September/October 1993, Page 102

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

Compiled By Janet McMahon

June 1: Yugoslav President Dobrica Cosic, losing a no-confidence motion engineered by Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, was ousted by the Yugoslav parliament.

The 192 Libyan pilgrims visiting Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem cut short their unprecedented visit following a news conference in which they called for the "liberation" of Jerusalem and the establishment of a Palestinian state. Palestinian Muslims, angry that the Libyans had broken the Arab boycott on travel to Israel and the occupied territories, had blocked attempts by the Libyans to enter Al Aqsa Mosque in East Jerusalem.

June 2: The Israeli government acknowledged for the first time that Major Yosef Amit of Israeli army intelligence had been convicted in 1987 on charges of spying for the U. S. and sentenced to 12 years in prison.

Amid anti-government demonstrations following the ouster of Yugoslav President Cosic, opposition leader Vuk Draskovic was arrested and severely beaten while in police custody.

June 3: U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher said the Bosnian conflict "involves our humanitarian concerns, but it does not involve our vital interests."

June 4: The U.N. Security Council ordered stronger protection for six "safe havens" in Bosnia, and, for the first time in the two years since fighting broke out in the former Yugoslavia, authorized the use of air strikes against Serb forces in Bosnia-Herzegovina. However, the U.S. and its European allies disagreed on what circumstances would call for a response.

June 5: Wali Abdelhadi Ghazali, one of the Iraqis on trial in Kuwait for plotting to assassinate former U.S. President George Bush, testified that he had been ordered to do so by Iraqi intelligence.

June 6: Israel's Shin Bet security service announced it had arrested four Palestinians for the December 1992 murder of Israeli border police Sgt. Maj. Nissim Toledano after Israel refused to exchange Toledano for imprisoned Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. The pretext for Israel's expulsion of 415 Palestinian Muslims, Toledano's murder was, a top Israeli official acknowledged, not "a challenging blow in a new terrorist offensive against us, [but] in reality, a rather uncalculated and badly bungled operation by people who were anything but trained cadres."

June 7: The Bosnian government, "faced with the risk of the rapid increase of fighting,'' reluctantly accepted the U.N. "safe haven" plan, which it had previously rejected as rewarding Serb aggression and creating for the Bosnian Muslims the equivalent of American Indian reservations. Meanwhile, Bosnian Serb forces continued their attacks on the "safe havens" of Gorazde and Srebrenica, and Bosnian government troops took control of the town of Travnik as thousands of Croats fled to Bosnian Serb-controlled areas.

The U.N. Security Council called for the "prosecution, trial and punishment" of those responsible for the killing of 22 Pakistani peacekeeping soldiers in Somalia.

The U.S. invited Arab and Israeli delegations to a 10th round of Mideast peace talks in Washington on June 15.

June 8: Kuwait announced that it will no longer blacklist companies which trade with Israel, thus becoming the first Arab country to lift the secondary boycott against the Jewish state. Kuwait will continue to observe the primary embargo on direct trade with Israel in effect since 1951.

June 9: As U.N. mediator Lord David Owen convened peace talks in Belgrade between Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic and Bosnian Croat leader Mate Boban, the commander of the Bosnian Croat militia walked out of U.N. sponsored cease-fire talks in Sarajevo.

Secretary of State Warren Christopher urged European Community foreign ministers meeting in Luxembourg to ban the sale of military-related equipment and technology to Iran.

June 10: At a meeting of NATO foreign ministers in Athens, Secretary of State Warren Christopher announced that the U.S. will send 300 troops to Macedonia in an effort to prevent the spread of fighting to that former Yugoslav republic. In Sarajevo, the commanders of the Bosnian army and Croatian militia signed a cease-fire agreement.

June 11: U.S. and U.N. forces launched an air and ground attack against Somali Gen. Mohammed Farah Aidid in Mogadishu, reportedly destroying four arms depots, capturing 200 of Aidid's supporters and damaging a radio station he was using, in retaliation for a June 5 ambush against U.N. peacekeeping forces which killed 23 Pakistani soldiers.

June 12: On his first official visit to Ankara, U.S. Secretary of State Christopher asked Turkish leaders to cooperate with a plan to end human rights abuses in Turkey, and announced plans to provide Turkey with $336 million in U.S. aircraft and other military equipment.

Iranian President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani won re-election to a second and final four-year term with 63 percent of the votes cast, but only 58 percent of eligible voters participating in Iran's presidential election.

Armenian forces from the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, who won control of about 10 percent of Azerbaijan, attacked the western Azeri city of Agdam.

June 13: Pakistani U.N. peacekeeping troops opened fire in Mogadishu on a crowd of demonstrators in which they believed there were armed Somalis, killing at least 14 people, a few hours before U.N. forces launched a third round of air strikes against positions held by Somali warlord Gen. Mohammed Aidid.

The speaker of Azerbaijan's parliament, Isa Gambarov, resigned under pressure from rebel commander Surat Huseynov, who has accused the government of being ineffective in the fight to contain Nagorno-Karabakh. Former Communist leader Gaidar Aliyev, head since 1990 of Azerbaijan's Nakhichevan region, a Turkish speaking enclave between Armenia and Iran, said he would consider assuming the role of speaker only after negotiating with Huseynov.

June 14: Turkish President Suleyman Demirel asked Tansu Ciller, a U.S.-educated economist, to form a government. If successful, Ciller would become Turkey's first female prime minister.

U.S. planes and helicopters continued to pound positions of Somali Gen. Mohammed Aidid.

June l5: Former Communist Party and KGB chief Gaidar Aliyev was elected chairman of Azerbaijan's parliament, as Azeri rebel troops under the command of Surat Huseynov moved to within 30 miles of Baku, Azerbaijan's capital.

Following an impassioned speech by Bosnian Foreign Minister Haris Silajdzic, delegates to the U.N. World Conference on Human Rights meeting in Vienna passed a resolution calling on the U.N. Security Council to take "necessary measures" to end genocide in Bosnia.

A 10th round of Mideast peace talks convened in Washington, DC.

June16: Croatian President Franjo Tudjman and Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic proposed abandoning the international peace plan for Bosnia in favor of dividing the former Yugoslav republic into three separate ethnic areas.

June 17: Following several hours of U.S. air strikes, U.N. troops moving into a Mogadishu neighborhood controlled by Gen. Mohammed Farah Aidid battled armed Somali citizens.

June 18: A day after EC negotiator Lord David Owen urged the Bosnian government to accept the Croatian-Serbian partition plan, President Clinton, who formerly had opposed the partition of Bosnia by force, said in a news conference that " if the parties themselves agree . . . the United States would have to look very seriously" at the proposed partition.

In a friendly White House meeting with Jordan's King Hussein, President Clinton said the U.S. would play a more active role in Mideast peace talks, but failed to release millions of dollars in U.S. aid withheld as a result of Jordan's stance during the Gulf war.

June 21: Azeri rebel commander Surat Huseynov announced that he was ready to "take all absolute power into my hands," demanding the resignation of President Abulfaz Elchibey, whom Huseynov has accused of mishandling the fighting in the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh.

June 22: A Croat-led Bosnian government delegation was appointed to attend tri-partite peace talks in Geneva after the Bosnian government's collective leadership split over Muslim President Alija Izetbegovic's decision not to attend the talks.

June 23: The presidents of Croatia and Serbia formally presented to the Bosnian government delegation their plan for the partition of Bosnia into three ethnically-based provinces.

Iraq put its air defenses on high alert and moved troops closer to its border with Iran.

June 24: Eight alleged Muslim extremists were arrested in New York City and Jersey City on charges of planning a terrorist campaign of bombing and political assassination. Among their alleged targets were U.N. headquarters, a federal building in New York City, and the Lincoln and Holland tunnels linking Manhattan and New Jersey.

Azerbaijan's parliament voted overwhelmingly to strip President Abulfaz Elchibey of all his authority because of his refusal to return to the capital from Nakhichevan.

June 25: In a wave of coordinated attacks, Kurdish separatists struck at Turkish targets in Britain and five European countries.

Zoran Lilic, an ally of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, was elected president of Yugoslavia, replacing ousted Dobrica Cosic.

June 26: In what President Clinton described as a "firm and commensurate" response to the alleged Iraqi plot to assassinate former President George Bush when he visited Kuwait in April 1993, U.S. Tomahawk missiles attacked the Iraqi Intelligence Service headquarters in Baghdad.

U.S. Iaw enforcement officials said there was not yet sufficient evidence to arrest exiled Egyptian Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman.

June 27: Somali gunmen wounded two American soldiers following U.S. helicopter surveillance of a residential area.

Armenian forces captured the town of Mardakert, the last Azerbaijani stronghold in Nagorno-Karabakh.

June 28: American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) Executive Director Thomas Dine was asked by the AIPAC board to resign from his $500,000-a-year position after a newly published book quoted him as saying that some establishment Jews perceive ultra-orthodox Jews as "smelly" and "low-class."

Iraq lodged a formal protest with the U.N. Security Council over the U.S. cruise missile attack on its intelligence headquarters in Baghdad, in which six Iraqis died when 3 of 23 missiles fired hit nearby residences. Iraq's intelligence chief vowed to avenge the attack.

June 29: A U.S. warplane fired a missile at an Iraqi anti-aircraft position in Basra province after it allegedly was targeted by the Iraqi battery's radar.

The U.N. Security Council refused to approve a U.S.-endorsed resolution to lift the arms embargo on Bosnia-Herzegovina. In Sarajevo, the collective Bosnian presidency met to attempt to reach agreement on the Serbian-Croatian partition proposal.

June 30: On the eve of adjournment of the 10th round of Mideast peace talks, the U.S. State Department presented an "informal working paper" on the negotiations and announced that State Department peace talks coordinator Dennis Ross and White House Middle East adviser Martin Indyk would lead a delegation to the region.

In Mogadishu, U.S. helicopters firing antitank missiles destroyed a suspected arms cache owned by a major financier of Somali warlord Mohammed Aidid.

The chairman of Azerbaijan's parliament, Gaidar Aliyev, named rebel commander Surat Huseynov prime minister and head of all security forces.

The United Nations High Commission for Refugees announced that, due to security problems and a lack of donations, it was reducing food aid to Bosnia for the next 10 weeks.

In Philadelphia, FBI agents arrested a ninth suspect, Earl Gant, also known as AWul Rashid and Abdul Jalil, in connection with the alleged New York bombing and assassination conspiracy.

July 1: Responding to a request from the Manhattan U.S. attorney's office, Attorney General Janet Reno reversed an earlier decision and ordered the detention of exiled Egyptian Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman.

The AIPAC board of directors asked Vice President Harvey Friedman to resign after he was quoted in the press as referring to Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Yossi Beilin, a Labor Party dove, as a "little slime ball." Their dispute arose when Friedman, on a visit to Israel, criticized the Labor Party for willingness to trade land for peace.

One Israeli was killed in a bus attack in Jerusalem and, in a subsequent shootout with Israeli police, two Palestinian gunmen and a second Israeli were killed.

July 2: Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman surrendered to federal authorities in New York, while, in Cairo, leaders of the Islamic Group threatened to "hit American targets . . . throughout the Middle East, Europe and the United States."

As U.N. refugee officials considered removing at least one-third of the population from the Muslim "safe haven" of Srebrenica, Bosnian Croat forces backed by Serbian tanks overran the Muslim town of Zepce.

At least 40 people were killed when militant Islamists set fire to a hotel in the city of Sivas in central Turkey to protest the presence of author and editor Aziz Nesin at a meeting of leftist writers and intellectuals. Nesin's newspaper, the daily Aydinlik, had published excerpts of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses.

July 4: Both Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO officials criticized the latest U.S. "working paper" on Mideast peace talks.

Secretary of State Christopher said the U.S. would cooperate with Egypt's request for the extradition of Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman.

July 5: The first contingent of U.S. troops assigned to prevent the spread of fighting in the former Yugoslavia arrived in Macedonia.

U.N. weapons inspectors left Baghdad after being denied permission to install monitoring cameras at an Iraqi missile site.

July 7: At Iraq's request, negotiations with the U.N. reopened on a 1991 Security Council resolution allowing for the sale of Iraqi oil in order to pay for food and medical supplies and for compensation to the victims of the Gulf war.

July 8: A U.S. team led by State Department official Dennis Ross met in Jerusalem with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on the first day of its trip to the region to try to "narrow the gaps" between Israeli and Arab positions.

Bosnian Croat leader Mate Boban proposed a confederation of Bosnia's three ethnic groups. Seven Egyptians were hanged in Cairo for Islamist-motivated attacks on tourists and government officials in order to bring down the Mubarak government.

The U.N. sent a team of inspectors to Iraq with instructions to seal missile testing sites and temporarily stop all missile testing.

July 9: The Bosnian government rejected a Serbian-Croatian proposal to divide the former Yugoslav republic into three ethnic states and appealed to the U.S. for political and military support.

The U.S. Board of Immigration Appeals rejected Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman's request for political asylum and upheld the exiled Egyptian cleric's deportation order.

July 11: Following a week in which five Israeli soldiers were killed and eight wounded in southern Lebanon, the Israeli cabinet accused Syria of supporting guerrilla attacks in Israel's self-declared "security zone" and warned that Mideast peace talks would not preclude Israeli military retaliation.

Bosnia's collective presidency, meeting in the Croatian capital of Zagreb, formally adopted a plan establishing Bosnia as a federal state. In Sarajevo, French Maj. Gen. Philippe Morillon, departing U.N. military commander, warned that the West risked creating "a new Gaza Strip" if it allows the destruction of the multicultural Bosnian government and society.

Iraq prevented U.N. inspectors from sealing two missile testing sites near Baghdad.

July 12: Angry residents of Mogadishu killed three foreign news photographers after inviting them to photograph victims and damage from a U.S. air attack on the home of a lieutenant of Somali warlord Mohammed Aidid. Other attacked foreign journalists were able to flee.

PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat said that Israeli and PLO officials had met in Washington to try to break the deadlock in peace talks.

July 13: Six Muslim states, including Iran, plus the PLO offered to send 18,000 troops to protect U.N. "safe havens" in Bosnia.

July 15: A U.S. delegation led by State Department peace talks coordinator Dennis Ross returned from a week-long trip to the Middle East without resolving any differences between the Arab and Israeli delegations.

The day after a failed test launch of Israel's Arrow anti-ballistic missile, for which the U.S. agreed to provide $500 million, U.S. Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) said a recent secret GAO report on the project found that "future incremental requests may draw the U.S. into providing almost all of the funding for a complete Israeli Arrow missile defense system."

July 18: After two years of legal maneuvering, Jewish Defense Organization member and dual American-Israeli citizen Robert Manning, prime suspect in the bomb-murder of American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee Southern California director Alex Odeh, was extradited to the U.S. from Israel for arraignment in the 1980 mail-bomb killing of secretary Patricia Wilkerson in California.

July 19: In an apparent move to avoid a possible military takeover, Pakistan's Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and President Ghulam Ishaq Khan resigned from office.

Iraq agreed to allow U.N. monitoring of its weapons industries.

July 21: On the eve of his departure to Asia and the Middle East, Secretary of State Warren Christopher rejected Palestinian demands that the basis for peace talks be expanded to include a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital. On the subject of Bosnia, Christopher said the U.S. "is doing all that it can consistent with our national interest."

July 22: Artillery and rocket exchanges between Lebanese guerrillas and Israeli troops in Israel's self-declared "security zone" in southern Lebanon intensified, as the sixth Israeli soldier in two weeks was killed and two Lebanese militiamen wounded.

July 23: The CIA's covert operations division announced it would spend $55 million to try and buy back U.S. Stinger missiles provided to Afghan guerrillas fighting Soviet occupation.

July 24: Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic agreed to attend peace talks in Geneva after the commander of Bosnian Serb forces accepted a cease-fire around Sarajevo, which was hit by 3,777 mortar shells two days earlier.

July 25: In the heaviest air attacks since its 1982 invasion, Israel's warplanes attacked Hezbollah and Palestinian targets in southern Lebanon. Arab guerrillas retaliated by shelling northern Israel.

Bosnian Serb forces broke a cease-fire agreement with heavy artillery barrages on Sarajevo.

For the second time in a month, a U.S. warplane fired a missile at an Iraqi anti-aircraft installation in Iraq's southern "no-fly" zone.

July 26: President Clinton ordered U.S. Special Envoy Reginald Bartholomew to resume participation in Bosnian peace talks being held in Geneva.

July 27: As Israeli bombardment of southern Lebanon continued, Secretary of State Warren Christopher cut short his visit to Asia and returned to Washington before his scheduled trip to the Middle East.

July 29: Israeli tanks and troops moved into Israel's self-declared "security zone" in southern Lebanon, as hundreds of thousands of Lebanese civilians continued to flee heavy Israeli shelling and air attacks.

The Israeli Supreme Court overturned the conviction of former Cleveland auto worker John Demjanjuk, who had been sentenced to death in April 1988 on charges that he was Treblinka death camp guard "Ivan the Terrible. "

New York State Supreme Court Judge John Bradley dismissed four charges against attorney Robert Altman, who, along with his former law partner Clark Clifford, are charged in connection with the BCCI bank scandal. Altman still is charged with defrauding bank regulators.

July 30: The Bosnian government agreed to accept the partition of the country into three ethnic-based republics, subject to the ratification of the Bosnian parliament.