Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, July 2001, page 100

Facts For Your Files

Compiled by Janet McMahon

April 1, 2001: After nightlong negotiations, former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic surrendered to authorities surrounding his mansion and was taken to Belgrade’s Central Prison, where he was ordered held at least 30 days on corruption and abuse of power charges.

•The funeral of 10-month-old Shalhevat Pass was held six days after she was killed in Hebron, when her family abandoned their demands that Israel retake the Palestinian neighborhood above their illegal settlement.

•The Algerian government announced it would try Abdelmajid Dahoumane, wanted by Washington on charges of conspiring with fellow Algerian Ahmed Ressam to blow up several sites in the U.S. during millennium celebrations.

•The beginning of a three-day general strike in Bangladesh to force Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina to resign was marked by violent clashes in which one man was killed and some 200 injured.

April 2: As Israeli troops battled with Palestinians near Bethlehem following the killing of an Israeli soldier, Israeli helicopter gunships fired three rockets at a van in the Gaza Strip, assassinating Islamic Jihad member Mohammed Abdelal.

•At a White House meeting with President George W. Bush, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak urged increased U.S. involvement in the Middle East.

•The State Department said the arrest of Slobodan Milosevic met conditions for receiving $50 million in U.S. aid, but urged that Milosevic be turned over to the war crimes tribunal in The Hague.

•Macedonia’s main ethnic-Albanian opposition party boycotted government-sponsored talks on the country’s ethnic tensions.

•Hundreds of women survivors of the Serb massacre of Muslim residents of Srebrenica stormed the U.N. building in Sarajevo after hearing that Naser Oric, a Muslim commander and former Milosevic bodyguard who defended Srebrenica during the siege, was about to be arrested for trial by the U.N. war crimes tribunal.

•Tehran called on the U.N. to recognize its improved human rights record and remove Iran from the annual agenda of the U.N. Human Rights Commission, which has evaluated Iran for the past 18 years.

April 3: Israeli helicopter gunships fired some 20 rockets at Palestinian National Authority (PNA) headquarters and other targets in the Gaza Strip, injuring some 70 people. Israeli authorities said the raids were in retaliation for Palestinian mortar attacks on an illegal Israeli settlement in Gaza which wounded a 10-month-old baby. Meanwhile, a senior Israeli army commander in the West Bank said Israeli soldiers will shoot first, and shoot to kill, when they see armed Palestinians.

•Calling for “mutual compromise,” Secretary of State Colin Powell met in Key West, FL with the leaders of Azerbaijan and Armenia to open a four-day negotiation session on a peace agreement over the contested Nagorno-Karabakh enclave.

•Sudan’s deputy defense minister, Col. Ibrahim Shamsul-Din, and 13 other high-ranking military officers were killed when their plane crashed while taking off in a sandstorm in southern Sudan.

April 4: Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres met in Athens with Palestinian negotiators Nabil Shaath and Saeb Erekat in the highest-level talks since Prime Minister Ariel Sharon took office.

•Federal prosecutors in New York rested their case against four alleged followers of Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden charged with the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

•Serb authorities refused to accept an arrest warrant for Slobodan Milosevic from the international war crimes tribunal.

•Several members of the governing council of the taxpayer-supported U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum asked chairman Rabbi Irving “Yitz” Greenberg to resign for having written on official stationery a letter to then-President Bill Clinton urging him to pardon fugitive financier Marc Rich.

•Thousands of Turks took to the streets of Ankara to protest a 20 percent rise in fuel prices.

•Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh asked Prime Minister Abdul Kader Bajammal to form a new government, resulting in new appointees to 23 of the country’s 35 ministerial posts.

April 5: Israeli troops in Gaza fired on a convoy carrying the PNA’s three top security chiefs returning from a late night meeting with Israeli officials at the Tel Aviv home of U.S. Ambassador Martin Indyk. In the West Bank, Iyad Hardan, a top Islamic Jihad official, was assassinated in Jenin when a public phone he was using exploded, allegedly detonated by remote control from Israeli planes flying near the city. Meanwhile, the Israeli Housing Ministry issued land tenders for 700 new homes to expand the illegal West Bank settlements of Ma’ale Adumim and Alfei Menashe.

•Letters signed by 87 senators and 190 representatives called on President Bush to “reassess [U.S.] official posture toward the Palestinians.”

•India proposed a “political dialogue” with all Kashmiri groups to settle the conflict in the divided state.

April 6: Israeli helicopter gunships fired at least four rockets at Palestinian police installations in the northern Gaza Strip. In the West Bank, Israeli special forces entered the Palestinian-controlled neighborhood of Um Sharayat on the outskirts of Ramallah and arrested two alleged leaders of Fatah’s Tanzim militia.

•Algerian Ahmed Ressam, arrested in December 1999 as he crossed from Canada into the U.S. with a car trunk filled with explosives, was convicted in a Los Angeles federal court of terrorism and eight related criminal counts.

•Pakistan’s Supreme Court suspended an earlier conviction on corruption charges and ordered a new trial for exiled former President Benazir Bhutto, as well as for her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, imprisoned since November 1996.

•Croat nationalists in the divided Bosnian city of Mostar attacked peacekeeping forces and burned three of their vehicles after the troops tried to take control of a bank suspected of financing a month-old separatist rebellion.

April 7: Tehran’s Revolutionary Court announced the arrest of 42 people, most of them members of the outlawed opposition Freedom Movement.

•The Iran-based Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which previously had refused to cooperate with the U.S. in ousting Iraqi President Saddam Hussain, said it was ready for direct talks with Washington.

April 8: Israel fired three surface-to-surface missiles at Beit Lahiya in the northern Gaza Strip, plunging the town into darkness and injuring four people, including a 10-year-old boy. In the West Bank, an Israeli soldier shot an 18-month-old Palestinian in the head as her family walked home during clashes in the village of al-Khader.

April 9: Several days after Israeli Prime Minister Sharon said he favored access to Jerusalem’s Haram al-Sharif by people of all faiths, Public Security Minister Uzi Landau said there were no immediate plans to change the status quo and admit Jews to the Muslim holy site.

•President Bush met separately with Armenian President Robert Kocharian and President Haydar Aliyev of Azerbaijan, urging the two leaders to maintain the momentum toward a settlement of the dispute over Nagorno-Karabakh.

•Gunmen fired at U.S. and Polish peacekeepers patroling mountains near the Kosovo-Macedonian border.

•Macedonia became the first former Yugoslav republic to take a formal step toward EU membership by signing an accord with the European Union.

April 10: After two mortar shells hit the illegal Jewish settlement of Katif in the Gaza Strip, causing no injuries, Israel launched a daytime rocket attack on Palestinian security targets, killing a police doctor and injuring 20 other Gazans.

•At a White House meeting with Jordan’s King Abdullah, President Bush promised to support the free-trade agreement between the two countries. The king also urged the president to increase U.S. involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute and to ease sanctions on Iraq.

•A draft report of the energy task force headed by Vice President Dick Cheney raised the possibility of lifting some economic sanctions against Iran, Libya and Iraq as a way to increase U.S. oil supplies.

•NATO agreed to allow Yugoslav troops into an additional section of the buffer zone between Kosovo and Serbia.

April 11: Following Palestinian mortar fire on illegal Jewish settlements, Israeli tanks and bulldozers entered Gaza’s Khan Younis refugee camp, damaging or destroying some 30 homes, killing two Palestinians and wounding more than two dozen. Israeli and Palestinian negotiators held a late night meeting at the home of U.S. Ambassador Indyk.

•Secretary of State Powell and his European counterparts in the six-nation “contact group” on the Balkans condemned the recent ethnic uprisings in Macedonia and Bosnia and urged Montenegro not to pursue full independence from Yugoslavia, in which it shares membership with Serbia.

•As police in Ankara used nightsticks and water cannons to battle some 50,000 stone-throwing demonstrators, most of them tradesmen and small-business owners, and more than 130,000 Turks rallied in cities across the country to protest the economic crisis, Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit rejected calls for his resignation.

•More than 150 members of Iran’s parliament protested the treatment of dozens of arrested dissidents.

•Tajikistan’s Deputy Interior Minister Khabib Sanginov, along with his driver and two bodyguards, were killed by gunmen who fired on his car in the capital, Dushanbe.

April 12: Secretary of State Powell visited the Macedonian capital of Skopje to promote an initiative by the country’s major Slavic and ethnic Albanian parties to address discrimination.

•Jordan promised not to begin regular commercial flights to Iraq without Security Council approval.

•Philippine troops freed American Jeffrey Schilling, a Muslim convert taken hostage Aug. 31 by Abu Sayyaf rebels.

April 13: In Sarajevo, Secretary of State Powell met with the members of Bosnia’s three-person joint presidency and warned against fresh violence, saying, “The only way forward here is the rule of law.”

•U.S. and British warplanes attacked targets in Iraq’s southern “no-fly” zone.

April 14: Following a Hezbollah attack on Israeli occupation forces in the Shebaa Farms area in which one Israeli soldier was killed, Israeli tanks and artillery fired at least 40 shells into the hills of southern Lebanon before warplanes attacked the area. In the Gaza Strip, Israeli tanks and bulldozers entered Palestinian territory and destroyed a lookout post and several homes and stores in the Rafah refugee camp.

•As some 40,000 people marched peacefully through the streets of Istanbul, Turkish Minister of Economy Kemal Dervis announced a package of austerity measures in order to qualify for $10 to $12 billion in new foreign loans.

April 15: Yemeni authorities arrested five suspects with ties to Islamist terrorist cells in the bombing of the USS Cole.

•NATO peacekeepers seized Dragan Obrenovic, a Bosnian Serb charged with participating in the July 1995 massacre of Muslims in Srebrenica.

•Kuwaiti police officer Lt. Col. Khaled Diab Al Azmi pleaded innocent to the March 20 assassination of Hedayet Sultan Al Salem, the country’s leading female journalist.

April 16: In the first such attack since 1996, Israeli warplanes bombed a Syrian radar station 22 miles east of Beirut, killing three Syrian soldiers and wounding six.

•Israel rejected a Jordanian proposal calling for an end to Jewish settlement construction, a pullback of Israeli troops from Palestinian towns and villages, and the lifting of Israel’s blockade of Palestinian-controlled areas in return for an end to the Palestinian intifada.

•Palestinians fired mortar shells at a town near Israeli Prime Minister Sharon’s ranch in the Negev Desert.

April 17: In an early morning attack on the Gaza Strip, Israel shelled and bombed Palestinian targets for six hours before troops seized Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza, threatening to remain “as long as it takes—days, weeks, months.” Following Secretary of State Powell’s criticism of the incursion as “excessive and disproportionate,” however, Israel withdrew its forces.

•A car carrying an Israeli diplomat in Athens was doused with gasoline and set on fire. There were no injuries.

•Hundreds of Serbs in Kosovo blocked roads to protest a new U.N.-imposed tax on goods imported from the rest of Serbia.

•Saudi Arabia and Iran signed a security agreement on issues ranging from money-laundering to fighting terrorism.

April 18: Hours after Israeli troops withdrew from Palestinian territory in the Gaza Strip, Palestinian militants fired a volley of homemade mortar shells at nearby Israeli settlements and military posts. Israeli forces briefly re-entered a Palestinian-controlled area in southern Gaza and demolished a police station.

•The U.N. Human Rights Commission voted 50 to 1 (the U.S.) to censure Israel for allowing Jewish settlements on Palestinian territories.

•A bomb exploded near Yugoslav government offices in the Kosovar capital of Pristina, killing one Serb and injuring four others.

•At the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague, former Bosnian Serb army commander Dragan Obrenovic pleaded not guilty to charges of genocide and other war crimes.

•Iraq charged Iran with firing 56 Scud missiles at Iraq-based camps of the opposition People’s Mojahedin of Iran.

•Three U.S. officials visited Afghanistan as part of a World Food Program delegation to assess the crisis caused by war, drought and extreme poverty.

•Fighting along the border between Bangladesh and the Indian states of Assam and Mehalaya killed 16 Indian Border Security troops and at least one Bangladeshi soldier.

April 19: Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad told President Bush that Damascus reserves the right to retaliate for Israel’s attack on a Syrian radar base in Lebanon.

•President Bush said he had no plans to lift sanctions against Iran or Libya.

•After accepting his apology and deeming the action a mistake, the 56-member U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum council unanimously backed chairman Rabbi Irving Greenberg, who had lobbied for a pardon of fugitive Marc Rich.

•India said it had regained control of the frontier village of Pyrdiwah from Bangladeshi forces.

April 20: In Chechnya, a series of mine explosions and clashes with separatist rebels left 21 Russian soldiers dead and at least 40 wounded.

•The remains of 19 bodies exhumed from a pit in western Bosnia-Herzegovina were believed to be those of Muslims and Croats held in the Serb camps of Samenica and Prekaja.

April 21: Hours after Israeli forces made their third incursion in a week into Palestinian-run Gaza, demolishing a police station near Rafah and wounding seven people, Israeli and Palestinian officials agreed to resume U.S.-sponsored security talks.

April 22: A Palestinian suicide bomber killed himself and a bus passenger when he exploded a nail-filled bomb at a bus stop in the central Israeli city of Kfar Sava. Right-wing Israeli politicians demanded that Prime Minister Sharon halt contacts with the Palestinian Authority.

•Voters in Montenegro gave a slim parliamentary majority to advocates of independence from Yugoslavia.

•Gunmen alleged to be Chechen sympathizers stormed the Swissotel in Istanbul, taking some 120 staff members and guests hostage.

•Two Turkish hunger strikers died, bringing to 16 the number dead from a months-long protest against the country’s new prison system.

April 23: Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Michael Melchior said Prime Minister Sharon had authorized Foreign Minister Peres to conduct “private and secret” talks with the Palestinian Authority. Meanwhile, during the funeral in Gaza of a Palestinian policeman who died of injuries suffered during an Israeli rocket attack the previous week, 12-year-old Muhanad Muhareb was shot and killed as the procession passed a Jewish settlement guarded by the Israeli army. Near Tel Aviv, a car bomb injured eight people.

•After a 12-hour siege, 13 Chechen sympathizers released their hostages at a luxury Istanbul hotel and surrendered to Turkish police.

•Citing incomplete and faulty evidence, Serbia’s Supreme Court ordered the release and retrial of 143 Kosovo Albanians convicted of terrorism and sentenced to lengthy prison terms.

•As Bangladeshis held their third nationwide strike in a month aimed at ousting Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, whose term ends in mid-July, police killed one protester and bomb explosions in the capital, Dhaka, injured at least eight people..

•In eastern Algeria, at the site of the former French army headquarters, excavators discovered a mass grave containing the remains of 290 people killed during Algeria’s 1954-62 war of independence.

April 24: At a White House meeting with President Bush, Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri urged the U.S. to play “a more effective role” in the Middle East.

•As Israel imposed a complete closure on the West Bank and Gaza Strip for the Jewish state’s observance of Memorial Day, followed by Independence Day, Hamas and Hezbollah representatives attending a two-day conference of Islamic countries in Iran warned Israel they would stage more “surprise” suicide and mortar attacks.

•In Kashmir, Indian troops reacting to a land-mine explosion which killed two soldiers fired at a civilian bus, killing a two-month-old baby and wounding several passengers.

•The Bush administration sent two U.S. narcotics experts to Afghanistan as part of an international team assessing ways to help former poppy growers with new crops and industries.

•The Yugoslav army charged 183 soldiers with committing crimes during the war in Kosovo.

April 25: A Pentagon investigation into the accidental bombing at the Udairi Range air base in Kuwait concluded that a Navy pilot, guided by two air traffic controllers, mistook an observation post for a target. The pilot then released three 500-pound bombs, killing five U.S. servicemen and a New Zealand army major, and seriously wounding three other Americans.

•India began deploying additional troops along parts of its border with Bangladesh.

April 26: Thousands of Gazans mourned four Fatah members killed by what Palestinian officials claim was a remote-control bomb planted in an Israeli buffer zone between Palestinian- and Egyptian-controlled areas of Rafah.

•In a second major clampdown in a month, Pakistan’s military rulers arrested hundreds of members of the 16-party Alliance for the Restoration of Democracy, which planned a May 1 rally in Karachi.

•The Hartford Seminary’s Mosque Study Project found that 2 million American Muslims attend 1,209 mosques nationwide, an increase of 25 percent since 1996.

April 27: Israeli troops fired grenade launchers and machines guns at Palestinian gunmen near Ramallah, wounding seven, including two police officers. In Gaza, Israeli soldiers firing on stone-throwing youth near the Karni crossing wounded nine Palestinians, and two elsewhere in Gaza.

•Israeli Prime Minister Sharon said one of his main goals was “to bring another million Jews” to Israel, primarily from Latin America and South Africa.

•Yemeni authorities arrested three more suspects in the Oct. 12 bombing of the USS Cole, bringing to 31 the number of people detained.

April 28: Despite Palestinian President Arafat’s call to stop using mortars and targeting civilians, morter shells fired on an illegal Jewish settlement in Gaza injured five teenagers. In the West Bank, Israeli soldiers killed Fatah activist Eymad Karakeh, and an Israeli man was killed by gunfire in northern Israel.

•In the apparent start of a spring offensive, fighting erupted in northern Afghanistan between the ruling Taliban militia and opposition troops.

•Eight Macedonian soldiers were killed by ethnic Albanian rebels in an ambush near the Kosovo border.

•Police shot and killed at least 16 civilians during riots in eastern Algeria, where nearly a week of clashes between Berber demonstrators and Algerian security forces, sparked by the killing of a Berber youth in a police station, claimed some 50 lives.

April 29: As seven Palestinians were killed in explosions in the West Bank and Gaza, Israeli Foreign Minister Peres traveled to Cairo and Amman to discuss an Egyptian-Jordanian peace proposal.

April 30: An annual State Department report listed Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria as states sponsoring terrorism.

•Iran’s Council of Guardians barred 145 of 356 would-be candidates for parliament in June 8 elections.

•The Indonesian parliament overwhelmingly censured President Abdurrahman Wahid for corruption and incompetence.