MANAGUA, Nicaragua -- The Nicaraguan government accused the CIA of masterminding a plot to use some 40,000 Miskito Indians to provoke war with neighboring Honduras.
Interior Minister Tomas Borge, speaking in the Caribbean port of Puerto Cabezas Thursday, said the CIA and anti-Sandinista rebels were trying to hinder a recent government move to make peace with the Miskitos by allowing a limited amount of autonomy for the English-speaking tribes.
'The CIA wishes to provoke a war between Nicaragua and Honduras along our border,' Borge said in the city, 230 miles northeast of Managua. The state-run Voice of Nicaragua radio transmitted his speech.
'Forty-thousand Nicaraguan Indians are trapped in Honduras. They live in conditions similar to those of a concentration camp and many now wish to return to Nicaragua to live,' Borge said.
'They are trying to prevent the return of those 40,000 Indians and they want military confrontation between our two countries,' Borge, the only survivor of the three men who founded the Sandinista movement, said in reference to the CIA and Nicaraguan rebel leaders.
He did not specify what measures the two groups were planning to prevent the Miskitos' eventual return to their homeland.
Nicaragua's leftist Sandinista government began a forced resettlement of Miskito Indians in 1982, bulldozing villages and uprooting more than 25,000 from their tribal homelands along the Caribbean coast.
Government officials said the move was necessary to prevent the Indians from being caught in fighting between Sandinista troops and U.S.-backed Contra rebels near the northern border, but Indian leaders said it was to decimate their political strength.
Thousands of Indians fled the area, many to Honduras, complaining of the government's policies and forced recruitment of youths into the army. The refugees in Honduras live in Red Cross-sponsored camps near the border.
Neither Brooklyn Rivera, the leader of a Miskito Indian rebel group, nor other Indian leaders were immediately available for comment on the charges of Indians being kept against their will in Honduras.
Borge said the planned operation to foment disorder on the northern border, code-named 'Black Eagle,' would use weapons left by U.S. troops who recently took part in joint military exercises with Honduran forces.
