduras and in the United States (training that included preparation for anti-aircraft warfare with very sophisticated weapons, such as "red eyes," and for using considerable communications equipment and decoding devices to intercept our army's messages), you can understand that the major losses we inflicted on them have had a particular effect on these militarily best prepared troops. Naturally, the new forces that they have incorporated, which are made up to a greater extent of children of 12 and 13 years of age and women, are militarily much less effective.
So, their best trained forces have considerably shrunk. This reflects a very great decline which will be aggravated by the signing of the Guatemala peace plan. Their weakening is also reflected in the extent to which members of their forces have expressed their satisfaction at the peace plan and their wish to go home.
We, for our part, have demonstrated our seriousness in welcoming men and women who break from the contras. We welcome them in a humanitarian way, and we offer them jobs or other means of reintegrating themselves in to social and civilian life. • Do you think that the right opposition could win elections? There is always that possibility, and the constitution provides for respecting an election victory by forces other 15 than the Sandinista front. But I think September 28, 1987 • International Viewpoint
NICARAGUA that it is hard to imagine the Nicaraguan people turning their backs on history. Such a thing has never happened. To encourage everyone to be more realistic, I would say that it is virtually impossible that the people would decide to return to the road of the past. But, if that were to happen, we would have to yield power, and I would stop believing in humanity. • The right opposition says that in order to apply the peace accord it is necessary to lift the state of emergency, and to permit the reopening of La Prensa and Radio Catolica.' What do you think about that? I am reading the accord signed in Guatemala, and it says exactly the oppo- not when i site. This accord implies that the state of emergency will be lifted when the war ends. When somebody is pointing a pistol at us, it would be crazy to put down the one that we are holding. I think that negotiation could lead to suspending the state of emergency. For our part, we will move ahead very quickly in implementing the peace plan. We are setting up the National Reconciliation Commission.
However, until we reach an overall and simultaneous accord in Central America, nothing requires us to suspend the state of emergency. Before such an accord, we can decide to suspend the state of emergency only if we think that the conditions have been assembled for this. The state of emergency is not an end in itself. It is a temporary measure designed to meet the needs of a war situation.
Now, in the present conditions, we cannot lay down our military or our political weapons of the legal weapons authorized by the constitution. But we would be ready to stop shooting if there were no longer any enemies that we had to shoot at. And likewise we would be ready to stop using the state of emergency, the legal means provided 16 by the constitution, if that were no longer necessary. If we were not ready to do that, we would fall into an illegal and dictatorial state of affairs. • The representative of the Social Christian Party (PSC) says that you have 10,000 political prisoners in your jails. How much truth is there in that? There are 8,800 prisoners in total, the majority of whom are thieves, rapists, drug-peddlers and cattle-rustlers. The majority, therefore, are common-law prisoners. In addition, there is a large group of former Somozista National Guards who have been imprisoned since the revolution. In all, 2,400 counter-revolutionaries are prisoners.
I am going to tell you an anecdote. When I went to Germany, an individual named Geisler questioned me, saying that there were Social Christian prisoners in Nicaragua. I checked by telephone, and I was told that there were, if I remember right, four or five Social Christian prisoners. But they were not jailed because of their political affiliation. One had committed a robbery, another a rape, and so on.
Following Mr. Geisler's reasoning, you could say that there are 8,800 Catholics in jail in Nicaragua. You could also say that a majority of the prisoners are Sandinistas. But nearly 5,000 "Sandinista" prisoners are not in jail because they are Sandinistas but for other reasons.
What is more, I can tell you that a majority of the prisoners in Region VI (the northern part of the country, Jinotega, Matagalpa) are members of the armed forces or of the forces of the Ministry of the Interior who have committed abuses against the population, and have violated the law for one reason or another. They are also Sandinistas. Is anyone concerned about their fate? • Where are you with the autonomy plan for the Atlantic Coast? The adoption of autonomy for the Atlantic Coast is entering its final phase. At the end of August or the beginning of September, autonomy projects will be submitted to the National Assembly. How long will this discussion go on? That depends on the National Assembly, but normally there should not be any major obstacle to adopting the plan because it has an important feature — it is an expression of the will of the majority of the inhabitants of the Atlantic Coast. This bill is the most democratic of all laws that I know of in history. It has been discussed and approved word by word, paragraph by paragraph, article by article by the people of the Atlantic Coast.
I might say that I would have preferred another sort of formulation in certain parts of the document, but since it is the result of collective discussion among the people of the Atlantic Coast, it would be an insult to them to oppose this law.
The application of the law is not going to be very easy, because it is complex and represents a qualitative step. Every qualitative step involves difficulties. The autonomy scheme is the result of the restoration of peace to the Atlantic Coast and the correction of errors that we committed.
This is a model law, an example to those facing similar problems throughout the Americas. It will be an encouragement to all the native peoples of the hemisphere, including those in the United States and Canada. It will be a cause for rejoicing for the Indians of the Americas and an object of great satisfaction for the inhabitants of the Atlantic Coast. • Since 1979, a revolutionary regime has existed in Nicaragua in which political pluralism and real trade-unionism has survived. What balance sheet do you draw from this situation? Pluralism and the mixed economy in Nicaragua are the natural results of our revolutionary process. This is not a trick or a tactic for gaining time. The problem is not whether this is positive or negative. It is a fact that cannot be gone around. It has not been easy to establish political pluralism, because in order to maintain this pluralism and mixed economy, the state has had to make major concessions to the employers.
We have encountered difficulties because the political factor took precedence over economics. That is, the class interests of those sectors excluded from political power (those who retain political options without holding political power) have created blockages in production and in the economy in general. In other words, ideally, if we could separate the political aspect from the economic one and solve the problems in each of these areas separately, things would be much easier. The problem is that politics and economics are tightly intertwined.
The fundamental aspect has been politics. More than an instrument of producers, the [employers' organization] COSEP is a sort of political party. Moreover, concretely, it is part of the Acasa coordinating body, which is a political instrument opposed to the revolution. It is clear that the room for political pluralism will increase to the extent that the provisions of the Guatemala peace accord are applied, because it has to be said that the state of emer1. Radio Catolica, the archiepiscopal station, was banned on January 2, 1986; and La Prensa was suspended indefinitely the day after the US Congress voted $100 million in aid to the contras on June 27, 1986.
gency has restricted the activities of the opposition parties to a certain extent. • In this stage of the Sandinista revolution, what is the role of the Sandinista Defence Committees (CDS)? The mass organizations have developed considerably since the revolution. Before the victory, they were underground, while now they are part of the revolutionary power. The CDS are a special form of representing the inhabitants of a neighborhood. They have been going through a process of finding ways to act and function. In the last analysis, the CDS can be the road to follow to consolidate mass participation in the revolutionary power. Now, the CDS are no longer essentially devoted to revolutionary vigilance, in any case not in the form that was practiced a few years ago. The CDS are the trustees and interpreters of the demands of the people in the neighborhood. Thus, these people have a channel for advancing their immediate demands - demands that are not outside the political context. Within the CDS, elections are genuinely democratic; they take place by means of secret ballots. I have witnessed a series of elections in various parts of the country. The CDS do not necessarily elect those who are recommended by the Sandinista Front, even though the majority in the CDS agree with the positions of the FSLN and recognize it as the revolutionary vanguard. • What remedies are there to bureaucracy, taking account of the fact that at the moment the main danger comes from imperialist aggression? I would like to know what chemical formula is effective in fighting bureaucracy. But I think that they will find a cure for AIDS first. I think that we really have to find mechanisms for fighting bureaucracy. But often this is very difficult because the forms that bureaucracy takes are so incredible that I am not surprised at the capacity it shows for survival. I said to a friend a little while ago in a discussion on human rights and bureaucracy: "If people commit the folly of launching a nuclear world war, humanity will disappear from the surface of the earth, but the bureaucratic cockroaches will survive." That is a way of describing the difficulty of dealing with bureaucracy. Nonetheless, you have to deal with it, and I think that the main means for fighting it is for the leaders, the revolutionists, to maintain a direct contact with reality. And you cannot get to know the reality in an office except through direct contact on the ground with the masses, the working people, the people in the neighborhoods and so forth. To make myself understood, I am going to give you an example. A document arrives in an office describing the problems in a factory where the workers are complaining about noise. Reading this paper is no substitute to visiting the factory. I went, and I realized that the problem was not that there was a lot of noise, but that the noise was intolerable, and that unless technical means were found to remedy this the workers were going to go deaf. If the functionaries or minister responsible for this factory did not confront the facts, the problem would not be solved. Reports never describe the facts exactly. They give you only a distorted view. Today, imperialism and bureaucracy are our main enemies, and it is harder to fight bureaucracy than it is to fight imperialism.