Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, March 1999, pages 119-121

Facts For Your Files: A Chronology of U.S.-Middle East Relations

Compiled by Janet McMahon

Dec. 1, 1998: Israel announced plans to triple the size of the illegal West Bank settlement of Kochav Yaacov by building 480 new houses.

•  As chief U.N. weapons inspector Richard Butler left for talks with the French and Russian governments, Iraq’s strongest supporters on the Security Council, Baghdad began providing detailed answers to some of the inspection teams’ questions.

• On the eve of Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s White House visit, the U.S. confirmed that it had sold to New Zealand 28 F-16 fighter planes, which Pakistan had originally ordered and paid $650 million for but which were never delivered after Islamabad was found to be proceeding with its nuclear weapons program. The U.S., which has held the planes in storage in the Arizona desert for nearly a decade, planned to reimburse Pakistan with the proceeds from the sale.

• Egyptian authorities detained Hafez Abu Seda, secretary-general of the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights, on allegations that his organization had received a $25,000 bribe to publish a statement charging police torture of minority Copts in southern Egypt.

• Exxon, the largest U.S. oil company, announced plans to purchase Mobil, the country’s second largest, a merger resulting in the world’s biggest corporation.

Dec. 2: Ten days before President Bill Clinton’s visit to Israel and Palestine to cement the Wye agreement, a Palestinian man was knifed to death by a suspected Jewish serial killer thought to be responsible for several previous attacks, while in Ramallah students protesting Israel’s failure to release Palestinian political prisoners attacked a car in which a Israel settler and soldier were riding, beating the soldier and seizing his rifle before he escaped with light injuries. Israeli soldiers dispersed the crowd with rubber-coated steel bullets and tear gas. Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu then announced he was suspending further troop withdrawals agreed to at Wye.

• American and allied forces in Bosnia arrested Maj. Gen. Radislav Krstic, the Bosnian Serb officer charged with genocide for directing the 1995 attack on Srebrenica, where some 6,000 Bosnian Muslim men were marched off and killed.

• Meeting with Pakistani Prime Minister Sharif, President Clinton said he would not lift remaining sanctions on Islamabad until it signs the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and ends its nuclear development program.

• With the backing of Turkey’s military, former Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit was asked to form a new government.

• Yemeni tribesmen protesting the lack of development in northern Yemen blew up a U.S.-owned pipeline, the second attack against the Hunt Oil Co. in two weeks.

Dec. 3: As the Israeli cabinet voted unanimously to suspend further troop withdrawals from the West Bank, Netanyahu spokesman David Bar-Illan asked President Clinton not to land at the newly opened Gaza International Airport on his upcoming visit.

• In the worst breach of the Kosovo cease-fire, Yugoslav border guards killed eight ethnic Albanian rebels allegedly trying to cross into Kosovo illegally.

Dec. 4: A U.N. human rights committee found that Israel treats non-Jews as second-class citizens, citing particularly its forcible eviction of the Jahalin bedouin for the expansion of an illegal Jewish settlement.

• A State Department spokesman, discussing Israel’s recent release of petty criminals rather than political prisoners, said “the Israelis have done what they said they would do” at Wye, where the category of Palestinian prisoners to be released was not specified in the final document.

Dec. 5: Some 2,500 Palestinian prisoners began a hunger strike as clashes continued in the West Bank, where 25 Palestinian civilians and three Israeli soldiers were wounded.

• U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan met in the Libyan desert with Col. Muammar Qaddafi to discuss a possible trial of the two suspects in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103.

Dec. 6: Former Foreign Minister David Levy announced he would not accept Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s offer, which he called a “sham,” to rejoin the cabinet as finance minister.

Dec. 7: A last-minute Knesset decision to postpone until after President Clinton’s visit a vote on dissolving the government and calling for early elections extended the life of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s faltering government.

• As U.N. weapons inspectors began a series of surprise searches, Iraqi Foreign Minister Mohammed Saeed Sahhaf described them as a “provocative” team of “commandos.”

• Maj. Gen. Radislav Krstic, the top Bosnian Serb war crimes suspect in U.N. custody, pleaded not guilty to charges of genocide and crimes against humanity for his role in the killing of an estimated 6,000 Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica.

• Gulf Cooperation Council oil ministers agreed to retain low oil production levels to counter depressed world oil prices.

• President Clinton announced the removal of Iran from the U.S. list of drug-producing countries.

Dec. 8: National Security Adviser Samuel (Sandy) Berger, in a speech at Stanford University, articulated a U.S. goal of overthrowing Iraqi President Saddam Hussain, pledging “to use effective force if necessary.”

• An American peace plan for Kosovo was rejected by Serbia, the chief negotiator for the province’s ethnic Albanian majority, and the Kosovo Liberation Army.

• Libya’s General People’s Congress began debating the proposal for a Netherlands trial of the two suspects in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103.

Dec. 9: Iraqi officials barred U.N. weapons inspectors from entering the ruling Ba’ath Party headquarters.

• The trial of 18-year-old American-born Palestinian Hashem Mufleh on charges of Hamas membership and distributing Hamas leaflets opened in Israel.

• As Israeli soldiers killed a 16-year-old Palestinian during clashes in the West Bank, the Israeli army decided to court-martial Cpl. Assaf Miara, attacked by Palestinian demonstrators in Ramallah Dec. 2, on charges of carrying an unloaded weapon and leaving his base without permission. Meanwhile, Israel’s Supreme Court overturned a decades-old exemption of yeshiva students from military service.

• Nine years after the military coup that brought him to power, Sudanese President Omar Hassan Bashir signed a law restoring a multiparty system.

Dec. 10: The PLO Central Council met in Gaza City to ratify amendments to the PLO charter calling for the destruction of Israel.

• Israeli war planes caused sonic booms in night flights over Beirut, whose power plants and infrastructure Israeli officials had threatened to attack.

• The U.S. said it would not respond with force to Iraq’s latest refusal to accommodate U.N. weapons inspectors but would await an overall UNSCOM report on Iraqi compliance.

• The international war crimes tribunal in The Hague sentenced Bosnian Croat paramilitary chief Anto Furundzijia to 10 years in prison for allowing a subordinate to rape a Muslim woman in his presence.

Dec. 11: A day before President Clinton’s arrival, Israeli soldiers using live ammunition shot two Palestinian teenagers in the head, killing them, as clashes over the release of Palestinian political prisoners continued in the West Bank.

• Germany’s highest court approved the extradition to the U.S. of suspected top Osama bin Laden aide Mamduh Mahmoud Salim.

• Saying he would end his decade-long self-exile, Lebanon’s former President Amin Gemayel endorsed newly elected President Emile Lahoud.

Dec. 12: Prime Minister Netanyahu welcomed President Clinton to Israel by asserting that the Palestinians “have not kept [their] commitments.”

• Israeli warplanes attacked southern Lebanon for the 108th time in 1998.

• U.N. weapons inspectors resumed full-scale operations in Iraq.

• The body of Iranian opposition writer Mohammed Jafar Pouyandeh, who had disappeared the previous week somewhere between his home and office in Tehran, was identified by family members. He was the fifth government critic to be killed since late November, and author Pirouz Davani was reported missing.

Dec. 13: Meeting face-to-face only for some 10 minutes, President Clinton and Prime Minister Netanyahu made a series of appearances in Jerusalem, culminating at a convention of Israeli high school students.

• U.N. weapons inspectors visited 25 sites in Iraq on the final day of their latest round of searches for illegal weapons.

• U.S. embassies in Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, citing the “strong possibility” of a terrorist attack against U.S. targets in the next 30 days, issued warnings to Americans in the region.

• In Afghanistan, at least 17 people were killed and some 80 wounded in one of the worst rocket attacks on the Taliban-held capital of Kabul in months.

Dec. 14: Following his arrival at Gaza International Airport, thereby becoming the first sitting U.S. president to visit Palestinian-held territory, President Clinton attended a meeting of the Palestine National Council chaired by President Arafat where members again repealed portions of their charter calling for the destruction of Israel.

• U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said recent U.S. calls for the overthrow of Iraqi President Saddam Hussain went beyond Security Council resolutions, which “[don’t] talk about getting rid of the leadership.”

• Serbian troops killed some 30 ethnic Albanian separatists in a five-hour gun battle along Kosovo’s southwestern border with Albania.

• Iranian authorities announced the arrest of the first suspects in the recent string of “mysterious killings” of opposition intellectuals.

• Algerian Prime Minister Ahmed Ouyahia resigned following opposition charges that he had rigged 1997 parliamentary elections.

Dec. 15: Following a summit meeting with U.S. President Clinton and Palestinian President Arafat, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu said he would not meet a Dec. 18 deadline for an second Israeli troop withdrawal from the West Bank as agreed to in the Wye agreement.

• Following chief U.N. weapons inspector Richard Butler’s report that Iraq’s “conduct ensured that no progress was able to be made in either the fields of disarmament or accounting for its prohibited weapons programs,” U.S. forces in the Gulf were put on high alert.

• U.S. envoy Richard C. Holbrooke, arriving in the Kosovo capital of Pristina, warned Serbia and ethnic Albanian separatists that they were “playing with dynamite.”

• Libya’s General People’s Congress gave conditional approval for the trial in a neutral country of two suspects in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103.

Dec. 16: The U.S. and Britain attacked Iraq with missiles and warplanes, days before the Muslim holy month of Ramadan was to begin and hours after House leaders said they would postpone impeachment hearings against President Clinton if military strikes were taking place. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-MS) called “both the timing and the policy...subject to question.” China, France and Russia criticized the strikes, and Iraq’s ambassador to the U.N., Nizar Hamdoon, objected at a special Security Council session that “The members of the council were not allowed to complete their discussions” of the report by chief weapons inspector Richard Butler.

• Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu told a Likud Party meeting that he would call early elections if he lost an upcoming Knesset vote of confidence in his handling of the peace process.

• Federal prosecutors charged five men, currently at large, of conspiring with Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden in the Aug. 7 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Tanzania. A sixth bomber was believed to have been killed in the assault.

• The 46 nations, including the U.S., comprising the Bosnian Peace Implementation Council agreed to give its top official in Bosnia, Carlos Westendorp, added authority to remove Bosnian leaders from political posts if they obstructed the 1995 Dayton peace accord, to reward those leaders who complied with the agreement, and to have added input in the allocation of $1.5 billion in annual foreign aid.

• Although an Italian court lifted restrictions on PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan following Germany’s decision to withdraw an international arrest warrant for the Kurdish separatist leader, Prime Minister Massimo D’Alema said Ocalan would be kept under police surveillance until a final decision was made “in the next few days.”

Dec. 17: Iraq was attacked for a second day by U.S. and British aircraft and cruise missiles—more in two days of bombings than launched during the entire Gulf war—while thousands of demonstrators in Arab capitals protested the strikes and Moscow recalled its ambassador to Washington.

• The U.S. closed 38 of its embassies in Africa for at least two days as a precaution against possible terrorist reprisals for its bombing of Iraq.

• Serb police attacked the ethnic Albanian rebel-controlled village of Glodjane in western Kosovo in retaliation for the killing earlier in the week of six Kosovo Serbs in a bar in Pec.

Dec. 18: As the U.S. and British bombing of Iraq entered a third day, the Pentagon said it was able to confirm that only 18 of 89 targets had been severely damaged or destroyed.

• The badly beaten body of Serb District Mayor Zvonko Bojanic, who had been shot between the eyes, was found alongside a roadside in Kosovo.

Dec. 19: After a final fourth night of bombing, during which the Muslim holy month of Ramadan began, President Clinton announced the end of the air assault on Iraq. Hours before the bombing ended, Iranian President Mohammad Khatami called for a halt to the strikes, saying they were exacerbating regional tensions.

• Turkish Prime Minister-designate Bulent Ecevit said he was abandoning his effort to form a coalition government.

Dec. 20: The Israeli government formally froze its implementation of the 2-month-old Wye accords.

• India and Pakistan each expelled a junior diplomat from the other’s embassy on charges of spying.

Dec. 21: Rejecting Prime Minister Netanyahu’s last-ditch offer to form a “unity government,” the Israeli Knesset voted to dissolve itself and hold early elections.

• As Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz said the recent U.S. and British attack on Iraq had destroyed two missile factories but killed 62 military personnel and a “much, much higher” number of civilians, Marine Corps Gen. Anthony Zinni said 85 percent of intended targets had been hit, weakening the Baghdad government at least temporarily.

• The day after his extradition from Germany, alleged Osami bin Laden aide Mamduh Mahmoud Salim was ordered held without bail by a U.S. federal court in New York on charges of murder, conspiracy and use of weapons of mass destruction in the August bombings of U.S. embassies in East Africa.

• The five-nation group monitoring the cease-fire agreement in south Lebanon accused Israel and its SLA militia of violating the agreement by killing a Lebanese teenager the previous week.

• The new government of Prime Minister Salim Hoss lifted Lebanon’s five-year-old ban on public demonstrations, imposed after a protest against the Oslo accords resulted in clashes between the army and Hezbollah supporters.

• Serbian police, retaliating for the killing of one of their officers in Kosovo, carried out a sweep of the ethnic Albanian stronghold of Podujevo.

Dec. 22: Israeli warplanes attacking eastern Lebanon fired a rocket at a farm southwest of Baalbek, killing a mother and six of her children, aged 2 to 13. Hezbollah guerrillas in southern Lebanon retaliated by firing rockets into northern Israel.

• As the U.S insisted that Israel honor the Wye agreement by continuing to withdraw troops from the West Bank, leading Likud Party member Dan Meridor announced he would form a new centrist party and run against Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu in upcoming elections.

• Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen announced a scaling back of U.S. forces in the Gulf.

Dec. 23: Palestinian President Arafat released Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin from two months of house arrest.

• Iraq banned all U.N. flights to Baghdad.

• Turkish Minister of Trade and Industry Yalim Erez, an ethnic Kurd, was asked to form a new government.

Dec. 24: Exiled Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden, the suspected mastermind of the bombing of U.S. embassies in East Africa, said, “I was not involved in the bomb blasts, but I don’t regret what happened there.”

• Lt. Gen. Ammon Lipkin-Shahak, Israel’s popular former military chief of staff and a protçgç of assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, resigned from the armed forces to run for prime minister.

• Defying NATO warnings that it was violating an October cease-fire agreement, Serb tanks and troops attacked six villages outside the ethnic Albanian stronghold of Podujevo in Kosovo.

• An Iranian appeals court upheld the conviction of former Tehran Mayor Gholamhossein Karbaschi convicted on charges of corruption, but reduced his sentence from five years to two years in jail, replaced his 60 lashes with a $3,000 fine, and shortened his ban from public office from the original 20 to 10 years.

Dec. 26: Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan said Iraq would fire on warplanes patrolling its “no-fly” zones.

Dec. 27: In Kosovo, ethnic Albanian separatists attacked Serb police positions in Podujevo.

Dec. 28: The Pentagon said U.S. warplanes patrolling Iraq’s northern “no-fly” zone fired at an Iraqi air defense site, killing four soldiers and wounding seven, only after they had been fired at. Iraq claimed its moves were defensive, and announced that its own planes were flying in the “no-fly” zone.

• Binyamin “Benny” Begin, son of Likud founder and former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, announced he was quitting Likud to run for prime minister in elections scheduled for May 17.

• International monitors restored a cease-fire in Kosovo.

• In Yemen, Islamist militants kidnapped 16 Western tourists, including two Americans, saying they would release them in exchange for the freeing of Islamic Jihad leader Saleh Haidara Atwi and another leader arrested by authorities two weeks earlier.

Dec. 29: As five ethnic Albanians were found slain in Kosovo, where thousands of new refugees feared returning to their homes, members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee released a letter they had sent to President Clinton proposing that Yugoslav President Milosevic and his wife be given refuge in a third country in exchange for relinquishing power.

• Four of the 16 tourists kidnapped in Yemen were killed during a rescue operation which freed the remaining hostages, two of whom were wounded.

Dec. 30: U.S. jets fired missiles and laser-guided bombs at an Iraqi air defense site after it launched six to eight missiles at a British aircraft patrolling the southern “no-fly” zone.

• An Israeli court ruled for the first time that non-Orthodox conversions to Judaism were legal, entitling the converts to be registered as Jews by the Interior Ministry. Orthodox leaders said they would appeal the ruling and renew attempts to pass legislation recognizing Orthodox conversions only.

• Cypriot President Glafcos Clerides announced the cancellation of plans to deploy Russian-made missiles, which Turkey had threatened military action to block.

• A Libyan prosecutor ordered the arrest of nine American officials, including the late CIA Director William Casey but not then-President Ronald Reagan, for the 1986 bombing of two Libyan cities.

Dec. 31: As Israel issued permits for an additional 1,051 illegal Jewish housing units in the West Bank, U.S. Ambassador Edward Walker ordered the American Embassy in Tel Aviv closed for four days because of a “direct and credible” threat of a terrorist attack.