Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, April/May 1999, pages 120-121

Facts For Your Files: January 1999 Chronology of U.S.-Middle East Relations

Jan. 1, 1999: Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan warned that his followers may return to full-scale war if efforts to advance their cause peacefully continue to be ignored.

Jan. 2: Three people were killed in Kosovo, but monitors said a cease-fire seemed to be holding with ethnic Albanian guerrillas.

• Algerian government security forces said rebels slashed the throats of 22 people in an overnight attack on the hamlet of Oued al Aatchaane, 240 miles southwest of Algiers.

• In Cyprus, the governing coalition’s socialist junior partners quit over cancellation of plans to deploy Russian-made antiaircraft missiles on the divided island.

Jan. 3: Iraqi President Saddam Hussain pledged his people would resist Western-imposed “no-fly” zones.

• Four people were killed, three wounded and two were missing in a powerful bomb explosion that shattered a bridge shortly before a car carrying Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was to cross it.

Jan. 4: Israeli authorities ordered the deportation of 11 members of the Denver-based Concerned Christians, suspected of plotting millennium violence against Arabs to hasten the Second Coming of Christ.

• Killing 16 people and wounding at least 25, gunmen opened fire on Shi’i Muslim worshippers as they knelt in prayer at a mosque in eastern Pakistan.

Jan. 5: Four U.S. fighter jets fired six air-to-air missiles at antiaircraft installations in southern Iraq’s “no-fly” zone.

• The United Nations rejected an Iraqi demand that American and British relief workers be replaced.

• Iran announced it had arrested a number of secret police agents for the recent killings of five writers and opposition figures.

• Independent Turkish lawmaker Yalim Erez, a former businessman of Kurdish origin, failed to form a new government.

Jan. 6: U.S. officials said that American spies working undercover as U.N. weapons inspectors had installed an electronic eavesdropping system and provided information on Iraqi weapons programs.

• Former army chief of staff Amnon Lipkin-Shahak announced his centrist candidacy for Israeli prime minister.

Jan. 7: State Department spokesman James Rubin, responding to Israeli accusations of Palestinian failure to comply with the Wye accord, said “it is the Israelis who have not fulfilled their...obligations.”

• For the second time in less than two weeks, Israeli troops demolished 14 houses in the southern Lebanese border village of Arnoun some 21ž2 miles outside the Israeli occupation zone.

• In the fourth such incident in 11 days, a U.S. F-16 fighter jet fired at an antiaircraft missile site in northern Iraq’s “no-fly” zone.

• Turkish politician Bulent Ecevit announced that he had received the backing of two feuding center-right parties for a coalition government with his minority Democratic Left Party, after six weeks of maneuvers.

• A government commission investigating the bombing of two U.S. embassies in East Africa cited “the collective failure of the U.S. government over the past decade” to take adequate security measures.

• Hundreds of armed Serbian civilians blocked all main roads out of the Kosovo capital of Pristina to protest the killing of a Serb the previous day, the Eastern Orthodox Christmas Eve.

• Syria’s ruling Ba’ath Party unanimously nominated President Hafez al-Assad for a fifth term.

Jan. 8: Syrian President Assad and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak agreed to back an Arab summit focusing on the issue of Iraq.

• Rival Iraqi Kurdish leaders Jalal Talabani of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and Massoud Barzani of the Kurdistan Democratic Party met in northern Iraq for the first time in four years.

Jan. 9: NATO troops in the eastern Bosnian town of Foca shot and killed local police chief Dragan Gagovic, a suspected war criminal accused of raping and torturing Muslim women, after he resisted arrest and drove his car directly at the soldiers.

• Yugoslav tanks shelled mountain strongholds of ethnic Albanian rebels in northern Kosovo, where eight Serbian soldiers were being held captive.

Jan. 10: Iraqi Foreign Minister Mohammed Said Sahaf charged Saudi Arabia and Kuwait with “aggression” for allegedly allowing December U.S. airstrikes on Iraq to be launched from their countries.

• Bosnian Serbs angry over the killing of Dragan Gagovic burst into a police station in Foca and assaulted U.N. police, injuring five.

Jan. 11: President Clinton’s top national security advisers recommended that convicted spy for Israel Jona than Jay Pollard not be released.

• Becoming the first Israeli to address the Palestinian legislature, former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres said, “It is in our common interest to see a Palestinian state.”

• U.S. jets attacked two Iraqi missiles sites in northern Iraq’s “no-fly” zone.

• Veteran leftist politician Bulent Ecevit, who ordered the 1974 military intervention in Cyprus and who twice was ousted by his country’s military, became Turkey’s prime minister for the fourth time in more than 20 years.

• Enver Maloku, a top aide to moderate ethnic Albanian leader Ibrahim Rugova, was assassinated outside his Kosovo home.

• Italian Prime Minister Massimo D’Alema, while ruling out the extraditon of Abdullah Ocalan to Turkey to stand trial, said Italy would not grant the Kurdish rebel leader political asylum.

• Nursultan Nazarbayev was re-elected president of Kazakhstan.

Jan. 12: A U.S. warplane fired a missile at an antiaircraft installation in northern Iraq.

• Jewish settlers in East Jerusalem and Hebron cheered Irving Moskowitz, the American millionaire who has funded construction of illegal Israeli settlements.

• In the ninth such attack since November 1997, a Palestinian was assaulted and stabbed in the ultra-Orthodox Jerusalem neighborhood of Mea Shearim.

• The Lebanese government said it would end four years of tight travel restrictions on former Palestinian residents seeking to return to Lebanon.

Jan. 13: Records connected to the campaign of Ehud Barak, a candidate for prime minister of Israel, were stolen from the Washington, DC offices of American political consultant Stanley Greenberg.

• In a stormy four-hour session in Ramallah, the Palestinian Legislative Council demand ed an end to political arrests and gave President Arafat a two-week deadline to either charge or release some 450 political prisoners, of whom only 11 have been charged and successfully prosecuted.

• In a formal break with the U.S. and Britain, France submitted a proposal to the U.N. Security Council calling for the lifting of the oil embargo on Iraq and the creation of a new weapons monitoring system. Meanwhile, American fighter jets based in Turkey attacked antiaircraft installations in northern Iraq for a third straight day.

• Ethnic Albanian rebels released eight Serbian soldiers held captive for six days.

Jan. 14: The Clinton administration proposed lifting the cap on Iraqi oil sales.

• In two separate incidents, U.S. jets patrolling the “no-fly” zone over northern Iraq fired missiles at Iraqi radar installations tracking the warplanes.

• Turkey’s new prime minister, Bulent Ecevit, sharply criticized U.S. policy on Iraq and warned that escalating confrontations could jeopardize Ankara’s willingness to continue to allow U.S. and British planes to be based at a Turkish airbase.

Jan. 15: As renewed fighting broke out in Kosovo, an international peace monitor and his local translator were shot by a guerrilla sniper. Elsewhere, at least 15 rebels were killed in fierce fighting.

• The U.S. quickly rejected a Russian proposal for abolishing the U.N. weapons inspection program in Iraq. Baghdad rejected the latest U.S. proposal, saying it would accept only a complete lifting of sanctions.

• Pursuant to the Iraq Liberation Act, the Clinton administration selected seven Iraqi opposition groups to receive $97 million in U.S. military assistance to support the overthrow of President Saddam Hussain.

• The Sudanese government and the rebel Sudanese People’s Liberation Army agreed to extend a cease-fire in the famine-struck southwest region of Bahr el Ghazal.

Jan. 16: U.S. Ambassador William Walker accused Serbian security forces of mass murder after at least 45 residents, including a child, of the ethnic Albanian village of Racak in southern Kosovo were massacred.

• Rebel Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan left Italy, reportedly for Moscow.

Jan. 17: Serbian security forces launched another attack on the village of Racak and sealed off several other villages in the area.

• The U.S. eased its restrictions on the sale of spare parts to Iraq for its petroleum infrastructure.

• Israel protested Palestinian President Arafat’s release of 54 prisoners, including members of Hamas and other opposition groups, to mark the end of Ramadan.

Jan. 18: The government of Yugoslav President Milosevic barred entry to a U.N. prosecutor sent to investigate new war crimes allegations and ordered U.S. Ambassador William Walker, head of the international peace-monitoring mission in Kosovo, to leave the country following the American’s remarks on the Racak massacre.

• The Bank of Israel reported that foreign investment in the Jewish state had fallen 40 percent from 1998, down from $3.45 billion to $2 billion.

Jan. 19: King Hussein of Jordan received a tumultuous welcome upon his return to Amman following six months of cancer treatment in the U.S.

• NATO commander Gen. Wesley Clark and his German colleague, Gen. Klaus Neumann, met in Belgrade for seven hours with Yugoslav President Milosevic but failed to win any concessions.

• For the second time in a week, burglars removed campaign files of Israeli Labor candidate Ehud Barak from the offices of Barak’s Washington, DC consultant, while Israeli police were investigating break-ins at the Tel Aviv offices and homes of seven Barak advisers.

Jan. 20: Indian police said they had foiled a plot to blow up U.S. diplomatic missions in Calcutta and Madras.

• NATO warned Belgrade to halt its repression in Kosovo or face possible air strikes.

Jan. 21: Yugoslav President Milosevic announced he was “freezing” the expulsion order for Ambassador William Walker, who had refused to leave Kosovo. Meanwhile, a report by international monitors concluded that the massacre at Racak was in revenge for the killing of four Serbian troops.

• The Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, Iraq’s Tehran-based main Shi’i opposition group and one of the groups designated to receive U.S. aid to help overthrow Saddam Hussain, rejected the American offer of assistance.

• The U.N. released more than $81 million to Iraq for electrical generating equipment.

Jan. 22: Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu fired as his defense minister Yitzhak Mordechai, rumored to be on the verge of running for prime minister as the candidate of a new centrist party.

Jan. 23: U.S. warplanes dropped laser-guided bombs on two surface-to-air missile sites in southern Iraq.

• Serbian authorities released nine ethnic Albanian guerrillas in exchange for the earlier release by the Kosovo Liberation Army of eight Yugoslav soldiers.

Jan. 24: As U.S. warplanes attacked Iraqi surface-to-air missile sites in northern Iraq, and an errant missile struck the al-Jumhuriya neighborhood of the southern city of Basra, killing and wounding civilians, Iraqi Foreign Minister Mohammed Said Sahaf stormed out of an Arab League meeting and accused fellow Arab states of following the dictates of the U.S.

Jan. 25: Jordan’s King Hussein formally named his son Prince Abdullah as his new crown prince and heir to the throne, replacing his brother, Prince Hassan, who had been crown prince for more than 30 years.

• American envoy Christopher Hill met with ethnic Albanian leaders to urge them to support a set of principles for the future of Kosovo endorsed by the Contact Group for the Former Yugoslavia.

• Ousted Israeli Defense Minister Morde chai accepted the leadership of a new, as-yet-unnamed centrist party, with former army chief of staff Lt. Gen. Amnon Lipkin-Shahak as number two.

Jan. 26: As National Security Adviser Samuel “Sandy” Berger announced that President Clinton had authorized a more aggressive U.S. military response to Iraqi targeting of U.S. and British warplanes patrolling the “no-fly” zones, U.S warplanes attacked Iraqi radar and antiaircraft installations near the northern city of Mosul.

• The Israeli Knesset passed a bill requiring a national referendum on any government de cision to withdraw from the Golan Heights.

• Following the bombing of the offices of an outspoken moderate newspaper, Iranian President Mohammed Khatami called on police to curb such incidents.

• King Hussein of Jordan was rushed back to the U.S. for further cancer treatments.

Jan. 28: Secretary of State Albright completed a three-nation tour of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan in an effort to build support for U.S. efforts to oust Iraqi President Saddam Hussain. Meanwhile, testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Marine Corps commander Gen. Anthony Zinni said, “I don’t see an opposition group that has the viability to overthrow Saddam at this point.”

Jan. 29: The six-nation Contact Group summoned the warring parties in Kosovo to a peace conference in Rambouillet, France to begin Feb. 5, with the expectation that a settlement will be reached within two weeks.

• Conservative American Christians threat ened to boycott the upcoming national prayer breakfast if Palestinian President Arafat attended.

• Turkey’s chief prosecutor, Vural Savas, demanded the closure of the People’s Democracy Party, the country’s main Kurdish political party, charging that its branch offices served as guerrilla recruiting centers.

• Prosecutors in Cyprus agreed to drop spy ing and conspiracy charges against two Israeli undercover agents who instead pleaded guilty to possessing banned listening equipment and approaching a restricted military zone.

Jan. 30: As the first step in developing a new policy on Iraq, the U.N. Security Council set up three panels to study disarmament, humanitarian aid, and Iraqi compliance with resolutions on Kuwaiti prisoners and property.

• U.S. warplanes attacked six air defense sites in northern Iraq.

Jan. 31: Ethnic Albanians in Kosovo urged their feuding leaders to form a united front prior to upcoming peace talks in France.

• U.S. and British warplanes fired on two defense installations in southern Iraq, while an Air Force F-16CJ launched a high-speed antiradiation missile at a radar system near the northern city of Mosul. Meanwhile, Baghdad called the recent Security Council decision to create study panels “nothing but procrastination.”