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

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

Compiled by Janet McMahon

April 1, 2000:

Lebanese Defense Minister Ghazi Zaytar said a unilateral Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon could result in Beirut asking Syrian troops to fill the vacuum and bring Tel Aviv within range of Syrian rockets.

Some 1,400 U.S. Marines conducted joint military exercises with Kuwait just south of the border with Iraq.

• With at least 50,000 troops gathered near the Turkish-Iraq border, some 1,000 Turkish troops crossed into northern Iraq in search of outlawed Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) guerrillas.

April 2: Foreign Minister Farouk Charaa distanced Syria from the previous day’s remarks of his Lebanese counterpart.

• Pakistani officials arrested Ahmed Abdullah, a Yemeni suspected of having ties with exiled Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden, as he and two Pakistanis tried to enter Afghanistan without visas.

• The Serbian National Council said it would send representatives as observers to the U.N.-established civilian administration in Kosovo.

April 3: U.S. Defense Secretary William Cohen, meeting in Jerusalem with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, criticized Israel’s planned sale of AWACS-type planes to China. The Israeli leader responded that he would “take into account” American concerns, but declined to halt the sale.

• Prime Minister Barak said he did not anticipate a military confrontation following Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon, while Gen. Antoine Lahad, commander of Israel’s proxy South Lebanese Army, said his forces would “defend their land unto the death.”

• NATO peacekeeping troops in Bosnia arrested Serbian leader Momcilo Krajisnik, indicted for war crimes including genocide.

U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson, in Chechnya to inspect detention centers and “filtration camps,” departed after Russian authorities denied her access to requested sites.

April 4: As Israeli Foreign Minister David Levy assured Secretary-General Kofi Annan that Israeli troops withdrawing from southern Lebanon would cooperate with UNIFIL forces there, Prime Minister Barak warned Syria and Hezbollah guerrillas not to attack Israel following its withdrawal.

• A group of 90 Palestinian academics and politicians issued a statement condemning the Feb. 18 arrest of Abdel Qassim following the university professor’s criticism of President Yasser Arafajt in an Arab newspaper abroad. A month before his latest arrest, Qassim had been released after serving 40 days in prison as one of the signers of a November petition criticizing corruption in the Palestinian Authority.

• Eleven U.S. peacekeeping troops were injured in southern Kosovo as an angry crowd surrounded the home in Sevce of a Serb being arrested on illegal weapons charges.

• India released three leaders of the Kashmir Freedom Conference held for six months without trial for organizing an election boycott in the Indian-controlled sector of the disputed province.

• Top Taliban figure Mohammad Arif Khan, governor of Afghanistan’s Kunduz province, was gunned down in the Pakistani border town of Peshawar.

April 5: Jewish settlers re-established an illegal outpost on the West Bank, on the site of a previous outpost, Maon, which had been dismantled last fall.

• After a decade of imprisonment, Israel freed Ghassan al-Dirani, one of 16 Lebanese prisoners held hostage without charges as “bargaining chips” for the return of Israeli soldiers captured in occupied southern Lebanon.

• The Turkish parliament rejected a proposed constitutional amendment which would have allowed President Suleyman Demirel to serve a second term.

• Iran’s only Jewish legislator, Manouchehr Eliassi, said the 13 Iranian Jews accused of spying for Israel would be allowed to retain their own lawyers.

• Iran said it had seized a tanker in the Persian Gulf carrying smuggled Iraqi oil.

• Russia offered to allow three Council of Europe observers to monitor human rights in Chechnya providing they not publicize their findings.

April 6: Deposed Pakistani Prime Minister Mian Nawaz Sharif was sentenced to life in prison, rather than to death, on terrorism and hijacking charges related to the Oct. 12, 1999 coup.

• In a letter to U.N. envoy Terje Larsen, Lebanese President Emile Lahoud said he could not and would not prevent Palestinian guerrillas from launching attacks against Israel following its withdrawal from occupied southern Lebanon.

• Israeli soldiers evicted an encampment of Jewish settlers protesting a High Court decision to allow Palestinians to return to their homes in caves on a West Bank hilltop.

• Following a three-month investigation, Israeli police recommended that President Ezer Weizman not be prosecuted for accepting $400,000 in monthly payments from French businessman Edouard Seroussi.

• U.S. and British warplanes killed 14 civilians and wounded 19 in air strikes in southern Iraq.

• Hans Blix, chairman of the U.N.’s new weapons inspection program, told the Security Council UNMOVIC would conduct surprise inspections throughout Iraq as part of its mandate but would not reveal agency secrets to their respective governments.

April 7: Indian soldiers fired tear gas into a crowd of more than 2,000 Kashmiris protesting the killing of eight people by Indian troops five days earlier.

• A U.S. warship detained a Russian tanker in the Persian Gulf on suspicion of smuggling Iraqi oil. Royal Dutch/Shell Oil Co. said it had chartered the tanker to carry a legal load of oil from Iran to Singapore.

April 8: In municipal elections termed “free and fair” by international monitors, Bosnian Serbs and Croats voted for their respective nationalist parties, while Bosnian Muslims elected moderate opposition Social Democrat candidates in the cities of Sarajevo, Gorazde and the Tuzla area.

• Iranian police arrested dozens of people following two days of protests against the conservative Council of Guardians’ overturning of the election of several reformers to parliament.

April 10: Iran freed 1,000 Iraqi prisoners held since the 1980-88 war.

April 11: On an 18-hour visit to Washington made at Israel’s request, Prime Minister Barak met with President Clinton, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and National Security Adviser Samuel Berger to discuss the stalled peace process and U.S. opposition to Israel’s planned sale of an AWACS system to China.

• The Israeli government lifted a freeze on construction in the occupied Golan Heights, where some 200 new housing units are being built. In the West Bank, Jewish settlers angry that new construction requests had been turned down said they would proceed with settlement expansions illegally and began bulldozing on Olive Hill near Efrat.

• U.S. and British warplanes bombed air defense sites in northern Iraq.

April 12: Israel’s Supreme Court ruled 6 to 3 that the state cannot continue to hold without charges 15 Lebanese kidnapped and held as “bargaining chips” to obtain information about Israeli soldiers missing in Lebanon.

• Israeli settlers began a new unauthorized expansion project near Har Hilo, and continued the expansion begun the previous day near Efrat.

• Prime Minister Barak welcomed Chinese President Jiang Zemin to Israel.

• Tehran radio reported that the trial of 13 Jews accused of spying for Israel will not be open to the public.

April 13: The U.N. Security Council approved a new weapons inspection program, UNMOVIC, for Iraq.

• Secretary of State Albright said the U.S. was “concerned” about Chinese assistance to Libya’s long-range missile program.

• Quickly after it opened, the trial of 13 Iranian Jews was adjourned until May 1 after defense attorneys requested more time.

• Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov said Russia was actively seeking a political resolution to the war in Chechnya.

April 14: More than 100,000 Serbs demonstrated in Belgrade against Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.

April 15: Iraq’s Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz said Baghdad did not accept UNMOVIC and would not allow resumption of U.N. weapons inspections.

April 16: Israel postponed the release of 13 Lebanese civilians being held as “bargaining chips” pending a Supreme Court ruling on a petition by the family of missing Israeli airman Ron Arad. Israel said it would continue to detain former Amal militia security chief Mustafa Dirani and Hezbollah spiritual leader Sheikh Abdel Karim Obeid.

• Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps warned reform leaders and the press that any attempt to undermine the state’s Islamic ideology would be met with “Islamic violence.”

April 18: Six days after its Supreme Court forbade the practice of holding hostages, Israel released 13 Lebanese prisoners. Prime Minister Barak ordered draft legislation to allow Israel to resume holding foreign nationals as “bargaining chips” for information on missing or captured Israeli soldiers.

• The trial of 145 ethnic Albanians from Djakovica in western Kosovo, charged with three attacks on Serb forces in April and May 1999, opened in Nis, Serbia.

April 19: Turkish Cypriot leader Rauf Denktash secured another five-year term as president after his only opponent, Prime Minister Dervis Eroglu, withdrew from the race three days before a runoff election.

• Following a grenade attack on an Indian security patrol in the Kashmir city of Sopore, police responded with machine gun fire, killing a 12-year-old boy and and 18-year-old girl and wounding 28 people in the crowded Iqbal Market.

April 20: In a three-hour White House meeting, President Clinton told Palestinian President Arafat that the U.S. would take a more active role in Mideast peace talks, but that both sides must make the necessary compromises.

• Iraq said some 295 people had been killed and 860 injured in U.S. and British air strikes since December 1998.

• The trial of 28 men, 13 of whom were still at large, allegedly linked to Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden and charged with planning attacks on U.S. and Israeli tourists over the New Year opened in Amman, Jordan and was adjourned to May 7.

April 21: Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov told a Moscow newspaper that he had “ordered a unilateral suspension of military actions” and offered to release all Russian prisoners.

April 22: Iranian journalist Akbar Ganji, who reported on links between government officials and the killings of dissidents and writers, was arrested when he appeared in a Tehran court to answer a summons.

• NATO troops arrested Bosnian Serb Dragan Nikolic, the first suspect to be indicted by the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague.

April 23: Jordan’s King Abdullah made his first state visit to Israel a low-key one, meeting briefly with Prime Minister Barak in the Red Sea resort of Eilat.

• Iran’s official news agency, IRNA, said the government had suspended 14 pro-reform newspapers and journals.

April 24: Chechen rebels attacked a Russian military convoy 16 miles from Grozny, killing at least 15 Russian soldiers.

April 25: Following King Abdullah’s first official visit to the West Bank to meet with Palestinian President Arafat, Jordanian Foreign Minister Abdul-Ilah Khatib said Amman will back the Palestinians on all issues.

• Thousands of Iranian university students demonstrated throughout the country in support of moderate President Mohammad Khatami and against the closure of pro-democracy newspapers and magazines.

• U.S. warplanes bombed an air defense system in northern Iraq, killing a water tanker driver.

• Citing the surprise naming of 119 new defense witnesses, prosecutors in The Hague trial of two Libyans charged with the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 asked for a delay of “several weeks.”

• Zika Petrovic, an ally of President Milosevic and director of the state-owned Yugoslav Airlines, was killed as he walked his dog near his Belgrade home by an unknown gunman.

April 26: Sixteen people, including eight Indian security personnel, were killed in several separate incidents in Indian-held Kashmir.

April 27: Disgruntled Turkish lawmakers failed to elect as president Ahmet Necdet Sezer, the hand-picked candidate of Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit.

• Iranian hard-liners shut down an additional three reformist newspapers, leaving only one still publishing.

• Thousands of Pakistani Islamic scholars meeting in Islamabad issued a declaration calling for a jihad to free Kashmir from Indian occupation.

April 28: In a nationally televised address, former Iranian President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani criticized the reformist movement for attacking “the Islamist content of the revolution.”

• Dr. George Habash, 73, retired as head of the radical Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and was expected to be replaced by Mustafa Zubari (Abu Ali Mustafa), 61, whom Israel had permitted to return to the West Bank after 32 years of exile in Damascus.

April 29: Asking his supporters to “keep calm,” moderate Iranian President Khatami defended his three-year-old reform government.

• In its annual report on worldwide terrorism, the State Department, citing Pakistan and Aghanistan, identified South Asia as a major hub, and listed for the eighth consecutive year the same seven countries—Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria—as state sponsors of terrorism.

• Pakistan ruler Gen. Pervez Musharraf said he wanted to meet with Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee to discuss disputed Kashmir.

• An eight-member delegation of U.N. Security Council ambassadors concluded a two-day visit to Kosovo to assess the effectiveness of the U.N. peacekeeping mission there.

April 30: After a five-hour delay to protest Israel’s decision to build 174 new houses in Ma’ale Adumim, the West Bank’s largest illegal Jewish settlement, Israeli-Palestinian final status negotiations reopened in Eilat.

• On the eve of parliamentary runoff elections, Iran’s hard-line Revolutionary Court jailed Ali Afshari, head of the Office to Foster Islamic Unity, the country’s largest reformist student group, on charges of endangering Iran’s internal security by participating in a Berlin conference. Four other conference attendees, including two newspaper editors, were freed on bail.

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