August/September 1996, Page 121

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

Compiled by Janet McMahon

June 1: Following the election of Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu as Israel’s next prime minister, King Hussein of Jordan told reporters he believed “the peace process has every possibility of continuing. This is an internal Israeli affair,” he added. “It is nothing to worry about.”

June 2: Israeli Prime Minister-elect Netanyahu called on “all the Arab leaders and all of our neighbors, our Palestinian neighbors…to join us on the road to real peace with security.”

Responding to questions about Israel’s new hard-line government, Secretary of State Warren Christopher said the U.S. “will have to adapt our policy to the current situation.”

Following a meeting in Geneva with the presidents of Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia, Secretary of State Christopher said elections scheduled for September would go ahead as planned, and that the U.S.-led Bosnian peacekeeping mission would start conducting “more visible and proactive patrols” to ensure greater freedom of movement and possible apprehension of indicted war criminals.

June 3: Palestinian President Yasser Arafat called on Prime Minister-elect Netanyahu to honor Israel’s commitment to withdraw from the West Bank city of Hebron. In Cairo, following a meeting with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Syrian President Hafez Al-Assad said he doubted talks with Israel would resume soon and that “things are not going ahead in a positive direction.”

Bahrain’s minister of state for cabinet affairs and information, Muhammad Mutawa, announced the arrest in May of 29 militants accused of having been trained by Iran to overthrow the ruling Khalifa family and install a Shi’i government. Mutawa also said Bahrain, while not breaking relations with Iran, was recalling its ambassador from Tehran.

June 4: Bahraini Interior Minister Mohammad bin Khalifa al-Khalifa said an additional 44 suspects, 34 of whom had already confessed, had been arrested in connection with an alleged Iranian plot to overthrow the government.

June 6: Following the resignation of Turkish Prime Minister Mesut Yilmaz and the resulting collapse of the coalition government with former Prime Minister Tansu Ciller, Islamist Refah (Welfare) Party leader Necmettin Erbakan demanded the right to form the next government. Meanwhile, Ankara rejected a U.S. aid package after the House of Representatives voted to condition it on Turkey’s policies toward neighboring Armenia.

June 8: Following a two-day meeting in Damascus, Presidents Assad of Syria and Mubarak of Egypt and Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia announced that an Arab summit would be held June 21-23 in Cairo to discuss the implications of Binyamin Netanyahu’s election as Israeli prime minister.

June 9: Croatian police arrested Zlatko Aleksovski, one of nine Bosnian Croats indicted by the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague.

At OPEC’s midyear meeting in Vienna, Gulf oil producers, along with Indonesia and Libya, warned other OPEC members to abide by production quotas when Iraqi oil begins to enter the market or face a flood of oil, with a resulting possible price shock, from the Gulf-state producers.

An appeals court in Abu Dhabi acquitted two and upheld the sentences of eight former officials of the Bank of Credit & Commerce International (BCCI) convicted of bank fraud.

June 10: Hezbollah guerrillas in southern Lebanon ambushed an Israeli army patrol, killing five Israeli soldiers.

For the second time in two months, Palestinian police arrested Gaza psychiatrist and human rights official Dr. Eyad el-Sarraj, who has criticized the PNA for corruption and human rights violations.

June 12: The U.N. Security Council demanded that Iraq give “immediate, unconditional and unrestricted access” to all sites its inspectors wish to investigate, including three military bases near Baghdad from which U.N. weapons inspectors recently had been barred.

Defense Secretary William Perry said he will recommend that U.S. ground troops remain in Bosnia beyond the December pull-out date if NATO determines that a withdrawal would jeopardize peace.

The State Department said it would impose sanctions on China if the M-11 missiles Beijing sold to Pakistan are deployed.

June 13: Hanan Ashrawi, former spokeswoman for Palestinian peace negotiating teams, was reported to have accepted the position of Palestine’s minister for international affairs.

Members of the international Peace Implementation Council, meeting in Florence, agreed that Bosnian elections should take place in September as scheduled, despite the fact that specific terms of the Dayton accord—including the return of refugees to their homes, free travel throughout the country, establishment of a free press, and the arrest of indicted war criminals—have yet to be met. In Brussels, U.S. and NATO officials agreed to put off until September a decision on the timetable for withdrawal from Bosnia.

June 14: Following intense U.S. lobbying to convince the Bosnian government that the agreement would not give Bosnian Serbs the status of a separate state, the Bosnian government and Bosnian Serbs, along with their respective allies of Croatia and Serbia, signed an accord to equalize the weapons strength of the recent adversaries.

June 16: Israeli Prime Minister-elect Binyamin Netanyahu issued his “Guidelines of the Government of Israel,” which included continued Israeli occupation of the Golan Heights, opposition to a Palestinian state, the strengthening of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, and Jerusalem as Israel’s eternal capital.

June 17: As Prime Minister-elect Netanyahu continued negotiations with right-wing and religious parties on establishing a coalition government, the newly elected Israeli Knesset was sworn in and addressed by outgoing Prime Minister Shimon Peres.

June 18: After agreeing to create a new cabinet position for fellow Likud member Ariel Sharon as minister of national infrastructure, Prime Minister Netanyahu’s cabinet was endorsed by the Knesset. Appointments included David Levy as foreign minister, Dan Meridor as minister of finance, Rafael Eitan as minister of agriculture and environment, Binyamin Begin as minister of science, and New Immigrant Party founder Natan Sharansky as minister of commerce and industry. Three posts in the 20-member cabinet went to the National Religious Party, two to the New Immigrant Party, two to Shas, and one to Third Way.

June 21: The Pentagon announced that at least one Iraqi weapons storage site destroyed by U.S. troops in the week following the end of the Gulf war contained two highly toxic chemical agents.

June 22: Twenty-two Arab leaders, representing all the Arab League states except Iraq, convened in Cairo for their first summit meeting in six years. In his opening remarks, Egyptian President Mubarak called on Israel to abide by the Oslo accords and the principle of land for peace.

Iraqi officials handed over to U.N. chief arms inspector Rolf Ekeus what it said were the complete files on its banned nonconventional weapons program and signed an agreement with the U.N. pledging “immediate, unconditional and unrestricted access” to all suspect sites.

Only days after the House of Representatives passed legislation tightening the economic embargo on Iran, President Clinton told the Arabic-language Al Sharq Al Awsat newspaper published in London that the U.S. was “prepared at any time to have a full and frank dialogue” with the Rafsanjani government.

June 23: The Arab summit’s final communiqu³ called on Israel to withdraw from all occupied Palestinian land and from the Golan Heights, and to agree to East Jerusalem as the capital of an independent state. Israel’s failure to adhere to the principle of land for peace would “compel all the Arab states to reconsider steps taken in the context of the peace process vis-â-vis Israel,” the communiqué concluded. In response, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu called the statement an “attempt to…dictate prior conditions that undermine the security of Israel.”

U.S. officials said Libya had halted construction on an underground chemical weapons plant.

June 25: In Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, a massive truck bomb exploded outside an apartment complex housing U.S. military personnel, killing 19 Americans and wounding some 250 people of several nationalities.

In Jerusalem, Secretary of State Christopher held his first meeting with newly elected Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu.

Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Maleki called President Clinton’s offer of a “full and frank dialogue” with Tehran “not sincere” and “contradictory.”

June 26: Secretary of State Christopher, who flew to Saudi Arabia from Israel, and Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal said the previous day’s truck bombing would not damage the close military ties between their two countries.

Palestinian guerrillas killed three Israeli soldiers in an ambush in the West Bank town of Naaran, near Jericho.

President Clinton certified Bosnia as eligible to receive millions of dollars in U.S. reconstruction aid and a military train-and-equip program, despite the reported continuing presence of Iranian fighters in the former Yugoslav republic.

June 27: At the G-7 economic summit in Lyon, France, President Clinton urged the world’s industrial countries to focus on terrorism.

In the first such meeting, two representatives of the new Israeli government met with PNA President Arafat in Gaza.

June 28: Turkey’s Islamist Refah Party leader, Necmettin Erbakan, after forming a coalition government with former Prime Minister Tansu Ciller, was named prime minister of Turkey.

Bosnian Serb leader and indicted war criminal Radovan Karadzic presided at his Serbian Democratic Party congress.

June 29: As Radovan Karadzic was re-elected leader of the ruling Bosnian Serb party, world leaders at the G-7 economic summit warned Serbia that, if it did not use its influence to pressure the Bosnian Serb leader to resign from public office, economic sanctions might be reimposed.

Presenting his new cabinet to the Turkish parliament, Islamist Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan called for a middle course between East and West and for free market reforms, earlier having paid tribute to Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern-day secular Turkey.

June 30: Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic announced that, while not resigning, he was turning over his presidency to Biljana Plavsic, who told Belgrade television that Karadzic “remains president, and I am a vice president.”

In what was seen as a preview for Bosnian elections scheduled for Sept. 14, municipal elections to establish a single city council were held in the divided Croat-Muslim city of Mostar.