April 1996, pgs. 115-116

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

Compiled by Janet McMahon

Jan. 1: Citing the need to rest and fully recuperate from an apparent stroke, Saudi Arabia's King Fahd temporarily handed over power to his half-brother, Crown Prince Abdullah.

Prime Minister Shimon Peres ordered Israel's attorney general and justice minister to develop options for the payment of compensation for personal and property damages to Palestinians.

The head of the 300-member European Union mission observing upcoming Palestinian elections criticized PNA President Yasser Arafat for shortening the campaign period from three to two weeks and for adding more seats for representatives from Gaza to the new National Council.

Jan. 2: The Bosnian government accused Bosnian Serbs of violating the Dayton peace agreement by abducting some 16 civilians traveling through Serb-held suburbs of Sarajevo.

The campaign period for Jan. 20 Palestinian elections officially opened in the autonomous West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem.

Jan. 3: The State Department said it was investigating reports that Israel had illegally sold U.S. military technology to China.

U.S. Defense Secretary William Perry, visiting Sarajevo, said that the NATO-led peacekeeping mission "was not set up as a police force" for Bosnia.

Palestinian human rights activist Bassam Eid, a longtime critic of Israeli abuses who was the principal researcher for two recent reports critical of the PNA, was detained in Ramallah for 24 hours. PNA police released him after Eid met with Arafat aide Ahmed Tibi.

The British government ordered the deportation of Saudi dissident Mohammed Masaari to the Caribbean island of Dominica, which had agreed to accept him.

Jan. 4: Israel and China denied that they had engaged in the illegal transfer of U.S. weapons technology.

Following pressure from the U.S. and NATO, Bosnian Serbs released 16 Bosnian civilians seized while traveling in Serb-occupied Sarajevo suburbs.

Jan. 5: Yahya Ayyash, the Hamas guerrilla known as "the engineer" for his ability to construct explosive devices and considered the mastermind behind a series of bus bombings in Israel, was killed when a booby-trapped portable phone blew up next to his ear. The killing was widely considered the work of Shin Bet, Israel's security service.

NATO peacekeeping troops in Bosnia fired the first shots since their arrival 17 days earlier when Italian soldiers returned fire on a Serb position which had fired on and wounded an Italian sentry.

Israel and Syria concluded six days of preliminary talks outside Washington, DC.

Jan. 6: Defense Secretary William Perry, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, said the U.S. plans to expand its military presence in the Gulf to deter possible aggression by Iran and Iraq.

Tens of thousands of Palestinian demonstrators at the funeral of Yahya Ayyash, said to be one of the largest ever held in Gaza, vowed to avenge his assassination by Israel. Following the funeral, the Israeli government announced it was sealing off the West Bank and Gaza Strip indefinitely.

Jan. 8: U.S. Defense Secretary Perry, following a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Peres, said the U.S. was prepared to send peacekeeping troops to the Golan Heights as part of an Israeli-Syrian peace agreement.

"K," the head of Israel's Shin Bet security service whose failure to prevent the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was partially redeemed by Shin Bet's reputed assassination of Yahya Ayyash, resigned his position.

Jan. 9: Turkish President Suleyman Demirel formally invited Necmettin Erbakan, head of the Islamist Refah (Welfare) Party which won the most seats in recent parliamentary elections, to form a coalition government. Turkey's two secular parties, Prime Minister Tansu Ciller's True Path Party and the conservative Motherland Party, had vowed not to cooperate with Refah but had failed to reach a coalition agreement themselves.

Jan. 10: Israel agreed to negotiate a financial settlement with the widow and children of Ahmed Bouchikhi, the Moroccan waiter who was gunned down while walking with his wife along a street in Lillehammer, Norway. The 1973 murder has long been considered the work of Israel's external intelligence agency, Mossad, which is believed to have mistaken Bouchikhi for Ali Hassan Salameh, leader of the Black September movement which took Israeli athletes hostage at the 1972 Munich Olympics. The Israeli embassy in Norway said the offer to negotiate a settlement was made in recognition of its friendly ties to Norway, and was not an admission of responsibility. Two days earlier, Israeli Prime Minister Peres had rejected a Norwegian government request that his country acknowledge responsibility for the murder, saying, "Israel will not take responsibility, because Israel is not a killing organization."

Appointed new chief of Israel's internal security agency was Rear Adm. Ami Ayalon, the first Shin Bet head to be named publicly. He succeeds Karmi Gilon, who was referred to only as "K" during his tenure.

As U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher arrived in Jerusalem for a new round of shuttle diplomacy, Jordan's King Hussein visited Tel Aviv to dedicate a trauma center named after Yitzhak Rabin at Ichilov Hospital where the assassinated Israeli prime minister died.

Ten days before Palestinian elections, Israel freed 812 Palestinians from prison and announced that it would reopen the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Jan. 11: Clinton administration officials said U.S. and NATO troops in Bosnia would monitor but not prevent reported Bosnian Serb attempts to obliterate the remains of thousands of war crimes victims by emptying mass graves and destroying the skeletons in an iron mine pit located in northwestern Bosnia.

Jan. 12: Following a meeting with Syrian President Hafez Al-Assad in Damascus, Secretary of State Warren Christopher announced that Syrian-Israeli talks would resume outside Washington.

Marking the first time U.S. and Russian soldiers have served in the same European theater of operations since World War II, the first contigent of Russian peacekeeping troops arrived in Bosnia, under an arrangement whereby they would not be under direct NATO command.

Defense Secretary William Perry said that, once they have reached sufficient strength to ensure their own safety, NATO peacekeepers would provide security to human rights investigators.

Jan. 13: As President Clinton visited American peacekeeping troops based in Tuzla, the CIA was reported to be establishing a "significant clandestine presence" in Bosnia to monitor opposition to the Dayton peace accord and undertaking a joint operation with the Department of Defense to assess possible threats to U.S. and NATO peacekeeping forces.

Following their meeting in Gaza, U.S. Secretary of State Christopher said he was "pleased" by PNA President Arafat's pledge to halt political violence.

Jan. 15: Israeli police forcibly removed some 100 screaming Jewish settlers from apartments on the outskirts of the right-wing settlement of Kiryat Arba which they had been occupying illegally and which Israeli police plan to occupy following their withdrawal from nearby Hebron.

Jan. 16: Iraq indicated it was ready to open negotiations with the U.N. Security Council on selling limited amounts of oil in exchange for humanitarian supplies.

The U.N. Security Council approved a resolution creating a new peacekeeping force of up to 5,000 troops to supervise the demilitarization of Serb-occupied Eastern Slavonia and its return to Croatia.

Jan. 17: Following an angry courtroom speech in which he declared, "I have not committed any crime except telling people about Islam," Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman was sentenced to life in prison for conspiring to commit terrorist acts in New York; his nine co-defendents received sentences ranging from 25 years to life in prison.

In what was described as retaliation for the murder of Hamas "engineer" Yahya Ayyash, two Israeli soldiers were killed in a drive-by shooting near Hebron.

Jan. 18: The PLO reached a tentative settlement to a lawsuit filed by the daughters of Leon Klinghoffer, the American tourist who was killed when terrorists hijacked the Achille Lauro cruise ship in 1985, whereby the PLO agreed in principle to help finance a peace institute in Klinghoffer's name.

Jan. 19: On the eve of Palestinian elections, Israeli soldiers at a West Bank checkpoint near Jenin killed three Palestinians who allegedly fired from a car and wounded one of the Israelis.

Rejecting a request by International War Crimes Tribunal chief prosecutor Judge Richard Goldstone, NATO declined to provide around-the-clock security for threatened mass grave sites in Bosnia, escorts for investigators and other assistance to the tribunal, saying requests would be considered on a case-by-case basis.

Jan. 20: In elections marked by heavy voter turnout despite a boycott by Hamas and leftist Palestinian rejectionist parties and numerous Israeli attempts at disruption, Palestinians elected Yasser Arafat president of the Palestinian National Authority and also elected an 88-member legislature.

Jan. 21: U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights John Shattuck, visiting burial sites outside Srebrenica said to hold the bodies of hundreds of Muslim victims of Bosnian Serb "ethnic cleansing," said the evidence indicated that mass executions had taken place.

Egypt's radical Islamic Group vowed to attack "American interests and people" as revenge for the life sentence imposed on Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman.

Jan. 22: Tunisia agreed to open a diplomatic office in Israel, with Israel to open an office in Tunis by April 15. Tunisian Foreign Minister Habib Ben-Yahia said full diplomatic relations between the two countries would not be established until Israel negotiated a comprehensive peace with all of its neighbors, including Syria.

The Beirut Stock Market reopened after having closed 13 years ago during Lebanon's civil war.

Jan. 23: On the first day of his trial for the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, self-confessed murderer Yigal Amir said he had intended only to paralyze the late Israeli leader.

The U.S. threatened to discontinue military and financial assistance to the Bosnian government unless it released all Serbian prisoners and expelled all remaining Iranian guerrillas.

Following three nights of disturbances in several Shi'i villages, Bahraini authorities arrested more than 2,000 people and charged eight arrested opposition leaders with incitement and involvement in foreign-backed anti-government protests.

Libya's Col. Muammar Qaddafi, following a meeting in Tripoli with Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan, said he and the American Muslim leader had agreed to work together to influence U.S. elections and foreign policy.

Jan. 24: Israel granted citizenship to convicted spy Jonathan Pollard, the former U.S. naval intelligence officer serving a life sentence in a federal prison for selling thousands of secret documents to officials of the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC.

Israel acknowledged that it has been discarding blood donations from Ethiopian immigrants for years because of fears that the falashas, brought to Israel 12 years ago in a humanitarian airlift operation, might carry the AIDS virus.

Jan. 26: Pakistan said Indian troops fired two rockets at a mosque in Azad Kashmir, killing 19 worshippers including three children.

After failing to meet a Jan. 19 deadline, the Bosnian government, Serbs and Croats agreed to release all remaining prisoners of war.

Three days of talks between Israel and Syria ended in an impasse.

Jan. 28: Thousands of Ethiopian Jews protesting Israel's policy of dumping their donated blood clashed with riot police outside the offices of Prime Minister Peres.