CHICAGO -- An American medical group charges U.S.-backed Contra rebels have systematically attacked Nicaraguan health clinics in a terror campaign that violates international treaties signed by the United States.
A medical task force organized by the National Central American Health Rights Network said Thursday it has independently confirmed the attacks in three unsupervised trips to Nicaragua from 1984 to 1986.
The task force visited the sites of six rural clinics allegedly bombed or ransacked and burned by the Nicaraguan Democratic Front, or FDN, the main force of U.S.-backed rebels called Contras, who are seeking to overthrow the Sandinista government.
The State Department refused comment on a report on the task force investigations published in today's edition of American Medical News, a publication of the American Medical Association.
The Reagan administration has dismissed reports of the attacks as propaganda by the Nicaraguan government, suggesting Sandinista soldiers masqueraded as Contras.
However, the medical task force said eyewitness accounts and physical evidence have convinced them Contras have systematically destroyed health facilities.
Members of the group said they interviewed clinic workers, some who were Contra sympathizers, who recounted that eight Sandinista soldiers were killed defending a clinic in one attack.
The report also said the attackers used American weapons that would be difficult for the Sandinistas to obtain.
'The pattern was so clear and so often repeated that I have no reason to believe that these weren't real stories about real Contras doing these things,' said Dr. Michael Gray, a member of the health rights network. Gray is also medical director of Benson Health Services and chairman of occupational medicine at Kino Community Hospital in Tucson, Ariz.
'I think it's a real tragedy,' he said. 'Here we have an administration that has been mouthing opposition to terrorism, and then goes and supports a military force that is really no different than the SS at the end of the Second World War.'
In each of the attacks, witnesses said the Contras loudly announced their identity and left behind graffiti, including the slogan 'The Lion Cubs of Reagan,' a reference to the Sandinista soldiers, who call themselves 'lion cubs of Sandino.'
As further support for its position, the task force said the Nicaraguan government has spent a lot of time and money creating and supplying the rural health clinics since Sandinistas overthrew Anastaso Somoza in 1979.
Also, Nicaraguan officials did nothing to interfere with the group's inspections and interviews at the clinics although they were aware of the visits, the report noted.
The detailed report on the attacks was written by Sandy Smith, a Washington-based free-lance journalist who accompanied four doctors, a nurse and a development worker on two of the trips to Nicaragua in 1985 and 1986.
Smith said the task force was organized in 1984 to try to verify Sandinista claims that U.S.-backed Contras were systematically destroying health clinics in violation of the Geneva Conventions, to which the United States is a signatory. The treaties include provisions protecting non-combatants in a war zone.
'The problem is Nicaraguans who say this is happening are suspect in the United States,' Smith said. 'They're branded as Sandinistas, and Americans who say it are called pretty much the same thing -- you know, crazy peace activists.'
Carolyn Trowbridge, a registered nurse who interviewed victims of a clinic in El Diamante, which was attacked last August, said some of the people she talked to were Contra supporters, including one woman who served Contra soldiers coffee before an attack.
'The people we talked to are totally convinced, and we tend to believe them,' Trowbridge said.
