Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, October 1996, pgs. 123-125

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

Compiled by Janet McMahon

July 1: Saudi Arabia’s highest religious authority, the 21-member Council of Senior Islamic Scholars, issued a formal opinion condemning as a sin against Islam the June 25 bombing of an American military residence compound in Dhahran.

•Following initial acceptance of Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic’s plan to hand over his duties without formally resigning as president and party leader, Western diplomats demanded that the accused war criminal formally relinquish power.

•American diplomats rejected Iraqi plans for distributing food and medical supplies to be purchased through limited oil sales under an agreement with the U.N.

July 2: FBI director Louis Freeh left for Saudi Arabia for meetings with American agents and Saudi officials investigating the June 25 Dhahran truck bombing.

•Turkey’s new Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan told visiting U.S. Under Secretary of State Peter Tarnoff that Israel must “withdraw from the territories it invaded, including the Golan Heights.”

•The Defense Department announced that some 1,000 U.S. troops and their tanks would be withdrawn from Bosnia later in the month, to be replaced by military police assigned to provide security for national elections in September.

•Israeli jets attacked an ammunition depot at a Palestinian guerrilla base in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley three miles from the Syrian border.

July 3: Israeli Foreign Minister David Levy threatened to resign from the new Likud government unless Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu appointed Gen. Ariel Sharon to a cabinet position.

•In response to Western pressure, Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic agreed to abandon his bid for president.

July 6: Following Bosnian Serb threats to fire on U.S. helicopters, American peacekeeping troops moved some 20 airplanes and helicopters and more than 20 armored personnel carriers outside the compound of Gen. Ratko Mladic at Han Pijesak in eastern Bosnia. The two-day standoff ended when Bosnian Serb forces apologized for the “mistake” and allowed the American commander to inspect their military headquarters.

July 7: Investigators from the international war crimes tribunal at The Hague began exhuming bodies from as many as 12 mass graves around the former U.N. “safe area” of Srebrenica. In Mostar, the city’s EU administration declared the results of Bosnia’s first postwar election valid, with the ruling Muslim coalition narrowly defeating the Croat party due to overseas ballots.

July 8: Turkey’s parliament narrowly approved the Refah-led coalition government with former Prime Minister Tansu Ciller’s True Path Party.

•As Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu left on an official visit to the U.S., Gen. Ariel Sharon was sworn in as minister of the newly created National Infrastructures Ministry.

July 9: In a White House meeting with President Clinton, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu adhered to his hard-line positions on expansion of Jewish settlements, Israeli control of Jerusalem, and postponed Israeli troop withdrawal from Hebron.

•Hours after the Bosnian federation’s parliament passed legislation formally uniting Bosnia’s Muslim and Croat armies, President Clinton announced the U.S. would provide long-delayed military equipment and training to the new force.

•Defense Secretary William Perry testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee that U.S. military commanders in Saudi Arabia had underestimated the capabilities of terrorists in the region.

July 10: Speaking to a joint session of Congress, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu pledged to resume stalled peace negotiations but demanded “an end to terrorist attacks [on Israelis] as a prerequisite to peace.”

July 11: Palestinian leaders criticized the U.S. Congress for applauding Israeli Prime Minister Netanayahu, “the man whose words are destroying the peace process.”

•On the first anniversary of the fall of Srebrenica, the international war crimes tribunal at The Hague issued international arrest warrants for Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and army commander Gen. Ratko Mladic.

July 12: The U.S. and the other members of the Lebanon monitoring group—France, Lebanon, Syria and Israel—agreed on terms for monitoring a cease-fire in Lebanon after Israel’s 17-day April assault.

•FBI director Louis Freeh flew to Saudi Arabia for the second time in less than a week to request that U.S. officials be given access to suspects in the Dhahran bombing.

July 14: Jewish settlers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip announced plans to build 8 to 10 new settlements and expand existing ones, resulting in 300,000 to 500,000 additional Jewish settlers.

•Libya’s state-run television reported that eight people were killed and 39 injured in a soccer riot which began when spectators began shouting anti-Qaddafi slogans after the referee appeared to side with the team supported by Qaddafi’s sons. Bodyguards fired on the spectators, some of whom returned fire, causing panic and further rioting in the streets of Tripoli.

July 15: Retired U.S. diplomat Robert Frowick, head of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s (OSCE) Bosnia operation, postponed the start of the upcoming Bosnian election campaign five days to allow for the removal from power of Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic.

July 16: Two days before Prime Minister Netanyahu’s scheduled meeting with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Israel announced that it would ease the 19-week closure of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, but gave no details.

July 17: Former U.S. diplomat Richard Holbrooke returned to the Balkans in an attempt to convince Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic to press for the ouster of Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic.

•Secretary of Defense Perry, saying, “We are going to prepare for a very intense threat,” told reporters that up to 4,000 U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia will be moved to more secure bases in remote areas of the country.

July 18: In Cairo, Israeli Prime Mininster Netanyahu and Egyptian President Mubarak held their first meeting.

•U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali approved a revised Iraqi plan for distribution of food and medical supplies purchased under a U.N. agreement for limited oil sales.

July 19: U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke announced that Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic had agreed to withdraw “permanently from all political activities.”

•A federal jury in Washington, DC convicted Omar Mohammed Ali Rezaq of air piracy for the 1985 hijacking of Egypt Air Flight 648 to Malta, where Rezak killed an American and an Israeli passenger and wounded three others.

July 21: Hezbollah returned the bodies of two Israeli soldiers in exchange for the remains of 123 of its men.

July 22: The State Department authorized the departure of Saudi-based dependents of U.S. military and civilian personnel.

July 23: PNA President Yasser Arafat and Israeli Foreign Minister David Levy, meeting at the Erez checkpoint on the border between Israel and the Gaza Strip, agreed to resume peace negotiations.

•Retiring Shin Bet official Ehud Yatom admitted he murdered two Arab bus hijackers following their capture in 1984. “We put them in the van and drove off,” he said. “On the way we received instructions from [Shin Bet chief] Avraham Shalom to kill them, so we killed them.”

•The House approved legislation penalizing foreign companies which invest in the oil industries of Iran and Libya.

July 24: Defense Intelligence Service director Lt. Gen. Patrick Hughes, testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee, warned that civil war is likely to resume in Bosnia unless the international peacekeeping force, scheduled to withdraw in December, remains there next year.

•Israeli Foreign Minister Levy said he was ready to meet with his Syrian counterpart “at any place and at any time.”

July 26: President Clinton rejected convicted spy Jonathan Pollard’s plea for clemency.

•Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu ordered the West Bank sealed off following a drive-by shooting which killed two Israelis and seriously wounded a third.

July 29: As Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu told Jewish settlement leaders he favored developing settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Minister of National Infrastructures Ariel Sharon revived plans to build two major highways through the West Bank and two new bridges to the Golan Heights.

July 30: Following a White House meeting with Egyptian President Mubarak, President Clinton said, “We expect and believe that Israel will adhere to the agreements it has already made.”

July 31: Yossi Beilin, a top adviser to former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres, said that, prior to the election of Binyamin Netanyahu, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators had agreed on a blueprint for a peace accord, to include a Palestinian state with its capital in a West Bank suburb of Jerusalem.

•The U.S. and Saudi Arabia announced that several thousand U.S. troops would be moved “on an urgent basis” from Dhahran to an isolated desert air base outside Kharj, 60 miles southeast of Riyadh.

Aug. 1: The Palestinian Legislative Council debated and hundreds of Palestinians demonstrated in Nablus following the death of Mahmoud Jumayel, who was hospitalized in a coma following his detention by Palestinian police, and who was the seventh person to die in police custody.

Aug. 2: Binyamin Netanyahu’s Likud government formally lifted the four-year-old freeze on settlement expansion in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

•Following a White House meeting with President Clinton, Croatian President Franjo Tudjman agreed to dismantle a separate ministate in Bosnia and to accept the municipal election results in the divided city of Mostar.

Aug. 3: Jordan’s King Hussein, on his first visit to Syria since Jordan’s 1994 peace treaty with Israel, met in Damascus with President Hafez Al-Assad.

Aug. 4: In Mostar, separatist Croats refused to honor the results of municipal elections and reunify the Bosnian city.

Aug. 5: Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu made his first visit to Jordan, meeting with King Hussein in Amman.

•Ignoring strong international opposition, President Clinton signed legislation penalizing countries which trade with Iran and Libya.

Aug. 6: Palestinian President Yasser Arafat called Israel’s decision to expand settlements a “flagrant violation” of the Oslo accords that should be resisted “on the ground.”

•Following intense EU lobbying, Bosnian Croat leaders agreed to honor election results in Mostar.

•Turkish Foreign Minister Tansu Ciller rejected any dialogue with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which has been fighting for an independent Kurdish homeland since 1984.

Aug. 7: Meeting with Egyptian President Mubarak in Alexandria, Syrian President Assad said Israel’s offer to resume talks with Syria offered not “the slightest hope of the possibility of a forthcoming peace.”

•The U.S. dropped its opposition to Iraq’s U.N.-supervised plan for distribution of food and medical supplies paid for by selling $2 billion worth of oil every six months.

Aug. 9: Necmettin Erbakan, Turkey’s first Islamist prime minister, embarked on his first foreign tour by flying to Tehran, to be followed by visits to Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia.

Aug. 12: A week after President Clinton signed legislation mandating a secondary boycott against Iran and Libya, Turkish Prime Minister Erbakan signed a $20 billion, 23-year agreement to purchase natural gas from Iran.

Aug. 13: Israel dispatched 298 mobile homes to West Bank settlements.

•U.S. peacekeeping troops in Bosnia were placed on the highest state of alert after civilians were observed videotaping American bases, and intelligence reports indicated the possibility of a terrorist attack.

Aug. 14: Israeli and Palestinian negotiators resumed talks for the first time since the May election of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.

•In Geneva, Secretary of State Warren Christopher announced that Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic and Croatian President Franjo Tudjman had agreed to create a joint Muslim-Croat federation to govern the non-Serb half of Bosnia.

Aug. 15: A CIA report released by the Senate Intelligence Committee charged that Israel and France engage in economic espionage against the U.S.

•Sarajevo’s airport reopened to civilian flights for the first time since 1992.

Aug. 16: Thousands of Jordanians in the southern city of Karak rioted after the government, under pressure from the IMF, drastically reduced bread subsidies, causing the price of bread to nearly triple.

Aug. 17: Violent demonstrations against the increase in the price of bread erupted again in the southern Jordanian towns of Karak and Ma’an and Tafila, spreading to the capital of Amman just before midnight.

Aug. 19: Jordanian security forces rounded up scores of people following three days of rioting over the increase in bread prices.

•Despite threats of retribution, NATO peacekeeping troops began blowing up a 300-ton cache of mines and ammunition from a Bosnian Serb depot in a former schoolhouse in Margetici in northeastern Bosnia.

Aug. 23: As Croatia and Yugoslavia signed a mutual recognition accord, Western election monitors were undecided on how to correct “massive” abuse of rules for September Bosnian elections, including Bosnian Serb pressure on refugees to register as intended future residents of formerly Muslim towns now under Bosnian Serb control.

•At a three-year-old Berlin trial of Iranian Kazem Darabi and four Lebanese Hezbollah-linked codefendents charged with the gangland-style murder of Kurdish leader Sadiq Sharafkindi and three colleagues, exiled former Iranian President Abol Hassan Bani-Sadr testified that Iranian President Rafsanjani and spiritual leader Ali Khamenei had personally ordered the killings.

Aug. 25: In what was seen as implied criticism of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s rebuffs of Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, Israeli President Ezer Weizman invited the PNA leader to meet with him if the Israeli prime minister continued to refuse to do so.

Aug. 27: A recently declassified intelligence report revealed that the Pentagon, White House, CIA and State Department had been told in Novermber 1991 that an Iraqi ammunition depot blown up by U.S. troops the previous March contained chemical weapons.

•As Syrian leaders offered to resume Washington peace talks with Israel on the basis of land for peace, Russian and U.S. warships were reported off the Lebanese coast tracking Syrian troop movements from areas around Beirut toward Israeli positions in Lebanon.

•OSCE representative Robert Frowick postponed Bosnian municipal elections until next spring, while saying the voting for national offices should proceed as scheduled Sept. 14.

•U.S. intelligence was reported to have concluded that Pakistan is secretly building a medium-range missile factory using blueprints and equipment supplied by China.

Aug. 28: Saying that the expansion of Jewish settlements and other recent actions by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government amounted to a “declaration of war on the Palestinian people,” Palestinian President Arafat called for a general strike the following morning and, at Arafat’s suggestion, the Palestinian Legislative Council called for a mass gathering at Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock at Friday prayers on Aug. 30.

Aug. 29: After a morning shutdown and strike by Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, Israel’s Likud government sent several high-ranking emissaries to meet with PNA President Arafat.

•As the first shipment of American weapons promised to the Bosnian government arrived in Sarajevo, Bosnian Serbs backed by armed police surrounded a U.N. police station in Zvornik, smashing vehicles and threatening peacekeepers, after U.S. troops stopped Serb police officers attacking unarmed Muslims attempting to return to their homes in the village of Mahala.

•At a meeting of the U.N. committee overseeing sanctions on Iraq, the U.S. accused Iran of helping smuggle oil out of Iraq in violation of the sanctions.

•In New York, jury deliberations began in the case against Ramzi Ahmed Yousef and two others, charged with plotting to blow up American jetliners crossing the Pacific.

Aug. 30: The U.S. increased air patrols over northern Iraq, sent an aircraft carrier and jet fighters to the Persian/Arabian Gulf, and ordered its forces in the region “to be prepared to deploy” following what it called threatening movements by Iraqi troops against Kurdish regions in northern Iraq.

•The Palestinian response to Yasser Arafat’s call for a massive presence at Friday prayers at Jerusalem’s Al Aqsa mosque was modest and peaceful, due in part to a heavy Israeli police cordon.

•Exiled Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden was reported to have urged his supporters to launch a guerrilla war to drive U.S. troops out of Saudi Arabia.

•In Tripoli to accept the Qaddafi International Human Rights Prize, Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan called Muammar Qaddafi “my friend and...my brother” and critized the U.S. Treasury Department’s recent ruling forbidding Farrakhan from accepting a $1 billion donation from the Libyan leader.

Aug. 31: Defying U.S. warnings, President Saddam Hussain sent armored columns into the town of Irbil in northern Iraq, briefly occupying the headquarters of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and looting the home of its leader, Jalal Talabani. Saddam’s troops were acting on a call for help from Masoud Barzani, leader of the Kurdish Democratic Party and long-time rival of Talabani.

•Palestinian President Arafat warned that the intifada may resume if the Palestinian-Israeli peace process breaks down.