Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, August/September 2000, Pages 101-104

Facts For Your File

A Chronology of U.S.-Middle East Relations

Compiled by Janet McMahon

May 1, 2000: Senior Israeli peace negotiator Oded Eran said that a Palestinian state will be the outcome of final status talks, as Israeli soldiers forcibly removed Jewish settlers from a makeshift outpost on the West Bank.

• Iranian state television broadcast a taped confession by Hamid Tefilin, one of 13 Iranian Jews on trial for spying for Israel.

• As Iran’s exiled opposition Mojahedin Khalq claimed responsibility for a mortar attack that injured six people near national police headquarters in Tehran, Iraq blamed Iran for a simultaneous rocket attack on a residential quarter of Baghdad that injured eight civilians.

• The Turkish parliament failed for a second time to achieve the two-thirds majority needed to elect a new president.

May 2: Israeli-Palestinian negotiations in Eilat broke off after Palestinians charged that Israeli-drawn maps for a final settlement showed plans to annex large areas of the West Bank.

• A British court ordered two Egyptian nationals extradited to the U.S. to face charges of involvement in the 1998 bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

• Baghdad said U.S. and British warplanes bombed civilian targets in Iraq’s northern and southern “no-fly” zones.

• Algerian security forces raided a rebel hideout along the border with Morocco, killing five insurgents and capturing one.

May 3: On the opening day of their trial in The Hague, Libyans Abdel Basset Ali Megrahi and Lamen Khalifa Fhima pleaded not guilty of the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 as family members of the victims looked on. Defense attorneys claimed the Palestinian splinter groups Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command and the Palestinian Popular Struggle Front were responsible.

• Israeli planes fired a missile at the parked car of Abbas Hallal, an Amal militia commander in southern Lebanon, injuring Hallal’s mother in the family home in Iqlim al-Tuffah as well as other civilians. Israeli forces also bombed, then shelled, the eastern sector of the occupation zone, after firing more missiles at Iqlim al-Tuffah.

• The Israeli Defense Ministry announced plans to deploy a high-energy laser shield, built by Cleveland-based TRW Inc., along its northern border to shoot down rockets fired from southern Lebanon after Israeli troops withdraw.

• Two more Iranian Jews confessed at their trials that they had spied for Israel.

• Alaa Hussein, who served as Kuwait’s puppet prime minister during Iraq’s 1990 invasion and occupation, was convicted of treason and sentenced to be hanged.

May 4: Following Hezbollah rocket attacks on northern Israel that killed an Israeli soldier and slightly wounded some two dozen people, Israeli jets attacked power stations outside Beirut and Tripoli, and a section of the Beirut-Damascus highway. Prior to the Hezbollah attacks, an SLA army tank had fired on a nearly deserted village near Israel’s occupation zone, killing an elderly Lebanese woman and her daughter.

• Saying the plane was using the wrong flight path, Israel intercepted a Palestinian plane flying to Jordan from the Gaza International Airport. Earlier in the week, Israel had intercepted an Egyptian and a Moroccan plane for the same reason.

• Iran freed 480 Iraqis held prisoner since the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war.

May 5: Israel announced a halt to its retaliatory raids on Lebanon which, in addition to civilian casualties, caused an estimated $60 million in damages to power stations, necessitating months of power rationing.

• On its third vote, by a simple majority, Turkey’s parliament elected as the country’s next president Ahmet Necdet Sezer, chief justice of the Constitutional Court.

• In run-off parliamentary elections, Iranian moderates won 52 of the 66 remaining vacancies in the 290-seat Majlis.

May 6: Sudanese President Omar el-Bashir froze the position of his chief rival, hard-liner Islamist Hassan al-Turabi, secretary-general of the ruling National Congress Party.

May 7: During a late night two-hour meeting, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian President Yasser Arafat agreed to resume negotiations.

• Mohammad Omar, head of Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban, said a Syrian and an Iraqi had been arrested in April on charges of spying for Israel and the U.S.

May 8: As Prime Minister Barak said he likely would delay for weeks or months the transfer to Palestinian control of three Arab villages near Jerusalem, Israeli troops shot and wounded six Palestinians during West Bank demonstrations demanding the release of 1,650 Palestinian prisoners.

• Prime Minister Barak hinted that Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon might be moved forward from his July 7 deadline.

• Egyptian police fired rubber bullets and tear gas at some 2,000 students demonstrating at Al Azhar University against Syrian author Haider Haider’s 1983 novel A Banquet for Seaweed, which the students charged insulted Islam.

• Two more of the 13 Iranian Jews on trial for spying for Israel confessed to the charges.

• Saying the government had bombed civilian targets, the southern rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army suspended peace talks aimed at ending Sudan’s 17-year civil war.

• Ekrem Rexha, a well-known commander of the former Kosovo Liberation Army known as Commander Drini, was gunned down outside his home in the southern town of Prizren.

May 9: Israeli warplanes attacked targets in southern Lebanon for the third consecutive day.

May 10: Hezbollah guerrillas attacked military posts in Israeli-occupied southern Lebanon, and Israeli and SLA forces retaliated with bombing and shelling.

• Several thousand students demonstrated at Egypt’s Al Azhar University demanding the release of 60 students arrested in protests two days earlier.

• Farzad Karshi, one of 13 Iranian Jews on trial for spying for Israel, pleaded not guilty.

• Four days after crossing into northern Iraq in search of Kurdish rebels, some 10,000 Turkish troops backed by aircraft returned to Turkey, having killed 53 rebel Kurds.

• U.S. and British warplanes bombed Iraqi air defense sites near the northern city of Bashiqah.

May 11: Israeli settler Gur Hamel was sentenced to life in prison for killing 66-year-old Palestinian Mohammed Zalout as he was handcuffed and kneeling in prayer. The Israeli Supreme Court overturned the parole of another settler, Yoram Skolnick, who shot and killed a captured Palestinian militant in 1993 in revenge for a stabbing attack.

• Chechen rebels ambushed and virtually wiped out a convoy of 22 Russian soldiers in the Caucasus foothills of Ingushetia.

May 12: Anwar Haddam, an Algerian politician held for more than three years on secret evidence, was granted political asylum by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.

• Pakistan’s Supreme Court ruled that pervasive corruption justified the October military coup that ousted Prime Minister Mian Nawaz Sharif, but set a three-year deadline for the government of Gen. Pervez Musharraf to restore civilian rule.

• Israel announced that it had signed an agreement with Jordan for a shared airport on the border between the Red Sea ports of Eilat and Aqaba.

• A key political ally of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, Bosko Perosevic, head of the Vojvodina provincial government, was shot in the head by a security guard as he toured an agricultural fair in Novi Sad.

May 13: In a pre-dawn attack, eight missiles struck the central Baghdad neighborhood of al-Karkh, killing a three-year-old child and wounding four family members. In southern Iraq, U.S. and British airstrikes hit a residential neighborhood, injuring nine civilians, including a three-year-old boy.

May 14: Prior to the announcement that Palestinian militant Mohammed Deif, suspected of masterminding some of the bloodiest terrorist attacks against Israel in recent years, was in Palestinian Authority custody, Israel released Hamas founder Salah Shihadah, imprisoned for nearly 12 years.

May 15: On the 52nd anniversary of the establishment of the Jewish state, Israeli soldiers exchanged gunfire with Palestinian police in Ramallah, and killed at least four Palestinians and wounded hundreds more as protests erupted across the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

• The Israeli cabinet and Knesset narrowly approved the transfer to Palestinian control of Abu Dis and two other villages east of Jerusalem. Following the vote, tens of thousands of Jewish settlers demonstrated in Jerusalem against the transfer.

• Hossein Ali Amiri, head of the judiciary in Shiraz, where 13 Iranian Jews were on trial for treason, said none of the defendants faced the death penalty.

• A General Accounting Office report said prospects for lasting peace in the Balkans were bleak and warned of possible instability and even renewed violence.

May 16: Former Judge Ahmet Necdet Sezer was sworn in as Turkey’s new president.

May 18: The Senate voted 53 to 47 not to eliminate funding for 5,600 U.S. peacekeeping troops in Kosovo by July 1, 2001.

• Over U.S. objections, the World Bank approved its first loan to Iran in seven years.

• As the U.N. Security Council imposed an arms embargo on the two neighboring countries, Ethiopian troops captured a strategic town in western Eritrea, causing hundreds of thousands to flee their homes.

May 20: Giving them control of parliament for the first time since the 1979 Islamic revolution, Iranian reformers won 26 of Tehran’s 30 contested seats.

• A U.N. conference on nuclear weapons agreed to formally call on Israel to join the 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and open its nuclear facilities to international inspectors. The U.S., which had blocked such attempts in the past, agreed after receiving assurances that Iraq would be cited for failing to abandon its nuclear weapons program as called for under the Gulf war cease-fire agreement.

May 21: Israeli troops began withdrawing from southern Lebanon after 22 years of occupation.

• Citing a week of Palestinian demonstrations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Israeli Prime Minister Barak cancelled his trip to Washington and recalled the Israeli delegation from peace negotiations in Stockholm, banned all Israelis and foreign tourists “rom Palestinian-controlled areas, including Bethlehem, and delayed the handover of three Palestinian villages on the outskirts of East Jerusalem.

• The Israeli Supreme Court ruled that Jewish women could wear prayer shawls and pray from the Torah at the Western Wall.

• Marking the third anniversary of his election, moderate Iranian President Mohammad Khatami gave a speech challenging his hard-line opponents and calling for freedom and democracy in the Islamic republic.

• A Serbian court in Nis convicted 143 ethnic Albanian Kosovars of terrorism, sentencing them to up to 13 years in prison each.

May 22: As Israeli troops hastily abandoned their positions in southern Lebanon, and its proxy Southern Lebanon Army began to disintegrate, Hezbollah militia, their supporters and displaced civilians jubilantly reclaimed their villages and freed some 140 Lebanese from the notorious Khiam prison.

• Some 3,000 Iranian students demonstrated against the hard-line Council of Guardians’ alleged tampering with parliamentary election results.

• Baghdad said one person was wounded by U.S. and British bombing of Iraq’s northern and southern “no-fly” zones.

May 23: As the last remaining Israeli troops withdrew from southern Lebanon, Prime Minister Barak declared an end to the “tragedy” of Israel’s two-decade illegal occupation, while Israel’s U.N. ambassador, Yehuda Lancry, delivered a letter from Barak to Secretary-General Kofi Annan warning Syria and Iran not to encourage guerrilla attacks on northern Israel from Lebanese territory.

May 24: Russia warned that it might bomb targets in Afghanistan if the ruling Taliban supported rebels in Chechnya and former Soviet republics in Central Asia.

• Iran freed 460 Iraqi prisoners from the 1980-88 war between the two countries, bringing the total to 2,939 freed since April.

• Following a 12-day Ethiopian offensive, Eritrea said it was withdrawing from border territory around Zalembessa it had seized in fighting two years ago.

May 25: On Lebanon’s first National Resistance Day, the holiday created to celebrate the end of Israeli occupation, Prime Minister Salim Hoss made his first tour of the southern border in two decades. Meanwhile, Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, noting that fears of reprisals against Lebanese collaborators had not materialized, said the resistance group did not intend to attack towns in northern Israel. Israeli Prime Minister Barak visited one of those towns, Kiryat Shimona, where he appealed to the Lebanese government and people to talk peace. “We don’t covet a single inch of your land,” he claimed.

• Israel lifted a week-old ban on travel to Palestinian-controlled Jericho, where a two-year-old girl had been injured in the firebombing of an Israeli car.

• Pakistan’s ruling Gen. Pervez Musharraf said, “We will hand back power to the civilians in three years,” as mandated by a recent Supreme Court decision.

• Former Iranian President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a hard-liner, resigned his recently won seat in parliament .

• The British medical journal Lancet reported a doubling of childhood mortality in southern and central Iraq since the 1991 Gulf war and the imposition of U.N. sanctions.

May 27: Israel was invited to a four-year temporary membership in the U.N.’s regional Western European and Others group, subject to several conditions.

• President Khatami called for an end to factional wrangling at the opening session of Iran’s newly elected reform-dominated parliament.

May 28: Israeli soldiers fired at Lebanese and Palestinian civilians throwing stones and trying to push across the border some15 yards away.

• A day after the resignation of Transport Minister and former candidate for prime minister Yitzhak Mordechai, charged with three criminal counts of sexual assault and harassment, Israeli President Ezer Weizman, denounced for having accepted cash payments from a French businessman, announced he would resign July 10.

May 29: Sheikh Abdel Karim Obeid and Mustafa Dirani, two abducted Lebanese being held by Israel as “bargaining chips,” appeared in a Tel Aviv court, where a government attorney argued that they posed a security risk to the Jewish state despite its withdrawal from southern Lebanon.

• Israeli Prime Minister Barak endorsed former Prime Minister Shimon Peres to succeed resigning President Weizman.

• Israel’s Justice Ministry said it would ask the Supreme Court to review a ruling allowing Jewish women as well as men to wear prayer shawls and chant from the Torah at the Western Wall.

• A Kuwaiti lower court referred to the Constitutional Court the question of whether women as well as men could vote and run for office.

• As negotiations were scheduled to begin in Algiers, Ethiopian fighter jets bombed a military airport near the Eritrean capital of Asmara.

May 30: Moderate cleric Ayatollah Mehdi Karrubi, an advocate of increased freedoms, was elected speaker of the Iranian parliament.

• In the largest single such release in weeks, Serbian authorities freed 23 ethnic Albanian prisoners, who walked across the border into Kosovo.

• In Algiers, Ethiopia said it would withdraw from territory in western Eritrea captured in the past 18 days.

• Pakistani shops remained closed for a second day to protest a government tax survey aimed at flushing out tax evaders.

May 31: Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk Charaa told U.N. envoy Terje Roed-Larsen that, while Damascus urged Israel to withdraw from the 100-square-mile area known as Shebaa Farms as part of its withdrawal from southern Lebanon, the area could be returned to Syria as part of negotiations over the Golan Heights.

• Iraqi Lt. Gen. Yassin Jasem said U.S. planes were dropping “flare bombs” to burn crops and civilian installations.

• Following two days of shootouts in which at least 16 people were killed, Pakistani General Musharraf renewed his offer to India to resume peace talks on Kashmir.

• Top Russian official Sergei Zverev was killed along with Grozny’s Deputy Mayor Nusreda Khabuseyeva, and Mayor Supyan Makhachayev was injured, when their car struck a land mine on the outskirts of the Chechen capital.

• Declaring victory, Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi said the two-year border war with Eritrea was at an end. Asmara countered that the conflict would continue as long as Ethiopian troops remained on Eritrean territory.

June 1, 2000: Following a 90-minute meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak in Lisbon, President Bill Clinton said Mideast peace “is within view now.”

• The Israeli government issued tenders for the marketing of 86 Jewish-only housing units in the occupied Golan Heights settlement of Katzrin.

• Iran appeared suddenly to have opened its shipping lanes to dozens of vessels carrying illegal shipments of Iraqi oil.

• A day after Ethiopia declared the two-year border war over, fighting was reported between Ethiopian and Eritrean troops.

• A Turkish court sentenced Ahmet Demir, leader of the country’s only legal pro-Kurdish party, to one year in prison for proposing an independent Kurdish state. Demir was free on appeal from a three-year-and-nine-month sentence for a 1998 hunger strike in support of condemned Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) leader Abdullah Ocalan.

• Ethnic Albanians opened fire on a group of Serbs walking home from a cemetery in the U.S.-controlled sector of Kosovo, killing one woman and wounding three men.

June 2: Carla Del Ponte, chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, told the U.N. Security Council that her office had found “no deliberate targeting of civilians or unlawful military targets by NATO during the [1999] bombing campaign.”

• Israel rejected a membership proposal by the International Committee for the Red Cross if it replaced the red Star of David with a neutral symbol in certain zones.

• Organization of African Unity (OAU)-sponsored talks between Ethiopia and Eritrea resumed in Algiers after a 24-hour break.

June 3: Eritrea accused Ethiopia of launching a new attack on military outposts near its main Red Sea port of Assab.

June 5: On her first Mideast visit in six months, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright met in Jerusalem with Israeli Prime Minister Barak and scheduled a second meeting for the following day after a meeting with Palestinian President Yasser Arafat.

• A National Commission on Terrorism report concluded that the Clinton administration had not done enough to press for Iranian cooperation in the investigation of the 1996 bombing of Khobar Towers in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, that killed 19 U.S. servicemen.

June 6: Secretary of State Albright announced the convening of a new round of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations the following week near Washington.

• In a White House meeting, President Clinton promised Jordan’s King Abdullah that the U.S. would back an international fund to resettle Palestinian refugees.

• Amnesty International accused NATO of committing war crimes by attacking civilian targets during its 78-day bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999.

• Calling anti-Serb violence “organized,” Bernard Kouchner, head of the U.N. mission in Kosovo, announced the drafting of “emergency legislation” to restrain hate speech in the Albanian-language media.

• Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic announced plans to retire in October, two years ahead of time.

June 7: Meeting with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk al-Charaa, U.S. Secretary of State Albright said, “There is no higher foreign policy priority for the Clinton administration than an Israeli-Palestinian peace.”

• Three of the six parties in Israeli Prime Minister Barak’s coalition government sided with the opposition as the Knesset voted preliminary approval to a call for early elections.

• An American-Israeli anti-missile laser destroyed an armed Katyusha rocket in flight in a successful test at the Army’s White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.

June 8: U.N. verification teams inspected the demarcation of the Israeli-Lebanese border to ensure that all Israeli troops had fully withdrawn from southern Lebanon.

• The U.N. Security Council extended for six months Iraq’s oil-for-food program.

• President Vladimir Putin imposed direct Russian rule on the breakaway republic of Chechnya.

June 9: The U.N. Security Council asked Secretary-General Kofi Annan to appoint a panel of independent experts to study the effect of 10 years of sanctions on the Iraqi people.

June 10: Syrian President Hafez Al-Assad, 69, died of a heart attack while talking on the phone to Lebanese Prime Minister Emile Lahoud, who said the Syrian leader’s last words were, “Our destiny is to build a better future for our countries.”

• The Lebanese government announced it would send a joint force of 500 troops and 500 policemen to perform “security tasks” in the former Israeli-occupied area of southern Lebanon.

• Ethiopia launched a major offensive hours after Eritrea said it had accepted a cease-fire and comprehensive peace plan.

June 11: Syria’s ruling Ba’ath Party placed Dr. Bashar Al-Assad, son of the late president, in command of the country’s armed forces and unanimously nominated him as the only presidential candidate.

June 12: Israeli-Palestinian negotiations resumed outside Washington.

• Russian President Vladimir Putin appointed Muslim cleric Akhmad Kadyrov to head the Kremlin-controlled administration in Chechnya.

June 13: Secretary of State Albright represented the U.S. at Syrian President Hafez Al-Assad’s funeral, which French President Jacques Chirac was the only Western head of state personally to attend.

• Israel’s ultra-Orthodox Shas Party voted to quit Prime Minister Barak’s coalition government, leaving it without a Knesset majority.

June 14: Palestinian negotiators said they would pull out of peace talks being held outside Washington unless Israel agreed to release some 250 Palestinian prisoners and complete the transfer of West Bank territory mandated in earlier agreements.

• Ethiopia accepted an accord ending its two-year war with Eritrea.

June 15: During an inconclusive White House meeting, President Clinton admonished Palestinian President Arafat to “finish the job” of Mideast peace negotiations. Following the meeting Arafat promised to declare a Palestinian state by Sept. 13. “It is out of my hands,” he said. “The people want it.”

• American diplomats, including Ambassador Martin Indyk, met in Jerusalem with Israeli Defense Ministry officials to reiterate U.S. objections to Israel’s planned sale to China of an AWACS radar system and press for Israeli consultation before concluding arms sales with a list of 27 “countries of concern” to Washington.

• Israeli soldiers shot at a U.N. verification team visiting one of the last remaining unchecked border sites in southern Lebanon.

• Iraq again accused the U.S. and Britain of dropping “flare bombs” on civilian areas in northern Iraq.

• Serbian opposition leader Vuk Draskovic was slightly wounded after being shot by gunmen at his Montenegro vacation home.

• NATO peacekeeping troops discovered four underground weapons caches found in the Drenica region of central Kosovo, a former stronghold of the disbanded Kosovo Liberation Army.

June 16: After U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan certified Israel’s complete withdrawal from southern Lebanon, Lebanese Prime Minister Salim Hoss issued a statement charging that Israeli troops still occupied parts of the border area.

• As 28 suspects were similarly being tried in Jordan, the trial of 29 people accused of planning attacks on U.S. and Israeli targets in Jordan under orders of Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden opened in Beirut.

June 17: Syria’s Ba’ath Party convened its first congress in 15 years, scheduled before President Assad’s death, to formally nominate Dr. Bashar Assad as his father’s successor.

June 18: After 16 hours of deadlock, the U.N. Security Council endorsed Secretary-General Annan’s certification of Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon, clearing the way for the deployment there of the Lebanese army and U.N. peacekeeping troops.

• Dr. Bashar Al-Assad was elected head of Syria’s ruling Ba’ath Party.

• A letter to the head of Iran’s judiciary, Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, signed by 151 reformist legislators warned that the hard-line body’s “illegal behavior” toward the press “has tarnished Iran’s international image.”

• Ethiopia and Eritrea signed a preliminary cease-fire and agreed to work toward a final settlement of their two-year war.

June 20: In southern Lebanon, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan met with Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah to discuss cooperation between the Lebanese government and “non-state parties.”

June 21: Israeli Prime Minister Barak said he would open a “continuous dialogue” with Jewish settlers, and told his ministers and peace negotiators to visit settlements and listen to settlers’ concerns.

• The Israeli Knesset passed a preliminary bill allowing the government to continue holding two Lebanese militia leaders, described as “combatants not entitled to prisoner-of-war status,” as “bargaining chips” in exchange for missing Israeli combatants in southern Lebanon.

• The British Broadcasting Corporation charged Israel with deliberately killing one of its drivers, Abed Takkoush, in an unprovoked tank attack as Israeli troops were withdrawing from southern Lebanon on May 23. Israel called the killing “a tragic accident.”

• As the U.N. Security Council voted to extend its peacekeeping mission in Bosnia for one year, chief prosecutor Carla Del Ponte said the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague would not withdraw its indictment against Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.

June 22: Israeli warplanes flew over Beirut in the first violation of Lebanese airspace since Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon a month earlier.

• Israel’s Shas Party retracted its resignation from the ruling government coalition after Prime Minister Barak agreed to provide millions of dollars in debt relief to the ultra-Orthodox party’s bankrupt educational network.

June 23: Syria told visiting U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan that it was ready to resume peace talks with Israel but would not compromise on its demand for a return of the entire occupied Golan Heights.

• The U.N. relief agency in Kosovo said it was suspending operations in the Serbian sector of the divided city of Mitrovica after rioters injured aid workers and attacked U.N. vehicles.

June 24: As U.N. peacekeeping troops in southern Lebanon reported half a dozen Israeli border violations, Israeli soldiers fired across the border into southern Lebanon, wounding three members of a Jordanian professional delegation shouting “Palestine is Arab,” as well as a Lebanese civilian.

• A Conservative Jewish synagogue in Jerusalem which had been the target of demonstrations and protests by Orthodox Jews was firebombed.

June 26: Vice President Al Gore told visiting Iraqi opposition leaders that President Saddam Hussain was an obstacle to Mideast peace and “must be removed from power.”

• A day after the commander of Russian forces in Chechnya, Col. Gen. Gennadi Troshev, said his troops were suspending major combat operations, the Kremlin said Russian attacks would continue.

• Jordan’s highest court dismissed an appeal to return home by four Hamas militants deported to Qatar in 1999, when Hamas offices in Jordon were closed and its activities banned,

• Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid declared a civil state of emergency in the eastern Maluku Islands, describing fighting between Muslims and Christians as “out of control.”

June 27: U.S. Mideast envoy Dennis Ross joined Israeli Prime Minister Barak in a meeting to try and persuade Barak’s coalition partners to support Israeli concessions needed to reach an agreement with the Palestinians.

• Syria’s parliament approved the nomination of Dr. Bashar Al-Assad as the sole candidate to succeed his late father as president.

• A day after being replaced as head of Sudan’s ruling National Congress Party, Islamist former parliamentary speaker Hassan Turabi formed his own Popular National Congress Party.

June 28: In her second visit in a month, Secretary of State Albright met in Ramallah with Palestinian President Arafat and in Jerusalem with Israeli Prime Minister Barak, saying afterwards that the time is not yet right for a summit meeting.

• Demanding an end to “the embargo, the death and murder of thousands of Iraqi children and elderly,” Fuad Hussein Haider, a car mechanic, shot his way into a U.N. office in Baghdad, killing two officials, wounding seven and taking some 50 hostages before surrendering after nearly three hours.

• Turkey’s parliament renewed permission for U.S. and British warplanes to use the Incirlik air base for patrol and bombing missions over Iraq’s northern “no-fly” zone.

• Succumbing to U.S. pressure, the U.N. Security Council postponed a decision on whether to lift sanctions on Sudan, now in compliance with requirements imposed in 1996, until mid-November, after U.S. presidential elections.

June 29: Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat complained to the U.S. and the EU that Israeli troops trained in low-intensity conflict were being deployed in the West Bank, with tanks moving to fortify Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

• The American Embassy in Amman announced it was canceling its annual Fourth of July celebration to “minimize the chances of [a terrorist] incident.”

June 30: American administration and military officials said Iraq had conducted eight flight-tests of its short-range Al Samoud ballistic missile.