SEPTEMBER 1999, pages 102-106

Facts For Your Files

A Chronology of U.S.-Middle East Relations

Compiled by Janet McMahon

May 1, 1999: As NATO bombs destroyed a civilian bus crossing a bridge in Kosovo, killing at least 24 people and critically wounding 16 others on the 39th day of its bombing campaign, Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic released three U.S. soldiers captured in Macedonia to the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who had flown to Belgrade to press for the Americans’ release.

•In an embarrassing defeat for hard-liners, Iran’s liberal minister of culture, Ayatollah Mohajerani, survived a parliamentary move to impeach him.

May 2: Some 20,000 ethnic Albanians fled the area around Prizren, Kosovo’s most diverse city, in a three-day period, with Serbian forces and equipment moving in and reportedly holding young ethnic Albanian men as a shield against a possible NATO land invasion.

•As NATO acknowledged that it had accidently struck a civilian bus in an attack on a bridge near the Kosovo capital of Pristina, NATO warplanes attacked a major hydro-electric power station west of Belgrade, plunging the Serbian capital and much of the country into darkness.

•The newly elected Turkish parliament erupted in fury and refused to adminster the oath of office to Merve Kavakci, a newly elected Virtue Party delegate, who arrived to take her seat dressed in hijab.

•After being fired on over Iraq’s northern “no-fly” zone, U.S. warplanes bombed air defense sites northwest of Mosul.

May 3: Shortly before a White House meeting with Russia’s Balkan envoy Viktor Chernomyrdin, President Clinton said NATO would continue bombing Yugoslavia until there is “clear and convincing evidence” that Serbian troops were being withdrawn from Kosovo.

•Turkish President Suleyman Demirel asked incumbent Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit, whose Democratic Left Party won April 18 elections by a narrow margin over the right-wing Nationalist Action Party, to form a new coalition government.

•Without explanation, the U.S. Treasury Department released more than $24 million in bank accounts held by Salih Idris, the Saudi owner of the pharmaceutical plant the U.S. bombed in Khartoum in August 1998.

May 4: The Oslo accords officially ended, with no declaration of a Palestinian state and final-status talks yet to be held.

•As Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu rejected U.S. accusations that Israel had broken its promise to build new West Bank settlements only on land adjacent to existing ones, Foreign Minister Ariel Sharon said some 20,000 additional settlers would occupy the West Bank by the end of the year.

•Two U.S. airmen on a nighttime training mission in Albania were killed when their AH-64 Apache helicopter crashed northeast of the Tirana airport.

•Kuwait’s Sheikh Jabar Ahmed Sabah dissolved parliament hours after legislators threated to oust Islamic Affairs Minister Ahmed Kulaib for numerous errors printed in 120,000 copies of the Qur’an.

May 5: Macedonia abruptly closed its border to newly arriving Kosovar refugees, saying it would admit only as many ethnic Albanians as were being evacuated from its territory to third countries.

•As the Milosevic government freed moderate Kosovar Albanian leader Ibrahim Rugova, NATO officials said they would need as many as 50,000 peacekeeping troops in Kosovo following a settlement.

•Sudan’s health minister said nearly 1,500 people had died of meningitis during the past week, in an epidemic which had infected some 20,000 people since its outbreak in December. The U.S. bombed the country’s main pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum the previous August.

•Yemen sentenced to death three Islamic militants convicted of the December kidnapping of 16 Western tourists, four of whom died in a botched government rescue attempt.

May 6: While still differing on its composition, the U.S. and Russia agreed for the first time on the need for an international military presence in Kosovo following the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia.

•As Belgrade agreed to allow a U.N. relief mission to visit Yugoslavia, a senior Kosovo Liberation Army official said the guerrilla force would not allow itself to be disarmed.

•Jordan’s King Abdullah said he would ask international lenders to forgive half of his country’s $7 billion debt.

May 7: NATO warplanes mistakenly bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, killing three journalists, including two newlyweds, and injuring more than 20 people. Earlier in the day, NATO warplanes dropped cluster bombs on a residential neighborhood and hospital grounds in Nis, killing at least 14 civilians.

•In a setback for the U.S., NATO backed away from using force to block ships carrying oil to Yugoslavia, deciding instead to seek voluntary compliance with its embargo.

•Police found the body of Fehmi Agani, an aide to Ibrahim Rugova and member of the Kosovo Albanian delegation to the Rambouillet peace talks, some 12 miles south of the Kosovo capital of Pristina.

•Turkey’s chief prosecutor asked the country’s highest court to ban the Islamist Virtue Party and to expel its members from parliament.

May 8: As angry crowds demonstrated in front of the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, NATO officials apologized for bombing the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, attributing the error to the misidentification of the embassy as a weapons agency.

•U.S. warplanes bombed northern Iraqi air defense sites near Mosul for the second time in a week, killing three people and wounding two others.

May 9: In a telephone interview from Tirana, Albania, KLA leader Hashim Thaci said hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians were stranded in Kosovo’s woods and fields under KLA protection.

•U.S. and British warplanes bombed a farmer’s house in Qurnah, Basra, killing three people and wounding three others, in addition to one death and two injured in other attacks in southern Iraq.

•Afghanistan’s Taliban militia announced it had recaptured the strategic central city of Bamian, which had fallen to opposition forces in April.

•Scores of Palestinians gathered at Orient House in East Jerusalem, vowing to prevent Israeli troops from entering the building and forcibly closing three PLO offices.

May 10: The U.S. and NATO dismissed as insufficient a Yugoslav announcement of a partial troop withdrawal from Kosovo.

•A State Department report charged that Serb forces had expelled more than 90 percent of ethnic Albanians from Kosovo and cited evidence gathered from ethnic Albanian refugees of mass executions in at least 70 Kosovo towns and villages since NATO began bombing Yugoslavia on March 24.

•China announced it was suspending talks with the U.S. on weapons proliferation, human rights and other issues, as protestors hurled rocks at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing for a third day.

•U.S. warplanes attacked air defense sites in northern Iraq after being targeted by radar while patrolling the “no-fly” zone.

May 11: As the U.S. rejected Russian and Chinese demands that the bombing of Yugoslavia stop, NATO virtually doubled its bombardment, after a two-day lull following its bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade.

•Israel’s Supreme Court ordered the government to delay its threatened closure of PLO offices in East Jerusalem’s Orient House for at least a week, defusing the issue until after May 17 general elections.

•U.S. and British warplanes attacked three air-defense sites in southern Iraq, killing two people and wounding seven. Meanwhile, Iraqi forces were reported to have attacked four Shi’i villages in southern Iraq, near Nasariyya, the previous week.

•Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei rejected a petition from Iranian legislators asking him to pardon former Tehran Mayor Gholamhossein Karbaschi.

May 12: NATO officials said alliance warplanes had their “best day yet” bombing Yugoslavia, as President Milosevic admitted the attacks were causing significant losses among military and police forces.

•Five days prior to national elections, Israel’s Shas Party, comprising primarily religious Sephardic Jews, endorsed Prime Minister Netanyahu, who continued to trail Labor candidate Ehud Barak in polls.

•Iraq said twelve civilians, including two children, were killed and a number of others critically wounded in U.S. attacks on the northern province of Nineveh.

•The Kuwait Democratic Forum of parliamentary liberals, campaigning for July 3 elections, called for a radical restructuring of the ruling Sabah family’s role in government to increase accountability and bring “real democracy” to the country.

May 13: President Milosevic refused to meet with U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson on Yugoslavia’s human rights record.

•In the highest single-day toll of the year, seven people were killed in fighting in southern Lebanon.

May 14: As first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton visited Kosovar refugee camps in Macedonia, NATO officials acknowledged that an attack on the village of Korisa in southwest Kosovo had killed some 80 ethnic Albanians, whom they suggested might have been used as “human shields.”

•Israeli warplanes attacked alleged guerrilla targets in southern Lebanon for a second straight day.

•The U.S. ambassador to Israel established an official residence in Jerusalem.

May 15: Saying he hoped to improve the chances of a Netanyahu defeat, Israel’s first Arab candidate for prime minister, Azmi Bishara, pulled out of the race two days before the election.

•U.S. warplanes attacked Iraqi air-defense sites in the northern “no-fly” zone.

•Iranian President Mohammed Khatami arrived in Saudi Arabia for a five-day visit, becoming the highest-ranking Iranian official to visit the Kingdom since his country’s 1979 Islamic revolution.

•Turkish Prime Minister Ecevit announced that newly elected Virtue Party parliamentarian Merve Kavakci, who caused an uproar when she appeared in hijab to take her oath of office, would lose her Turkish citizenship because she had accepted U.S. citizenship earlier in the year.

May 16: Candidates Yitzhak Mordechai of the recently formed Center Party and ultra-nationalist Benny Begin withdrew from the race for Israeli prime minister hours before polls opened, leaving Labor’s Ehud Barak, whom Mordechai endorsed, and Likud incumbent Binyamin Netanyahu, whom Begin declined to endorse, as the only two candidates.

•A Tel Aviv court granted a delay requested by defense attorneys for Samuel Sheinbein, the Maryland teenager accused of murder who fled to Israel to avoid prosecution in the U.S.

•President Clinton ordered the release of two Yugoslav soldiers captured by KLA forces in Kosovo in April.

•Kuwaiti emir Sheikh Jaber Al-Ahmed Al-Sabah granted women the right to vote and run for office subject to parliamentary approval.

May 17: Labor’s Ehud Barak was elected prime minister of Israel by an overwhelming 56 to 44 percent of the vote over Binyamin Netanyahu, who abruptly quit as Likud leader following his defeat.

May 18: Jewish settlers began building a new settlement, funded by American Dr. Irving Moskowitz, in East Jerusalem’s Ras al-Amoud neighborhood.

•As diplomatic efforts toward ending the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia appeared to be gaining momentum, President Clinton said for the first time that he would consider sending ground troops to Kosovo if the bombing did not result in victory.

•In a speech marking the centennary of the first International Peace Conference, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said, “Unless the Security Council is restored to its pre-eminent position as the sole source of legitimacy on the use of force, we are on a dangerous path to anarchy.”

•In the largest exodus in 10 days, more than 2,000 refugees entered Macedonia from Kosovo, where they said Serbs had begun a new wave of mass expulsions.

•Great Britain and Iran resumed diplomatic relations, severed following Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution.

May 19: As Israeli occupation authorities destroyed water reservoirs in Hebron built to collect rainwater during the region’s severe drought, the Israeli army said several of its generals supported the withdrawal of troops from southern Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority said it would proclaim an independent state by year’s end.

•Truckloads of Yugoslav soldiers were reported to be arriving in towns in southern Serbia where hundreds of women demanded that their sons, brothers and husbands be allowed to return home from combat. Meanwhile, the U.S. State Department showed video footage of mass graves in Kosovo.

•As NATO warplanes bombed Belgrade and its suburbs, hitting a hospital and killing at least three people in the heaviest bombing since the Chinese Embassy was hit on May 7, German Chancellor Gerhard Shroeder vowed to veto any NATO move to fight a land war in Kosovo.

•Former U.S. Army Sergeant Ali Mohamed, a native of Egypt, was indicted on charges of planning with Osama bin Laden to kill U.S. military personnel in Saudi Arabia and Somalia and the bombing of the U.S. Embassy of Nairobi and other sites.

May 20: NATO commander Gen. Wesley Clark urged that some 45,000 to 50,000 troops be amassed on Kosovo’s borders.

•Semdin Sakik, the top lieutenant to Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan, was sentenced to death by a Turkish court for PKK attacks which killed 283 people.

May 21: Belgrade indicated it no longer objected to NATO troops forming the core of an international peacekeeping force in Kosovo. Meanwhile, 20 inmates, guards and officials were killed when NATO warplanes carried out several attacks on a maximum-security prison in Istok and at least 10 other people were wounded in airstrikes on western Kosovo.

•In a closed hearing, U.S. authorities arrested on charges of perjury Florida resident Ihab M. Ali, who had traveled to New York City in response to a request that he testify before a federal grand jury investigating an alleged worldwide conspiracy involving Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden.

•The U.N. Security Council extended for six months Iraq’s oil-for-food program.

May 22: Saying, “He completely destroyed the Likud Party,” former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir blamed defeated Prime Minister Netanyahu for their party’s loss in national elections, falling from 32 to 19 Knesset seats.

May 23: As NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia entered its third month, campaign commander Lt. Gen. Michael C. Short said allied warplanes were finally inflicting serious damage on Serb-led forces in Kosovo, and predicted the bombing would result in their destruction or departure from Kosovo within two months. Meanwhile, 14,000 ethnic Albanian refugees were reported to have fled to Macedonia in the past two days.

•More than 500 emaciated ethnic Albanian men staggered into Albania after having been held since mid-April near the town of Kosovska Mitrovica by Serb gunmen who suspected them of being KLA guerrillas. According to the U.S ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues, David Scheffer, more than 225,000 ethnic Albanian men between the ages of 14 and 59 remained unaccounted for in Kosovo.

•Iran filed an official protest with NATO over the May 19 bombing of Belgrade which, in addition to hitting a hospital, damaged the Iranian mission, the Swedish Embassy and the residences of the Norwegian and Spanish ambassadors.

•In Tehran, tens of thousands of supporters gathered to commemorate the 1997 election victory of moderate President Mohamed Khatami, who called for greater tolerance in his speech to the crowd.

•U.S. warplanes attacked Iraqi defense sites near the northern city of Mosul.

•Following his election defeat, former Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu was reported to have decided to quit politics in favor of lecturing in the U.S., where he could earn top fees from universities, political organizations and Jewish groups.

May 24: Egyptian President Mubarak criticized Israeli Prime Minister-elect Barak’s pledges not to cede control over Jerusalem or withdraw to pre-1967 borders.

•The Clinton administration announced it would begin providing Iraqi exile groups office equipment and training but, despite congressional pressure, no weapons.

May 25: In fierce fighting including air strikes, India attacked armed intruders who had crossed Kashmir’s line of control from the Pakistan side, occupying Indian positions in the disputed territory.

•As alliance warplanes bombing Belgrade attacked the official residence of President Milosevic, NATO approved plans for a heavily armed peacekeeping force of 50,000 troops in Kosovo.

•Forensic experts discovered two mass graves near Sarajevo, one containing the bodies of 30 Muslims believed murdered by Croats in the summer of 1993, the other holding the bodies of six victims of Serbian military units. More than 24,000 Bosnians are still missing from the 1992-95 war in which an estimated 200,000 people were killed.

•In Israel, Peace Now urged Prime Minister-elect Barak to stop illegal Jewish settlements, as settlers rushed to grab Palestinian land prior to Barak taking office. In Washington, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee adopted a recommendation written more than a year earlier supporting “Palestinian self-government.”

•As U.S. jets attacked a communications site in northern Iraq, a U.N. report said crop yields in the U.N.-sanctioned country were half of the previous year’s total as a result of Iraq’s worst drought on record.

May 26: Pakistan threatened to retaliate for what it claimed was India’s bombing of its territory.

•Jordan’s King Abdullah made his first official visit to the Palestinian Authority, meeting with President Arafat in Gaza City, where the two leaders stressed the need for “Arab coordination.”

May 27: Pakistan shot down two Indian planes over the Pakistani side of the Kashmir line of control.

•The international war crimes tribunal in The Hague indicted for the deportation of 740,000 and the murder of 340 Kosovo Albanians Yugoslav President Milosevic, Deputy Prime Minister Nikola Sainovic, Army Chief of Staff Aragoljub Ojdanic, and Serbian President Milan Miluntinovic and Interior Minister Vlajko Stojiljkovic.

•Yugoslav forces shelled for a second day border villages in northeast Albania from which KLA guerrillas were mounting an offensive.

•Saying “God willing, we will make a comeback,” Binyamin Netanyahu resigned from the Knesset and as leader of the Likud Party, which elected Ariel Sharon as its temporary chairman.

May 28: Four Indian soldiers were killed in Kashmir when their helicopter was shot down by Pakistan-backed guerrillas using a shoulder-fired missile.

•Palestinian leaders appealed to Israeli Prime Minister-elect Barak to rescind a May 12 decision of Defense Minister Moshe Arens of the since-defeated Netanyahu government to expand the boundaries of the illegal Jewish settlement of Ma’ale Adumin by 3,000 acres to make room for a hotel, shops and other family-attractive amenities, and which would extend the settlement’s border to the municipal limits of Jerusalem. Although the U.S. State Department called the decision “a provocative act,” Ma’ale Adumin Mayor Benny Kashriel said the extension was first approved in 1994 by the Labor government of Yitzhak Rabin.

•Turkish President Suleyman Dermirel approved a coalition government headed by Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit of the Party of the Democratic Left, with Devlet Bahceli of the right-wing Nationalist Movement Party as deputy prime minister.

•The Israeli submarine Dakar, which disappeared in 1968 with 69 sailors on board, was discovered at the bottom of the Mediterranean between Crete and Cyprus, near its original route.

May 29: France and Germany called for a meeting of the G-7 to assess whether President Milosevic was prepared to accept NATO terms for ending its bombing of Yugoslavia.

•American and British jets patrolling Iraq’s southern “no-fly” zone attacked three military sites after being fired on.

May 30: NATO planes attacking the Yugoslav town of Varvarin near Kosovo bombed a bridge over the Velika Morava River, killing at least nine civilians and wounding 28 others who were trying to assist victims of a NATO attack minutes earlier on a crowded riverfront market. NATO planes later bombed a convoy of journalists in Kosovo, wounding three European reporters and killing a driver.

•As Israeli Prime Minister-elect Barak named as his chief of staff Danny Yatom, who resigned as head of Israel’s Mossad following the 1997 botched assassination attempt in Amman of Hamas official Khaled Meshal, outgoing Prime Minister Netanyahu said he had held secret negotiations with Syria “for about a year.”

•India said it had pushed Pakistan-backed guerrillas back toward Kashmir’s line of control.

May 31: Saying it had become too dangerous, Israel’s proxy South Lebanon Army began withdrawing from the mainly Christian enclave of Jezzine. Elsewhere in south Lebanon, an SLA shell fired at Hezbollah guerrillas landed inside a U.N. peacekeeping post, killing an Irish soldier and wounding two others.

•As EU foreign ministers agreed to send Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari to meet first with Russian and U.S. envoys in Bonn, then with President Milosevic in Belgrade, President Clinton said Europeans would contribute most of the manpower and cost of rebuilding Yugoslavia. Meanwhile, NATO killed 27 more civilians when it bombed a sanitarium and nearby retirement complex in southern Serbia.

•While continuing its bombing of some 700 guerrillas in Kashmir, India agreed to hold talks with Pakistan.

•On the opening day of his trial Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan, facing the death penalty, said, “For peace and brotherhood, I am ready to serve the Turkish state, and for this end I must remain alive.”

June 1: As NATO warplanes mistakenly bombed Albania and, in an attack on “first defense lines” near Belgrade, killed Lt. Gen. Ljubisa Velickovic, Yugoslavia’s deputy chief of staff and former air force chief, U.S., Russian and EU officials meeting in Bonn reported progress toward reaching a unified position on terms for ending the 10 weeks of warfare on Yugoslavia. President Slobodan Milosevic said in a letter he was ready to withdraw troops from Kosovo and accept a “United Nations presence” there. Meanwhile, in Washington, President Bill Clinton met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff to discuss a possible ground invasion of Kosovo.

•Egytian Foreign Minister Amr Moussa urged Israeli Prime Minister-elect Ehud Barak to form a government that would revive the Mideast peace process.

•Pakistan said it repulsed three Indian ground offensives on frontier outposts in Kashmir.

•Najam Sethi, a prominent Pakistani newspaper editor jailed for the past month, was formally charged with activities harmful to his country’s “safety, security and sovereignty” because of a speech he made in India referring to Pakistan as a “failing state.”

•Tehran’s city council unanimously elected as mayor Morteza Alviri, a moderate and ally of President Khatami, to replace his moderate predecessor and Khatami ally Gholamhossein Karbaschi, imprisoned on corruption charges.

•Hezbollah guerrillas attacked SLA troops retreating from Jezzine, killing two SLA soldiers.

June 2: Finnish President Ahtisaari and Russian envoy Viktor Chernomyrdin flew to Belgrade and presented President Milosevic with a modified, nonnegotiable peace plan.

•Guerrillas occupying Indian positions in Kashmir rejected an offer of safe passage if they would return to Pakistan.

•PKK guerrillas announced their support of their imprisoned leader Abdullah Ocalan’s willingness to end 15 years of hostilities with Turkey if his life is spared.

•Pakistan, which had been under pressure from Western governments and human rights groups, dropped sedition charges against journalist Najam Sethi.

•After being targeted by radar, U.S. warplanes attacked Iraqi command-and-control centers near the northern city of Mosul, killing three civilians.

June 3: President Milosevic and the Serb parliament accepted NATO’s terms for ending its attack on Yugoslavia.

•Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip held a “Day of Rage” to protest the continued expansion of Jewish settlements.

•An Iraqi military spokeman said U.S. and British warplanes bombed civilian targets in the northern “no-fly” zone.

•Turkish police in Istanbul killed two radical leftists as they were allegedly about to attack the U.S. consulate there.

•Turkey imprisoned human rights advocate Akin Birdal, convicted of “inciting the people to enmity...along religious, linguistic or racial lines” for his calls for a peaceful settlement with Kurdish rebels.

•The Egyptian parliament overwhelmingly nominated President Hosni Mubarak for a fourth six-year term.

June 4: While accelerating peace preparations, NATO continued its bombing of Yugoslavia, saying it would end when Serbian troops begin withdrawing from Kosovo.

June 5: NATO officials and Yugoslav military officers met for more than five hours on the Kosovo border, but failed to agree on withdrawal terms.

•Lebanese President Emile Lahoud arrived in Jezzine to help celebrate the withdrawal of the Israeli-backed South Lebanon Army.

June 6: A top rebel commander said the KLA would disarm if Yugoslav forces withdraw from Kosovo and NATO assumes control of the province.

•India resumed its bombing of Pakistan-backed guerrillas in Kashmir.

•Algeria’s Islamic Salvation Army said it had “decided to abandon definitively its armed activities against the authorities,” and President Abdelazia Bouteflika promised amnesty to the rebels and their supporters.

June 7: As negotiations over the details of Serb withdrawal from Kosovo broke down after two days of talks, NATO said it would intensify its bombing of Yugoslavia. Meanwhile Russia refused to approve a resolution for presentation to the U.N. Security Council on the future of Kosovo and the role of a peacekeeping force.

•As Prime Minister-elect Barak continuing his efforts to form a coalition government, pledged to curtail Jewish settlement building and “race forward” with the peace process, the 120 members of Israel’s 51st Knesset, including longtime Arafat adviser Ahmed Tibi, were sworn into office.

•Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee asked Pakistan to “undo” the armed incursion into Kashmir.

•Iran arrested 13 Jews in the southern Fars Province on charges of spying for Israel.

•The ruling Taliban forces were reported to have launched a major offensive in northern Afghanistan.

•At the request of defense lawyers, Scottish High Court Judge Lord Sutherland agreed to an extension until February 2000 of the trial of the two Libyan suspects in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103.

June 8: As the U.S., NATO and Russia agreed on a Kosovo peacekeeping presence, several hundred Serb-led Yugoslav troops were believed killed in a single U.S. B-52 cluster-bomb attack near the Kosovo-Albanian border, and KLA guerrillas attacked Yugoslav forces in Kosovo and were suspected of an ambush of civilians. In Germany, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright met with three rival ethnic Albanian leaders, urging them to work together for a democratic Kosovo.

•India and Pakistan agreed to hold talks on Kashmir.

•Turkish prosecutors demanded death by hanging for PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan.

•In southern Lebanon, gunmen opened fire on a courtroom in Sidon, killing three judges and the prosecutor and wounding five people.

•U.S. warplanes bombed Iraqi antiaircraft artillery near the northern city of Mosul, killing one person.

June 9: NATO strikes came to a virtual halt as Yugoslav military representatives signed an agreement calling for the withdrawal of their troops from Kosovo within 11 days and their replacement by a NATO-led armed peacekeeping force.

•As its planes bombed guerrilla positions near the line of control, India sent reinforcements to Kashmir.

•Israeli and Palestinian officials said some 1,500 Palestinians stranded in Egypt since 1982, when Camp David agreement boundaries divided southern Gaza’s Canada refugee camp, will be allowed to return to Gaza over the next two years.

•Israel retaliated with airstrikes after Hezbollah guerrillas ambushed an Israeli patrol in southern Lebanon, killing two soldiers and wounding four others.

•In the second attack in a week, six members of the exiled opposition People’s Mojahedin of Iran were killed in a truck bomb attack on the bus in which they were traveling in Baghdad. An Iraqi civilian on another bus also was killed.

June 10: As Serb troops began withdrawing from Kosovo, President Clinton, saying the Western alliance has “achieved a victory,” announced the end of NATO’s 11-week war on Yugoslavia. In New York, the Security Council approved a resolution authorizing the NATO-led peacekeeping force in Kosovo, with the U.N. in administrative charge of the province.

•Although his driver was hospitalized after being struck in the head, Nazareth Mayor Ramez Jeraisi, a Christian, was not injured in an attack by club-wielding Muslim demonstrators, three of whom were arrested in a continuing controversy over the use of a plaza in front of the Church of the Annunciation.

June 11: The first units of NATO’s KFOR force, in helicopters and military vehicles, entered Kosovo at dawn. In a surprise move, Russian troops arrived in advance of NATO troops, occupying the Pristina airport.

•In an agreement with the INS, five of eight Iraqi dissidents brought to the U.S. in 1986 after the failure of CIA-financed efforts to overthrow Saddam Hussain and imprisoned since 1987 on secret evidence would be sent to Lincoln, NE where they would be free to live and work until their deportation was arranged to one of 74 countries where they could live safely.

•U.S. and Libyan representatives held their first official meeting in 18 years, with the U.S. saying it would not support the complete lifting of sanctions until Tripoli stopped supporting international terrorism and met other U.N. conditions.

•Baghdad accused Iran of firing three surface-to-air missiles at an opposition People’s Mohajedin base in Iraq.

June 12: India and Pakistan broke off Kashmir peace talks after eight hours.

June 13: Departing Serbian troops torched houses, U.S. troops guarded a suspected mass grave site, two Serbs were killed and a German soldier wounded, and sniper fire killed two German journalists near the southern city of Stimlje as NATO’s KFOR peacekeeping troops began entering Kosovo and Serebian civilians fled the province. Meanwhile, Serbian opposition leader Zoran Djindjic urged the West to “make a distinction between Milosevic’s government and the cities and people of Yugoslavia.”

•After an all-night battle with guerrillas, Indian troops captured a key mountain peak in Kashmir.

•Israel denied Palestinian lawyer Mohammed Oudeh reentry to the West Bank, where he has lived for the past three years in Ramallah, following the publication of Oudeh’s autobiography, in which he described smuggling arms into Germany in 1972 and transporting Palestinian gunmen to the Olympic village in Munich, where Israeli athletes were taken hostage and 11 killed in a bungled rescue operation.

•In his first trip outside Libya since the lifting of travel sanctions, Col. Muammar Qaddafi flew to Cape Town to attend South African President Nelson Mandela’s farewell to Parliament. Mandela had earlier suggested that critics of Qaddafi’s visit “go jump in a pool.”

June 14: Indian Prime Minister Vajpayee ruled out further peace talks with Islamabad until Pakistan-backed guerrillas withdraw back to the Kashmir line of control.

•Outgoing Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu ordered that some 2,500 to 3,500 Ethiopian Jews be brought to Israel quickly.

June 15: Serbia’s Orthodox Church called on President Milosevic to resign.

•U.S. warplanes attacked Iraqi antiaircraft artillery in the northern city of Mosul.

June 16: As U.S. Marines confiscated the weapons of some 100 KLA troops, more than 12,000 ethnic Albanian refugees began returning to Kosovo from Albania.

•In two waves of air raids on alleged Hezbollah sites, Israel’s warplanes attacked northeast Lebanon near Syria, the farthest north it had attacked this year, followed by a second sortie in the Ya’atar area north of its occupation zone in southern Lebanon.

•The U.S. indicted alleged Osama bin Laden associates Ayman al-Zawahiri, thought to be in Afghanistan, and Khalid al-Fawwaz, in British custody, for the 1998 bombing of two American embassies in Africa.

June 17: Leaders of the Serbian Orthodox Church and NATO’s Maj. Gen. John Drewienkiewicz of Britain urged Kosovar Serbs not to flee the province as ethnic Albanian residents returned.

June 18: President Clinton ordered a delay of at least six months in the congressionally mandated relocation of the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

•After three days of intense negotiations, the U.S. and Russia signed a military agreement integrating Russian troops into NATO’s Kosovo peacekeeping force.

•As Indian commandos parachuted behind guerrilla lines in Kashmir, Prime Minister Vajpayee rejected international mediation with Pakistan.

•Israeli Prime Minister-elect Barak revived the idea of a “highway on pillars,” with no intermediate on- or off-ramps, between the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

•U.S. warplanes bombed a radar installation in northern Iraq.

June 19: NATO commanders reached a tentative agreement with KLA leaders to disband gradually the separatist army, while agreeing to consider reforming it on the model of the U.S. National Guard.

June 20: With an estimated 122,000 Kosovar Serbs having fled the province and the last of some 40,000 Serbian forces having withdrawn a few hours ahead of the deadline, NATO formally declared an end to its air war on Yugoslavia. In Germany, G-8 leaders outlined a plan for Balkan aid and political support, stipulating that Belgrade must adopt “democratic and economic reforms” to be eligible for assistance.

June 21: The PLO central committee postponed its meeting to discuss Palestinian statehood until after Israeli Prime Minister-elect Barak forms a new government.

•A day after driving Islamic guerrillas from the highest peak overlooking India’s northern highway in Kashmir, Indian soldiers recaptured another Himalayan outpost.

•KLA political leader Hashim Thaqi urged fleeing Serbs to return and live in “a democratic Kosovo.”

•Israel’s Tourism Ministry announced that rival Christian sects had agreed to decide on a location for a new door to Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulcher, with church leaders assuming custody of the key, entrusted to two Muslim families since the 12th century.

June 22: Israeli police using rubber bullets shot Knesset member and former prime ministerial candidate Azmi Bishara, and seriously wounded the doctor assisting him, during a protest against the demolition of an Arab family’s home in Lod.

•President Clinton visited the Stenkovic I refugee camp near the Macedonia-Kosovo border, telling ethnic Albanian refugees waiting to return to Kosovo, “NATO and the United States did the right thing.”

•U.S. warplanes attacked Iraqi radar installations around the northern city of Mosul for a second straight day.

June 23: As ethnic Albanians reportedly waged a campaign of terror to drive Serb residents from their homes in western Kosovo, U.S. Marines returning fire killed at least one person and wounded two others at a rural roadblock in southeastern Kosovo.

•In closing statements at his trial, PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan warned Turkey that if he is executed, “thousands of people will start the terror machine for me.”

•Iran said it would pay compensation for some of the factories seized after its 1979 Islamic revolution.

June 24: Targeting Lebanon’s civilian infrastructure, Israeli jets bombed power stations and bridges near Beirut, plunging much of the city into darkness, after Hezbollah guerrillas fired Katyusha rockets into northern Israeli in retaliation for an earlier mortar attack by Israeli-backed SLA troops which killed 45-year-old Saada Mansour in her home. Following the Israeli air attacks, Hezbollah again fired missiles at Qiryat Shemona and Shlomi, killing two Israeli civilians and wounding one.

•As the Yugoslav parliament voted to end the three-month state of war and lift civil liberties curbs, returning army reservists blocked highways to demand overdue pay.

•Turkish Cypriot leader Rauf Denktash rejected as “nonsense” a U.N. plan for talks with the Greek Cypriot government.

June 25: With nearly 50,000 ethnic Albanians returning in one day, NATO troops struggled to maintain order in Kosovo where, in the capital of Pristina, 14 people were killed in a 24-hour period.

June 26: In an interview with London’s Arabic-language newspaper Al Hayat, Israeli President Ezer Weizman said Israel should return the Golan Heights to Syria.

June 27: Algeria’s state-run radio said 100,000 Algerians had been killed in the country’s seven-year conflict between the government and Islamist rebels.

June 28: After some three weeks of negotiations, Israel’s former ruling Likud Party announced it would not join the coalition government of Labor Prime Minister-elect Barak, reportedly over differences over withdrawal from the Golan Heights and other “security” issues.

•In the 56th such attack since mid-December, U.S. warplanes bombed an Iraqi military command center near the northern city of Mosul.

June 29: A Turkish court sentenced PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan to death on charges of treason.

•More than 5,000 Serbs demonstrated in the city of Cacak, calling for the resignation of Yugoslav President Milosevic.

•In fierce fighting, Indian troops attacked 13 guerrilla positions on a strategic mountaintop near the Pakistan frontier, three miles from Kashmir’s line of control.

June 30: Israeli Prime Minister-elect Ehud Barak announced that he had succeeded in forming a coalition government with six parties, including the leftist Meretz and ultra-Orthodox Shas religious party but not the former ruling Likud.