Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, October/November 1998, pages 119-122

Facts for Your Files

July-August 1998 Chronology of U.S.-Middle East Relations

Compiled by Janet McMahon

July 1, 1998: While welcoming the Clinton administration’s softer tone toward Tehran, Iranian President Mohammad Khatami said, “Honesty lies in action, not words.”

—The U.S. modified its stance on an immediate withdrawal of Serb forces from Kosovo, saying a cease-fire probably would have to be negotiated first.

July 2: Israel retaliated with airstrikes and artillery after Hezbollah guerrillas attacked 18 Israeli and SLA military positions in southern Lebanon, briefly taking control of one.

—Israel demolished four Palestinian homes in the West Bank.

July 3: In the most serious confrontation in some two years, Israeli troops and armored personnel carriers and Palestinian police armed with automatic weapons conducted a 12-hour standoff in Gaza. It began when Israeli soldiers refused to permit a Palestinian Authority official’s entourage to accompany him down a coastal road. In response, Palestinian police set up roadblocks throughout the Gaza Strip and scores of residents abandoned their vehicles on a road leading to a Jewish settlement.

—Serbian forces retook the Kosovo town of Kijevo after a two-week siege by ethnic Albanian separatists.

July 4: Some 200 Palestinian Orthodox Christians demonstrated outside the Old City’s Jaffa Gate to protest the Greek-administered Orthodox Patriarchate’s selling of church lands in Nazareth, Jaffa and Jerusalem to Israelis.

—Fighting between ethnic Albanian and Serb forces erupted on the outskirts of Suva Reka, causing fears of an escalation of the conflict in Kosovo and of a new large-scale exodus of the 60,000 area residents.

July 5: Meeting in Cairo to discuss the deadlocked Middle East peace process, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, King Hussein of Jordan, and Palestinian President Yasser Arafat denounced Israel’s plan to expand unilaterally the municipal boundaries of Jerusalem.

—The Algerian government celebrated the 36th anniversary of the country’s independence from France by banning the official use of all languages except Arabic, despite opposition from Berbers, who constitute one-third of the population, and other Algerians.

July 6: After Labor Knesset members collected enough signatures to demand a special parliamentary session, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu appeared before the Knesset for the first time in seven months to debate the peace process, trading insults with opposition members, who called him a liar and heckled him throughout his remarks.

—As U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke and Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Nikolai Afanasyevsky met with representatives of Kosovo’s 16 ethnic Albanian political parties, urging them to unite behind moderate leader Ibrahim Rugova, diplomatic observer teams began patrols in Kosovo.

July 7: The U.N. General Assembly voted 124 to 4 (Israel, the U.S., Micronesia and the Marshall Islands) to upgrade Palestine’s status from observer to “super-observer,” thereby allowing Palestinian delegates to participate in U.N. debates, co-sponsor Mideast-related resolutions, and be seated in the Assembly chamber next to Switzerland and the Vatican.

—Greek Defense Minister Akis Tsohatzopoulos warned that NATO threats of military intervention in Kosovo were encouraging the Serbian province’s secession and union with Albania, which he said would be “intolerable.”

July 8: Criticizing both Serb and ethnic Albanian factions, members of the six-nation “Contact Group” on the former Yugoslavia called for a cease-fire in Kosovo.

—The Palestinian Authority requested that Israel return the bodies of hundreds of Palestinians killed in skirmishes while trying to enter Israel and whose remains currently are buried in graves marked with numbers rather than names in a desert graveyard in the Jordan Valley.

—The Israeli Knesset defeated a bill calling for the conscription of ultra-Orthodox seminary students.

July 9: Bowing to pressure from American farmers, the Senate voted unanimously to exempt food exports from U.S. sanctions on India and Pakistan.

—Five Kashmiri separatists and two paramilitary soldiers were killed in gun battles near the Indian-Pakistani border.

—Egyptian President Mubarak, reportedly with permission of the U.N. sanctions committee overseeing the air travel ban to Libya, flew to Beida to visit Col. Moammar Qaddafi, recovering from hip replacement surgery.

July 11: Serbian troops shelled ethnic Albanian forces outside Pec, Kosovo’s second-largest city.

—As his trial on corruption charges neared an end, Gholamhossein Karbashi, Tehran’s reform mayor and ally of President Mohammad Khatami, denied the allegations against him in an impassioned, four-hour courtroom speech.

July 12: Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat called on the U.S. to make public its proposal for an Israeli withdrawal from an additional 13 percent of the West Bank, adding that the Palestinian Authority would not agree to renegotiate the terms of the plan, which it accepted in May and which Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has refused to accept despite U.S. pressure.

July 13: The U.N. Security Council unanimously adopted a statement, as opposed to a binding resolution subject to a U.S. veto, calling Israel’s plan to expand Jerusalem’s municipal boundaries “a serious and damaging development” and calling on the Jewish state “not to take any other steps which would prejudice the outcome of the permanent status negotiations.”

—The State Department announced that Israeli and Palestinian negotiators would soon meet face-to-face for the first time in months. “Nobody here wants to bring the Palestinians the bad news [about continued Israeli rejection of the latest U.S. plan],” explained a U.S. official, “so they have to hear it directly from the Israelis.”

—Meeting in Moscow, President Boris Yeltsin and Cypriot President Glafcos Clerides said that the planned delivery of Russian S-300 anti-aircraft missiles to the Greek Cypriot government would proceed as planned.

July 14: For the third time in three weeks, the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait was evacuated because of a bomb threat. The threats began after the embassy warned Americans in Kuwait to beware of terrorist attacks following Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden’s vow to attack U.S. targets.

—In Kashmir, Indian security forces killed 10 separatist guerrillas.

July 15: Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu met with his security cabinet, again failing to reach a decision on the U.S. proposal for a 13 percent Israeli withdrawal from the occupied West Bank.

—Palestinian President Arafat ended his visit to China with promises of financial and moral backing from Chinese leaders who said, “A just cause gains abundant support,” and who had made no agreement on bilateral cooperation with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, who visited the country in May.

—The Senate unanimously agreed to allow President Clinton to waive temporarily most remaining economic sanctions on India and Pakistan.

—The Sudanese People’s Liberation Army declared a three-month “unconditional and unilateral” cease-fire, and the Khartoum government agreed to a one-month truce, to allow food shipments to reach hundreds of thousands of people facing famine in southern Sudan.

July 16: On his first official visit to the West in some 22 years, Syrian President Hafez al-Assad met with French President Jacques Chirac in Paris, where he declared that, because of Israel’s “intransigent policy,” the peace process “has been reduced to zero.”

—Serbian police broke up the first session of a self-declared ethnic Albanian parliament elected March 22 in underground voting in Kosovo, but not in time to prevent the swearing in of moderate leader Ibrahim Rugova as president.

July 18: As ethnic Albanian separatists launched a major offensive on a Serbian-held town in Kosovo, Serbian forces shelled villages along the main refugee route into, and gunrunning route from, Albania, and the Yugoslav army claimed it killed 30 rebels attempting to infiltrate Kosovo from Albania.

July 19: The separatist Kosovo Liberation Army captured Orahovac, the first city to come under their control.

—Palestinian and Israeli negotiators met in Tel Aviv for U.S.-brokered talks, and agreed to meet again.

July 20: Serbian troops recaptured Orahovac, the population of which is almost entirely Albanian, virtually destroying the city in the process and creating an estimated 20,000 refugees.

July 21: The Clinton administration said it would consider the creation of a special court in the Netherlands to try two Libyans suspected in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.

—Jordan’s King Hussein, undergoing tests at the Mayo Clinic, disclosed that he may have lymphoma.

July 22: Iran conducted its first test of a new medium-range missile.

—Algeria pledged to cooperate fully with a U.N. fact-finding team on a two-week mission to investigate the violence which has plagued the North African country since national elections were cancelled to avert an Islamist victory.

July 23: Reformist Tehran Mayor Karashi was convicted on corruption charges and sentenced to five years in prison, 60 lashes and fines of more than $300,000.

—Yemeni naval forces took control from Saudi troops of the disputed Red Sea island of Duwaima.

—Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov survived a car bomb attack near his motorcade which killed his driver and top bodyguard.

—Chief U.N. weapons inspector Richard Butler told the Security Council that Iraq had refused to turn over documents on munitions that could be used to deliver chemical and biological weapons.

—The Senate Foreign Relations Committee postponed indefinitely consideration of the controversial Freedom From Religious Persecution bill.

July 24: Following a day of shuttle diplomacy, U.S. envoy Thomas Miller left Cyprus without securing a breakthrough between the Turkish and Greek Cypriots.

July 25: For the second time in three days, Greece accused President Clinton, despite statements to the contrary, of being unwilling to resolve the Cyprus dispute.

—The U.S. abandoned plans for a secret mission in Bosnia to arrest indicted Bosnian Serb war criminals Radovan Karadzic and Gen. Ratko Mladic.

July 26: As the Yugoslav army and paramilitary police units launched their biggest offensive to date against ethnic Albanian insurgents, fighting in Kosovo spilled over into neighboring Albania, with Yugoslav and Albanian troops trading gunfire across their border for more than two hours.

—Turkish Foreign Minister Ismail Cem warned that the planned deployment of Russian-made antiaircraft missiles on Cyprus would compromise NATO security in the region.

July 27: Serbian troops drove ethnic Albanian separatists from a strategic highway linking Kosovo’s two largest cities and surrounded a key rebel stronghold near the Albanian border.

—International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors reiterated past findings of “no indication” that Iraq possesses prohibited nuclear weapons or material, but added that Baghdad’s previous attempts to conceal weapons activities made it impossible to confirm their conclusions.

—By a vote of 42 to 20, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu survived a Knesset no-confidence motion accusing him of obstructing Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.

July 29: Foreign diplomats and human rights monitors were unable to determine the fate of some 20,000 of the estimated 35,000 ethnic Albanian refugees fleeing the previous day’s Serb attack on the Kosovo town of Malisevo.

—At a regional conference being held in Sri Lanka, Prime Ministers Atal Behari Vajpayee of India and Nawaz Sharif of Pakistan met for the first time since their countries conducted atomic tests in May.

—Turkey’s parliament voted 488-12 to hold national parliamentary and municipal elections in April 1999, more than a year early.

July 31: During a meeting with U.S. special envoy Christopher Hill, Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic offered to permit diplomatic observer patrols to escort tens of thousands of ethnic Albanian refugees back to their homes in Kosovo.

—Talks between India and Pakistan being held in Sri Lanka collapsed over the issue of Kashmir, where 52 people died in fighting over the past week.

—At a conference in Paris, former U.S. Embassy press officer Barry Rosen appeared with his one-time Iranian captor, Abbas Abdi, to discuss the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis and the current state of U.S.-Iranian relations.

Aug. 2: Senior Palestinian negotiators said they were prepared to pull out of peace talks if Israel fails to present new ideas.

—Afghan’s ruling Taliban militia captured the Shebergan base of rival leader Rashid Dostum.

—Fighting erupted again between Serbian police and Kosovo Liberation Army forces.

—With Iraq demanding quick removal of sanctions, chief U.N. weapons inspector Richard Butler arrived in Baghdad for talks on the progress of a plan aimed at speeding final verification of Iraqi compliance with U.N. weapons inspections.

—Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust museum, demanded that Polish authorities immediately remove 50 crosses outside the Auschwitz death camp, placed around a 26-foot cross commemorating a 1979 Papal Mass there, saying the Christian symbols violated an agreement among it, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Polish government and the Roman Catholic Church to erect no religious, ideological or political symbols at the site.

Aug. 3: After “unfruitful” talks with U.N. weapons inspection chief Richard Butler, Iraq’s Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz accused the U.N. of prolonging sanctions through “a game of maneuvering, protraction, and blackmail.” Butler cut his Iraq visit short, returning to New York following the meeting.

Aug. 4: In Kosovo, freshly dug mass graves were discovered in the ethnic Albanian town of Prizen.

Aug. 5: Iraq said it was ending all cooperation with U.N. weapons inspectors, a position the Security Council described as “totally unacceptable.”

—Palestinian President Yasser Arafat announced a reshuffling of his cabinet, adding 10 new ministers and defiantly retaining virtually all the previous ones, even those the Palestinian Legislative Council had criticized a year ago for corruption and mismanagement.

Aug. 6: Dr. Hanan Ashrawi and Abdul Jawad Salah resigned their posts in the cabinet of Palestinian President Arafat because “comprehensive reform was not addressed in this new government formulation.”

Aug. 7: Car bombs detonated only minutes apart destroyed the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar es-Salaam, Tanzania, killing a total of 12 American and 135 African citizens, and wounding thousands.

—Serb forces overran the remaining strongholds in central Kosovo of ethnic Albanian separatists.

—In the first open confrontation since their 1994 establishment of diplomatic relations, the Vatican firmly rebuffed Israel’s efforts to block the appointment as leader of the Melkite Christians in Galilee of Archbishop Pierre Mouallem,70, a native of Palestine who became a refugee in 1948 and who previously was serving as a bishop in Brazil.

Aug. 8: The Taliban claimed to have captured the city of Mazar-e Sharif in northern Afghanistan, the last major city under control of anti-Taliban forces.

Aug. 9: Saying, “The memory of the United States is very long and our reach is very far,” Secretary of State Madeleine Albright vowed retaliation if the bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa were found to be the result of state-sponsored terrorism.

—Following two days of intense debate, the Palestinian Legislative Council approved the new cabinet appointed by President Arafat.

—As arms inspections of new sites in Iraq were suspended, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, via his special envoy Prakash Shah, sent a message to President Saddam Hussain asking that Baghdad resume cooperation with U.N. weapons inspectors.

Aug. 10: As Taliban forces confiscated weapons from residents of Mazar-e Sharif, Iran demanded an accounting of 10 of its diplomats and a journalist allegedly seized by Afghanistan’s Islamist militia as it entered the city.

—The brother of Walid Mahmoud Qawasmeh, who died en route to a Nablus hospital after being held for 10 days in a Jericho jail by Palestinian intelligence police, said autopsy results proved his brother had been tortured.

Aug. 11: As USAID offices in Cairo were moved to the grounds of the well-fortified U.S. Embassy there, operations in U.S. embassies in Malaysia, Uganda, Swaziland and the Ivory Coast were suspended or temporarily closed down.

—Taliban troops captured Afghanistan’s key northern provincial capital of Taloqan.

—Warning that the conflict in Kosovo “can have no military solution,” the U.N. Security Council urged the Yugoslav government and ethnic Albanian separatists to negotiate their dispute.

—Following similar pledges by India and Pakistan, Israel agreed to join talks on an international treaty to halt the production of the fissile materials used to make nuclear weapons. The Jewish state, however, which had been the lone holdout on the 61-member U.N. Conference on Disarmament, indicated it still had deep misgivings about signing such a treaty.

Aug. 13: The State Department ordered a partial evacuation of the U.S. Embassy in Albania and warned American citizens to leave the Balkan country, which the previous month had extradited four alleged members of an Islamist group headed by Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden.

—Secretary of State Albright and other administration officials were reported to have intervened against surprise U.N. weapons inspections in Iraq.

—In what was seen as a serious setback to a negotiated peace in Kosovo, moderate ethnic Albanian leader Ibrahim Rugova named a negotiating team that included no representatives of the Kosovo Liberation Army.

Aug. 15: Hamas leader Imad Awadallah was reported to have escaped the Palestinian prison where he was being held on suspicion of killing Hamas bombmaker Muhyidin Sharif.

—Some 750 Iranians visited Shi’i Muslim shrines in Iraq in the first such pilgrimage in 17 years.

Aug. 16: Following Pakistan’s handing over to Kenyan authorities of Mohammed Sadiq Odeh, who allegedly admitted being involved in the bombing of U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es-Salaam as a member of Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden’s organization, the State Department ordered the evacuation of all nonessential workers at the American Embassy in Islamabad and its consulates in Lahore, Karachi and Peshawar, and warned U.S. citizens against traveling to Pakistan.

—Serb forces reported seizing the town of Junik, the organizational and weapons distribution center for the ethnic Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army.

—Jordan’s King Hussein, undergoing cancer treatment in the U.S., transferred to his brother and heir, Crown Prince Hassan, the power to shuffle the government.

—Iraqi defector and former nuclear scientist Khidhir Abdul Abas Hamza told The New York Times that Israel’s 1981 attack on the Osiraq nuclear reactor resulted in the acceleration of Iraqi efforts to build a nuclear weapon.

Aug. 17: Kenyan and U.S. investigators denied reports that Mohammed Sadiq Odeh had confessed to or implicated others in the bombings of two U.S. embassies.

—As 1,700 U.S. and NATO troops began five days of maneuvers in Albania, Serb forces captured three more villages in western Kosovo.

Aug. 18: As Washington pressed Afghanistan to expel Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden, the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad urged all non-Muslim foreigners working in Afghanistan to leave the country, and Pakistani authorities arrested two more suspects in the bombings of two U.S. embassies in West Africa.

—Saying Serb attacks must first cease, ethnic Albanian separatists rejected a Belgrade offer for an immediate start to peace talks.

—U.N. envoy Prakash Shah ended a five-day visit to Iraq having failed to persuade Baghdad to resume cooperation with U.N. weapons inspectors.

Aug. 19: The U.S. launched some 75 cruise missiles at “terrorist bases” in Afghanistan associated with Osama bin Laden and at an alleged chemical weapons facility—which Sudanese authorities maintain was a pharmaceutical plant—in Khartoum.

—Witnesses said Israel demolished 12 Palestinians homes, housing some 100 people, near the West Bank city of Hebron.

Aug. 20: Following a strongly worded statement from Iraqi Deputy Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz accusing it of succumbing to “American pressure and blackmail,” the U.N. Security Council renewed economic sanctions on Iraq.

Aug. 21: As Muslims around the world demonstrated against the U.S. missile strikes on Afghanistan and Sudan, Russian President Boris Yeltsin reacted by saying, “I am outraged, and I deplore this act.”

—The U.S. moved to freeze the financial assets of Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden, whose name had not appeared on a Treasury Department list of terrorists targeted for such seizure until after the Aug. 7 bombing of two U.S. embassies in West Africa.

—U.S. District Judge Denise Cote ordered released from prison Abdelhaleem Ashqar, who had been on a hunger strike since February after being jailed for refusing to testify before a secret grand jury investigating alleged Hamas moneylaundering in the U.S. Dr. Ashqar had been kept alive since June by forced feeding, his hands shackled to his bed to prevent him from removing the feeding tubes.

Aug. 23: As the State Department warned of possible retaliation against Americans at home and abroad for the U.S. raids on Afghanistan and Sudan, the American media and public speculated about the timing of the strikes, coming at a time when the scandal over President Clinton’s sexual involvement with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky was reaching a head.

—The Clinton administration agreed to a trial in the Netherlands by a Scottish court of two Libyans suspected in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.

Aug. 24: As the Sudanese government recalled its diplomats from Washington and London, Pakistan filed a complaint with the U.N. Security Council charging that the U.S. violated its airspace durings its missile attack on Afghanistan.

Aug. 25: A bomb exploded at a crowded Planet Hollywood franchise restaurant in Cape Town, South Africa, killing at least one woman and injuring 24 other people.

—Hezbollah guerrillas in southern Lebanon fired Katyusha rockets into northern Israeli towns, injuring at least 19 people, after an Israeli ambush in which a helicopter gunship fired a missile at the car of Hossam al-Amin as he was driving along a coastal road near the Israeli border, killing the Amal militia leader.

—A federal grand jury in New York issued a sealed indictment against Osama bin Laden for terrorist acts against the U.S. prior to the bombing of two embassies in West Africa.

—Egypt was reported to have captured Palestinian extremist Abu Nidal as he was crossing the border from Libya.

Aug. 26: Two suspects in the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Kenya, Khalid Salim and Mohammed Saddiq Odeh, were flown from Nairobi to the U.S. for trial.

—American W. Scott Ritter resigned his position as senior U.N. weapons inspector, criticizing U.S. and U.N. officials for a “surrender to the Iraqi leadership.”

—Libya accepted a plan for a Netherlands trial under Scottish law for two of its intelligence agents suspected in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103.

—Egypt denied that it was holding Abu Nidal.

Auq. 27: Jerusalem authorities approved a controversial plan to expand the city’s municipal boundaries.

—As Libyan leader Moammar Qaddafi demanded guarantees that the U.S. and Britain would not play “tricks” if he surrendered two suspects in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, the U.N. Security Council voted unanimously to suspend sanctions against Libya once Tripoli hands over the suspects for trial.

—A federal judge in Washington awarded $65 million in damages to Joseph J. Cicippio, Frank H. Reed and David P. Jacobson, who had sued the government of Iran on charges of controlling the Lebanese Hezbollah captors of the three Americans.

—A gasoline bomb was thrown at the U.S. Information Center in the Kosovo capital of Pristina, causing a fire but no injuries.

Aug. 28: The U.S. rejected Libya’s call for negotiations on trial procedures for the suspects in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103.

—At the urging of U.S., Italian and German intelligence, the Albanian government launched a broad crackdown on Arab and Islamic groups in the Balkan country.

—Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif proposed a law for an Islamic shariah legal system.

Aug. 30: In its first use of capital punishment, the Palestinian National Authority executed by firing squad two members of President Arafat’s security force, brothers Raed and Mohammed abu Sultan, for the shooting deaths of Majdi and Mohammed Khalidi, also brothers, in a family feud in the central Gaza town of Nusseirat.

—In Sarajevo, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright urged Bosnians and Croatians to support unification in upcoming September elections.

Aug. 31: As the American embassies in Ghana and Togo were closed for security reasons, U.S. officials acknowledged that they may have erred in attacking what was in fact a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan.