President Clinton and 700 FOBs Drop in On Oslo

By Lucille Barnes

When Norwegians, still hoping against hope that the “Oslo accords” will lead to an Israeli-Palestinian peace, decided to host a commemoration of the fourth anniversary of the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, they invited President Bill Clinton to attend and even offered to put up at Norwegian government expense the U.S. president and a party of up to 15 people. No answer was forthcoming from the White House until the last moment, when it became apparent that it was a good opportunity to kick off the Middle East peace process’s final status talks, which the Israelis had scheduled to start on Nov. 7. So, the White House told the Norwegians the president would be dropping by, and that his party would number 700.

The 1999 visitation from Washington must have been an eye-opener for King Harold of Norway, who spent two years living in the White House, then a kinder, gentler and apparently less crowded place, as a guest of President Franklin D. Roosevelt while Norway was under Nazi German occupation during World War II. Although the unpretentious Norwegian royalty isn’t into giant royal entourages, the king and his American guest at least had Oxford University in common, which both attended as students.

Kicking off what Friends of Bill hopefully called Oslo III, President Clinton met for an hour separately with Palestinian President Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak on Nov. 2, and then opened the first trilateral meeting of the newest phase of the marathon Middle East peace process only a few miles from where the first secretive meetings between PLO and Israeli representatives were held on an estate outside Stockholm nearly seven years earlier.

CIA Director George Tenet acknowledged for the first time in a speech at Georgetown University in mid-October that the U.S. has in its possession copies of 320,000 files that belonged to the Stasi, the former East German intelligence service. The German government has been pressing for return of the material which the U.S. “obtained” in an as-yet-undisclosed manner during the confusion that surrounded the popular dismantling of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The U.S. government won’t return the files but it will provide the German government with a master list of “identities,” meaning the real names, code names and pseudonyms of East German and West German citizens who allegedly cooperated with the Stasi.

Tenet said, however, that files relating to foreigners who worked for the Stasi in the United States, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and elsewhere will not be turned over, according to U.S. officials. The U.S. claims to have allowed NATO allies to review files on their own citizens. But it’s not clear who is reviewing files on U.S. citizens who worked for East Germany. It has been reported that some leaders of American Jewish organizations, at least one of whom is very prominent today, agreed with East German leaders to work in the United States against ending the partition of East and West Germany.

The Tenet speech also awakened echoes of the August 1998 U.S. rocket attack on the El Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, Sudan, ordered by President Clinton on the eve of his admission of an “improper relationship” with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. According to The Washington Post, CIA director Tenet declined to mention in the speech that in a written analysis one month before the attack the CIA had said that additional soil sampling would be necessary to determine conclusively whether or not the plant produced, stored or shipped deadly VX nerve gas. In mid-October Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL), chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said after a closed-door hearing on El Shifa that he “is concerned still about the standard of evidence used.” Two other committee members, Senators Bob Kerrey (D-NE) and the late John Chafee (R-RI), both said they believed the attack was justified.

Again according to The Washington Post, former administration foreign policy officials have fingered the National Security Council’s counter-terrorism coordinator, Richard A. Clarke, as the leading advocate of the strike at El Shifa. But on Oct. 20 NSC Spokesman David C. Leavy denied this, saying “the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CIA were responsible for selecting the target.” Media reports have said that after the Gulf war Clarke’s pro-Israel stands resulted in his departure from the Department of State at the time its chief inspector charged probable Israeli complicity in China’s obtaining plans for the U.S. Patriot ground-to-air missile.

Meanwhile Harvard law professor Lawrence Tribe has agreed to represent the El Shifa plant’s owner, Sudan-born Saudi businessman Salah Idris, in a lawsuit seeking $30 million in compensation from the U.S. government for destruction of the plant. Earlier the U.S. Treasury Department capitulated to a suit by Idris to force the U.S. government to release $24 million in Idris’s assets frozen after the U.S. charged Idris was linked to alleged terrorist Osama bin Laden.

Department of State sources say that at the request of Israeli Prime Minister Barak, Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs Martin Indyk will be nominated for a second tour as U.S. ambassador to Israel. Indyk, a London-born Australian citizen, came to the U.S. after living in Israel to work for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Israel’s Washington, DC lobby. With funds from the wife of an AIPAC director, Indyk then founded the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He was appointed as the National Security Council’s Middle East adviser in January 1993, after his naturalization was accelerated so that he could receive a security clearance for the top White House Middle East position.

Subsequently Indyk became the first Jewish U.S. ambassador to Israel. Later, after an open clash with a minister in Likud Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s government, Indyk returned to Washington to accept the State Department’s top Middle East position. Indyk will exchange jobs with Ned Walker, a former U.S. ambassador to Egypt and the first Arabist to be ambassador to Israel.

Convicted American spy for Israel Jonathan Jay Pollard asked Oct. 12 for a hearing by Israel’s High Court of Justice on a petition he has filed demanding that the Israeli government pay his lawyer’s fees and provide financial support for himself and his wife while he is serving a life sentence in U.S. prisons. Pollard rejected the Israeli government’s claim that the fees demanded by his lawyers are exorbitant. “It is outrageous that the respondent [the Israeli government] denies the petitioner [Pollard] the fundamental right to choose his own legal representation,” Pollard’s petition said. “The [Israeli] government spent millions of dollars funding attorneys for the petitioner. For the government these attorneys were a means of distancing itself from the petitioner and of isolating him.”

Republican Representative Sonny Callahan of Alabama has become a folk hero in Washington for, to date, keeping his vow to hold up extra funding promised Israel for territorial withdrawals specified in the Wye River agreement which it has not yet completed. Callahan has said that President Bill Clinton was not authorized to promise $1.9 billion in aid to Israel, Jordan and Palestine, as he did at Wye River, without the consent of Congress. In fact Jordan has received its share of the funds. But the $1.2 billion in supplementary funding for Israel, which would be in addition to some $3 billion in foreign aid Israel already has received for fiscal year 2000, so far has been held up.

Zionist Organization of America president Morton A. Klein, perhaps the most extreme of national Jewish leaders, has criticized Rep. Tom Campbell (R-CA) for using the slogan “Let My People Go” while talking about Arab Americans languishing in U.S. jails awaiting hearings on charges based upon “secret evidence.” Klein maintains that since the slogan was used by Moses, it is demeaning when the “people” referred to are not Jewish. Too bad that the late Dr. Martin Luther King and a whole generation of America’s most respected black and white civil rights leaders can no longer recant. Campbell, who is a co-sponsor with House Democratic Whip David Bonior of Michigan of H.R. 2121, proposed legislation to repeal the use of secret evidence authorized in the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, used the term in an Oct. 28 press conference to celebrate the release of Palestinian-born Hany Kiareldeen from 19 months of imprisonment apparently based solely on unsubstantiated charges by his extranged ex-wife (see p. 42). Klein, whose frequent over-the-top press releases are seldom denounced by mainstream Jewish leaders, said Campbell should apologize for use of the phrase because Klein “sees no moral equivalence between suspected terrorists and the Jews in ancient Egypt or the Soviet Union.” Never mind that none of the nearly 30 “suspected terrorists” presently in U.S. jails on secret evidence charges have been convicted of any crimes.

In a Sept. 24 column in The Jewish Week of New York headlined “Rough Justice,” columnist J.J. Goldberg, son of former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Arthur Goldberg and author of the highly-praised book Jews in American Politics, described how the World Jewish Congress and its allies “pursue justice” for Jewish Holocaust victims. “First, get the Germans, Swiss or whoever to sit down,” Goldberg wrote. “Then bring in a top U.S. government official—usually Deputy Treasury Secretary Stuart Eizenstat—as mediator. Keep up the public heat through congressional hearings. In the background, maintain a threat of boycotts by American city and state governments, organized by New York City Comptroller Alan Hevesi. That combination brings results, like the Swiss banks’ $1.25 billion, advocates say. And it doesn’t give the other side an opening for endless motions, writs and depositions.”

For those who don’t remember Stuart Eizenstat from before his Clinton administration political appointment to ambassadorial rank, he was a Jewish community activist in Maryland and before that a domestic political adviser in the Carter White House. Maybe after he goes back to civilian life he can work with the Palestinians when they start traveling down the same road for reimbursement from the government of Israel for displacement from their homes, lands, country and even identity.

Former South African President Nelson Mandela, this writer’s candidate for the world’s “outstanding man of the 20th century,” took another step toward making himself a non-person in the U.S. media. In Gaza while making his first visit to Palestinian-ruled areas and Israel as part of an itinerary that already had taken him to Iran and Syria, he urged Israel to withdraw its occupation forces from the Palestinian territories, south Lebanon, and Syria’s Golan Heights. Mandela, who since the end of apartheid in South Africa has made a point of supporting leaders and nations that supported his people’s successful struggle against apartheid, is a long-time supporter of the Palestine Liberation Organization and of Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his wife Sara were questioned by Israeli police Oct. 20 after police seized a number of valuable items they said the couple may have kept illegally after Netanyahu left office. Police said the searches were connected to an ongoing investigation into allegations that Netanyahu accepted illegal favors from a contractor, Avner Amedi, while in office. The Netanyahus were questioned for more than seven hours on the matter in September. Amedi’s lawyer, Yaron Rabinovitch, said his client had promised to provide information on the Netanyahus as part of a plea bargain. The Israeli army radio said Amedi will admit to bribery but not serve jail time.

Reaction among Pakistanis in the United States to the return to military government in Pakistan has been muted. But Washington journalists expressed concern at reports that after members of former Prime Minister Mian Nawaz Sharif’s cabinet were told by the government of Gen. Pervez Musharraf to vacate their residences in Islamabad’s ministerial enclave, former Information Minister Mushahid Hussein was ordered to remain in his second floor apartment. His telephone lines and tv cables have been cut and neither he, his wife, his mother, nor his school-age son have been allowed by army guards to descend to the ground floor, appear on the balcony, or receive visits from his sister-in-law and mother-in-law. While some other Sharif loyalists also reportedly are under house arrest, the fact that Hussein was singled out among the ministers for continued detention has attracted attention. As a prominent journalist before joining the Sharif government, Hussein was a frequent visitor to the U.S., where he has family connections and where he spoke to American Muslim and Pakistani-American audiences.

Iranian President Mohammad Khatami’s late October visit to Paris gave everyone a good chance to vent. His more conservative rivals within Iran’s Islamist government complained via the hard-line daily Jomhuri-Eslam that French President Jacques Chirac’s invitation was “not an honor” because of France’s “ negative activities against the Islamic revolution.” Kayhan, another conservative Tehran daily, complained also that China’s president had received a more elaborate reception in Paris. Meanwhile, after a “tip” from the Iranian government, France closed its borders to Iranian visitors from neighboring European countries and staged dawn raids to arrest known supporters of the principal Iranian opposition group, the National Council of Resistance of Iran. Nevertheless, NCR supporters managed to pelt Khatami’s motorcade with eggs on the first day of his visit, and station sign-carrying protesters at other points along his itinerary.

Preceding the Khatami visit to France was a mid-September visit to Tehran by Austrian President Thomas Klestil. It was the first visit by a head of state from the European Union since the Islamic revolution of 1979, and it drew strong criticism from Austria’s Green Party and the NCR of Iran.

Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman is the Egyptian opponent of the government of President Hosni Mubarak who is serving a life sentence in a U.S. prison on charges he was the spiritual leader of the terrorists who bombed the World Trade Center in New York City in 1993, killing six persons and injuring 1,000. In early October his wife, Aisha Hassan Mohammed, faxed a statement to the French AFP news agency saying her 61-year-old blind husband’s health is deteriorating. A diabetic, he suffers from heart problems, has lost the sense of feeling in his hands, and has shed 36 kilograms since he was jailed, she reported.

A New York appeals court upheld the sentences of Sheikh Omar and nine others convicted in the same plot in August of this year. In the same month, however, Egyptian Interior Minister Habib al-Adly said Sheikh Omar would be allowed to return to Egypt if U.S. authorities released him early.

Syrian Foreign Minister Farouq al Charaa underwent emergency heart surgery at the American University Hospital in Beirut Oct. 4. Lebanese newspapers said the veteran player in the Middle East peace process suffered a life-threatening tear in his aorta, the body’s main artery. Lebanese Health Minister Karam Karam said the operation was successful and Lebanese Prime Minister Salim Hoss, who visited Charaa after the operation, reported “he is well.”

Mayor Ali Mufit Gurtuna of Istanbul announced in September that he would return an August visit of the mayor of Athens in a continuing series of people-to-people initiatives that followed the arrival of a Greek rescue team to lend support to Turkish victims of the Izmit earthquake. That precedent-making event was followed by the arrival of a Turkish rescue team in Greece which successfully dug out victims of an earthquake there.

Lucille Barnes covers Washington, DC for U.S. and Middle East publications.