Relocation Plan Spurs Contras’ Disarmament : Nicaragua: The Chamorro government agrees to give greater autonomy to rebel resettlement colonies.

The idled Contra army began speeding up the stalled process of disarming Wednesday after the government accepted a relocation plan allowing former rebel combatants to police their new communities.

After all-night negotiations, rebel leaders promised President Violeta Barrios de Chamorro for the third time in six weeks that their forces will surrender all their weapons to U.N. peacekeeping troops by June 10. After each previous pact, the rebels had slowed their demobilization and made new demands, leaving about 13,000 rebels still to be disarmed as of Tuesday.

In a new concession, Chamorro agreed to give some autonomy to the rural resettlement colonies that the rebels had won in a previous agreement. The colonies are to be built in the sparsely settled southeastern corner of Nicaragua, with the government providing roads, housing materials, schools, health clinics and farm tools for former rebels and their families.

The new colonies will be self-governing and policed by former rebel combatants. They are to be trained by U.N. troops and accountable to the Ministry of Government in Managua, which oversees the national police force.

The agreement, signed early in the morning, had an immediate impact. U.N. officials said 498 rebels disarmed Wednesday in the seven cease-fire zones where they are gathered, a daily record since the process started May 8. Before the accord, a total of 1,984 had disarmed--an average of 90 per day.

Although the accord ratified the June 10 deadline, U.N. officials said it would be logistically hard to meet. But Chamorro said she believes it still can be done.

“Today our friends in the resistance have promised to comply with all the agreements they have made earlier for June 10,” she told reporters after signing the agreement with Contra military commander Israel Galeano.

Asked why she believes the rebels’ promise this time, the president said: “One must have enormous faith.”

Rebel disarmament is a critical first step in Chamorro’s plan to demilitarize this war-weary country after eight years of fighting between the U.S.-backed rebels and the Sandinista-led army. Noting that Wednesday was Mother’s Day in Nicaragua, the evening newspaper La Prensa hailed the accord under a banner headline: “Peace, the Best Gift.”

On June 10, Chamorro plans to announce steps to reduce the 90,000-member national army. Sitting beside her Wednesday, Gen. Humberto Ortega, the army’s Sandinista commander, said he is ready to comply with her orders.

The self-policing arrangement was crucial to Contra leaders, who contended that disarmed rebels face the threat of reprisal by members of the army and national police. Both are still led by officers of the Sandinista revolutionary movement that lost the Feb. 25 election to Chamorro’s center-right coalition.

The talks that produced Wednesday’s agreement started last week but were broken off Friday in a bizarre sequence of events. Rebel negotiators charged that 14 disarmed rebels on their way home in northern Nicaragua had died in a Sandinista ambush.

But when a team of investigators from the government, the Roman Catholic Church, the United Nations and Organization of American States flew to the site, they found no evidence of the alleged massacre.

Before the investigators returned to Managua, the Contra negotiators tried to leave town but were sequestered in their hotel by the police and staged a brief hunger strike. The talks resumed Tuesday.

The rebel leaders’ behavior appears to reflect concern over the prospect of losing their power. While many rebels say they want to go home, Galeano has pressed for the new colonies as a way of keeping his men together.