Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, June 2000, pages 103-104

Facts For Your File

A Chronology of U.S.-Middle East Relations

Compiled by Janet McMahon

March 1, 2000: Three of the six parties in Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s coalition government joined with the opposition to approve a draft bill mandating that a majority of all registered Israeli voters, rather than of Israelis who actually vote, be required to pass a referendum authorizing Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights.

• Dr. Hans Blix, the U.N.’s new chief arms inspector for Iraq, told a news conference that he expected Baghdad to provide unlimited access to inspectors and would not lower inspection standards, but was not seeking to humiliate Iraq.

• The trial of 13 Iranian Jews arrested along with 8 Muslims on charges of spying for Israel was set for April 13 in Shiraz.

March 2: In a daylong raid on a house in the northern Israeli Arab town of Taibeh, Israeli police and soldiers killed three Hamas members from Gaza allegedly building bombs to be used against Jewish Israeli civilians “to sabotage the peace process.”

• Students and teachers at Birzeit University near Ramallah suspended classes to protest the arrest of scores of students by Palestinian Authority security forces following a Feb. 26 stone-throwing protest against visiting French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin.

• Three Turkish soldiers and six Kurdish rebels were killed in two clashes, ending a six-week lull.

• The State Department announced it had issued a “wanted” poster for Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and Bosnian Serb leaders Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, indicted by the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague.

• U.S. and British warplanes patroling the northern “no-fly” zone bombed Iraqi air defense sites.

March 3: The latest Arab leader in two weeks to visit Lebanon in the face of Israeli attacks, Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdel Aziz ended a two-day visit during which a Hezbollah delegation met with the prince “to express our deep appreciation for the Saudi support of our resistance and…for his own distinguished support.”

• Palestinian President Yasser Arafat met with Israeli Knesset Speaker Avraham Burg.

• NATO peacekeeping troops firing tear gas and stun grenades plowed a corridor through protesting Kosovar Serbs in Mitrovica and transported some 30 ethnic Albanians in armored personnel carriers across the Ibar River to their former homes in the northern Serb sector of the divided city.

• In its harshest sentence to date, the war crimes tribunal in The Hague sentenced Croatian Gen. Tihomir Blaskic to 45 years in prison for leading a series of attacks on Bosnian Muslims between 1992 and 1994.

• Chechen rebels ambushed a Russian convoy near the capital of Grozny, killing 29 police officers and wounding 29.

March 4: Ethnic Albanians fled to Kosovo from their village of Dobrosin in southern Serbia following a gun battle between Serbian police and Albanian guerrillas.

March 5: The Israeli cabinet voted unanimously to back Prime Minister Barak’s plan for a pullout from southern Lebanon by July, whether or not a peace deal has been reached with Syria.

• The Palestinian Authority freed 30 students jailed after the stoning of visiting French Prime Minister Jospin.

• Serbian police tightened a blockade on trade with its Yugoslav federation partner, Montenegro, whose pro-Western President Milo Djukanovic has been distancing the republic from Belgrade.

• In Bosnia, British-led NATO troops arrested Dragoljub Prcac, a Bosnian Serb indicted for war crimes as deputy commander of the Omarska detention camp near Prijedor.

March 6: Jewish settler Yoram Skolnik, sentenced to life in prison for the execution-style murder of Palestinian Musa Abu Sabha, was granted parole after seven years.

March 7: Israeli Prime Minister Barak and Palestinian President Arafat met in Ramallah to discuss a proposed U.S. timetable for restarting negotiations.

• In southern Lebanon, Hezbollah guerrillas killed two SLA militiamen and wounded a third.

• Some 17 French peacekeeping troops, along with ethnic Albanian and Serb civilians, were wounded in a series of retaliatory attacks in the Kosovo city of Mitrovica.

• President Bill Clinton announced that he would visit Pakistan “for a few hours” on his upcoming visit to the subcontinent.

March 8: After a five-week impasse, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators agreed to resume talks outside Washington.

• Acting on a discrimination suit filed by Adel and Iman Kaadan, an Israeli Arab couple who had been prevented from buying a home in a Jewish community, Israel’s Supreme Court ruled 4 to 1 that the government may no longer allocate land to citizens on the basis of religion or ethnicity.

• In Brcko to declare the Bosnian city a multi-ethnic district, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was heckled by Serbs, while further south some 10,000 Bosnian Croats protested the sentencing of Gen. Dragoljub Prcac in The Hague.

March 9: Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak met with Israeli Prime Minister Barak and Palestinian President Arafat in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.

• As U.S. and British jets bombed air defense targets in northern Iraq, Baghdad complained to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan about an unapproved visit by American and Turkish officials to the Kurdish-controlled areas in northern Iraq.

March 10: In Karachi, gunmen killed Iqbal Radh, the attorney for deposed Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.

• The commander of NATO peacekeeping troops in Kosovo, Gen. Klaus Reinhardt, vowed to prevent any insurgency mounted from Kosovo into Serbia.

• Former Turkish Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan, leader of the banned Islamist Welfare Party, was sentenced to a year in prison for “provoking hatred” in a 1994 campaign speech in which he accused the secular establishment of dividing Turks and Kurds.

March 11: The Arab League met in Beirut to “reaffirm full support for Lebanon and its resistance to Israeli occupation.”

• U.S. and British jets bombing targets in southern Iraq injured eight civilians.

March 12: Some 10 days before visiting the Holy Land, Pope John Paul II asked forgiveness for the errors of the Catholic Church over the past 2,000 years, including a “confession of sins against the people of Israel.”

• State Department spokesman James Rubin arrived in Kosovo to warn ethnic Albanian leaders to halt reprisal attacks against Serbs or risk losing Western support.

• Two gunmen shot and seriously wounded leading Iranian reformer and Tehran city council member Saeed Hajjarian, managing editor of the newspaper Sobh-e-Emrouz.

March 13: Lebanese guerrilla leader Mustafa Dirani, held hostage by Israel since 1994 as one of 14 “bargaining chips,” sued Israel for $1.5 million in damages for alleged rape and sodomy during his torture and interrogation.

• The trial of Serbian Gen. Radislav Krstic, accused of organizing the 1995 massacre of some 9,000 Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica, opened in The Hague.

• The Iraq-based opposition Mojahedin Khalq claimed responsibility for a mortar attack on a residential complex adjacent to a military base in northern Tehran.

March 14: Israeli warplanes flew more than 20 bombing raids in 24 hours over Lebanon, and Israeli artillery shelling killed a Lebanese soldier and civilian.

• Secretary of State Albright warned Pakistan to “respect” the Line of Control in Kashmir and to halt terrorism against India.

• In a report to the Security Council on the humanitarian situation in Iraq, Secretary-General Kofi Annan faulted the U.S. and Britain for holding up more than $1.5 billion in humanitarian supplies.

March 15: After Israeli and Palestinian negotiators reached agreement on which areas would be transferred to Palestinian control, Israel’s security cabinet narrowly approved the long-delayed troop withdrawal from 6.1 percent of the West Bank.

• In raids on ethnic Albanian strongholds in the eastern sector of Kosovo, U.S. troops seized bombs and other weapons and detained nine suspected anti-Serb rebels.

• U.S. and British warplanes killed an Iraqi civilian and wounded six others in 36 sorties over the southern “no-fly” zone.

March 17: Secretary of State Albright, in a speech to the American-Iranian Council, acknowledged past U.S. errors toward Tehran and announced the lifting of sanctions on the U.S. import of Iranian rugs, caviar and nuts. While welcoming the overture, Iranian officials called the offer to open official talks “unrealistic.”

• Lebanon granted political asylum to former Japanese Red Army member Kozo Okamoto “because of the suffering he endured in Israeli prisons” as the only surviving gunman of a 1972 Red Army attack on an airport near Lod in which 26 people died.

March 18: The day before President Clinton’s arrival in the subcontinent, Indian and Pakistani troops exchanged heavy artillery fire along the Line of Control in Kashmir.

March 20: Pope John Paul II arrived in Amman, Jordan, the first stop on his historic visit to the Holy Land.

• Following a drive-by attack on an Israeli vehicle which wounded three of the seven occupants, Israeli soldiers killed a Palestinian woman and wounded her husband when the Israelis opened fire on the couple’s car near the Jewish settlement of Tsurif.

• Unidentified gunmen massacred 35 Sikh men in the remote Kashmiri village of Chati Singhpura Mattan.

• The trial of three Bosnian Serb men accused of gang raping and enslaving Bosnian Muslim women in the town of Foca opened in The Hague.

March 21: Arriving in New Delhi, President Clinton endorsed India’s position on Kashmir, rejecting a Pakistani request that the U.S. referee the dispute, while Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee rejected the American president’s calls for India to curb its nuclear program and sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

• Palestinian and Israeli negotiators met at Bolling Air Force Base outside Washington, DC to resume talks on a “framework agreement.”

• Pope John Paul II was welcomed to Israel by Prime Minister Barak, cabinet members and President Ezer Weizman, who made repeated references to a united Jerusalem as Israel’s “eternal capital.”

• Iraqi officials blamed Iran and the U.S. for a mortar attack on a Baghdad apartment building which killed at least four people and wounded 38.

March 22: Pope John Paul II celebrated Mass in Bethlehem’s Manger Square, met with Palestinian President Arafat, and visited the Dheisheh refugee camp.

March 23: Pakistani Gen. Pervez Musharraf announced that local elections would be held between December 2000 and July 2001.

• Pope John Paul II visited Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, and attended an interfaith gathering in Jerusalem.

March 24: As Secretary-General Kofi Annan warned that “the humanitarian situation in Iraq poses a serious moral dilemma” for the U.N., the U.S. agreed to double the amount of money Iraq may spend to repair its oil infrastructure.

• U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson ordered Iran to pay $341 million to Terry Anderson, held hostage for nearly seven years by Lebanese captors whom the judge ruled were controlled by Tehran.

March 25: Following an Islamabad meeting with Gen. Pervez Musharraf in which he asked the Pakistani leader to show restraint in Kashmir, President Clinton addressed a Pakistan-wide audience in a live television broadcast.

• Iran’s conservative Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei described the U.S. as Iran’s “enemy because America’s past behavior is full of acts of hostility and treason.”

• Four State Department officials arrived in Tripoli to assess security arrangements and whether to recommend the lifting of a ban on travel to Libya by Americans.

• Pope John Paul II celebrated Mass at the Basilica of the Annunciation in Nazareth, site of a controversial mosque to be built on the basilica’s square.

March 26: Returning to the U.S. from his South Asia visit, President Clinton stopped in Geneva to present Israeli proposals on an international border to Syrian President Hafez Al-Assad, who reiterated his proposal of a full return of the occupied Golan Heights in exchange for a full peace.

• On the last day of his week-long pilgrimage, Pope John Paul II visited Jerusalem’s Old City, where he met with Muslim leaders at the Haram al-Sharif, celebrated Mass at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, and tucked a note asking forgiveness into the Western Wall.

March 27: Israeli Interior Minister Natan Sharansky announced he would return 250 acres of land confiscated from the Israeli Arab village of Kafr Kassem and given to the neighboring Jewish town of Rosh Haayin.

• Uday Hussain, son of the Iraqi president, was elected to the national legislature by 99.99 percent of voters in Iraq’s second parliamentary elections since the 1991 Gulf war.

March 28: President Clinton, meeting with Egyptian President Mubarak at the White House, said the next move in stalled Syrian-Israeli negotiations was up to Syrian President Assad, but that the U.S. expected to “continue to see progress at least on the Palestinian track.”

• Israeli warplanes bombed targets in southern Lebanon for a second straight day.

• Nine of the 11 OPEC oil ministers meeting in Vienna agreed to increase production by 1.45 million barrels per day, short of the more than 2 million barrel increase sought by the U.S. to offset high gasoline prices.

• Jordan indicted 28 followers of Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden for allegedly planning attacks on U.S. tourists and others in Jordan the previous December, when 13 of the men were arrested.

• Burmese expert Tun Myat was named new head of the U.N.’s oil-for-food program in Iraq. He succeeded Hans von Sponeck, who resigned in protest of the effect of sanctions on the Iraqi people.

March 29: As two senior NATO officers warned the Yugoslav military against further incursions into the “buffer zone” separating Serbia from Kosovo, NATO Supreme Commander for Europe Gen. Wesley Clark warned that “President Milosevic is putting in place the capability to take action” against Montenegro, its fellow republic in the Yugoslav federation.

• Turkey’s parliament defeated a proposed constitutional amendment to reduce the presidential term from seven to five years but allow a second term, to enable President Suleyman Demirel to seek re-election.

March 30: At least 20 Palestinians were injured during clashes with Israeli police and soldiers in demonstrations marking Land Day, the anniversary of the 1976 killing of six Israeli Arabs who were protesting the expropriation of their land.

• Chechen rebels killed as many as 43 elite Russian commandos in an ambush near the southern village of Zhani-Vedeno.

March 31: The U.N. Security Council voted unanimously to allow Iraq to import $1.2 billion in spare parts and other equipment for its oil infrastructure.