[NYTr] Nicaragua's Soviet-Era Missiles Locked in Limbo

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Washington Post - Sep 3, 2007
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/02/AR2007090201409.html


Nicaragua's Soviet-Era Missiles Locked in Limbo

By Manuel Roig-Franzia

MANAGUA, Nicaragua -- At a secret location somewhere in Nicaragua,
shoulder-fired missiles capable of taking down a jetliner lie behind
heavy fencing and locked double doors.

The missiles are dangerous artifacts of another era, a time before the
end of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union fed arms to Marxist
Sandinistas then in power, and the United States surreptitiously
countered by organizing and arming an anti-Sandinista force known as
the contras. The bloody conflict between the Sandinistas and contras
during the 1980s is long gone, but the Soviet weapons remain, locked in
a kind of limbo between Nicaragua and the United States, which fears
the missiles could fall into the hands of terrorists.

Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, a former Sandinista rebel, has
proposed exchanging the missiles for medical supplies, an offer that a
U.S. State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity,
called "unprecedented." Paul A. Trivelli, the U.S. ambassador to
Nicaragua, immediately pronounced the offer "very good."

But the deal hasn't happened, and since Trivelli's initial remark, U.S.
officials have been reluctant to speak publicly on the matter. The
reasons, some Nicaraguan and American observers say, are that the
proposal has not been put on paper and that suspicions remain in both
countries that Ortega -- who frequently taunts the United States --
might be luring the Bush administration into an embarrassing diplomatic
trap by making a complex offer that might never come to fruition.

"Ortega's going to go around six months to a year from now and be able
to say, 'We made this generous offer and the U.S. ambassador came out
the next day and said 'great idea,' and what have we gotten for it?' "
said Eduardo Gamarra, director of the Latin American and Caribbean
Center at Florida International University. "Yes, he's playing them."

Manuel Coronel Kautz, Nicaragua's vice minister of foreign relations,
said in an interview that "Daniel Ortega has never made a proposal that
wasn't serious."

American officials have been pressing Nicaragua for several years to
get rid of its stockpile of more than 1,000 shoulder-fired,
anti-aircraft missiles -- one of the largest caches in the Western
Hemisphere outside the United States. Ortega is offering to destroy 651
of his nation's missiles, while keeping 400 that his military advisers
say are necessary to maintain a balance of power with other Central
American nations. Still, the destruction of more than 600 missiles
would be a major coup for U.S. diplomats, and more than 22 times the
number of missiles the United States helped destroy in Bolivia in 2005.

The diplomatic push to destroy Nicaraguan missiles is part of a
worldwide effort that has led to the destruction of 17,000
shoulder-fired missiles in the past five years, according to State
Department figures. More than 1 million of the weapons have been
manufactured in countries around the world, including the United
States, and while many of those have been destroyed, no one knows how
many are still in circulation.

The campaign to eradicate missiles gained momentum after a 2002 attack
in which two SA-7 missiles nearly struck an Israeli airliner in
Mombasa, Kenya, and again after a 2003 strike on a cargo plane in Iraq
that caused damage but no fatalities.

The following year the United States, concerned that the Nicaraguan
missiles were vulnerable to theft, began paying to build a facility to
store them. The missiles that American officials want to destroy are
now kept in state-of-the-art bunkers that cost the United States
$130,000 for construction and staff training, according to a State
Department source. The United States also has funded weapons storage
facilities in Cambodia and Bosnia, the source said.

Ortega offered to exchange missiles for medical supplies on July 31,
saying "this won't be a gift, but simply a barter with them."
Ambassador Trivelli, who declined multiple requests through a
spokeswoman to be interviewed, told Nicaragua's La Prensa newspaper
that he would pass the offer along to U.S. authorities "with great
pleasure."

The offer has puzzled some in Nicaragua, particularly because Ortega
has spent the ensuing weeks bashing the United States and trading
broadsides with Trivelli in the Nicaraguan press. On Aug. 13, Ortega
called the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks "insignificant" compared
with the U.S. nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World
War II. Trivelli said Ortega's remark was "disappointing."

Ortega lost the Nicaraguan presidency in 1990 after 11 years in office,
then staged a comeback in last year's presidential election, winning
the top job in the Western Hemisphere's second-poorest nation. Some
U.S. officials believe that Ortega's antagonistic rhetoric is an
attempt to appeal to his left-leaning base and that his actions behind
the scenes are much less hostile.

"This offer is an encouraging sign," Avil Ram?rez Valdivia, a former
Nicaraguan defense minister who now heads an American chamber of
commerce in Managua, said in an interview. "Ortega needs a
justification for turning over the missiles, and the medicine deal
could be it."

A former Nicaraguan official who has been involved in past missile
negotiations said the only way he could see the deal working would be
if the Bush administration slipped additional money into an aid
program, such as the U.S. government's Millennium Challenge Corp.,
without openly admitting a quid pro quo.

Political posturing aside, the Nicaraguan leader might have the biggest
incentive to make the missile deal happen, said Roger F. Noriega, the
former top Western Hemisphere official at the State Department.

"If they get into the wrong hands," Noriega said, "he's going to be the
one held accountable."