The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 18

is Guardian Wednesday September 8 1993 Onion delight at Smith's promises ahead for him before the party conference. He said it was vital one-mcmber-one-vote proposals Klth Harper and Seumas Milne yNION leaders were jubilant in Brighton last night after an unexpected package of promises by John Smith, the Labour leader, which deflated the conflict between the two wings of the Labour movement. His outspoken commitment to full employment and trade union rights, and an expansionary economic policy, marks a sharp change in the programme espoused by the party's modernises, notably by Gordon Brown and Tony Blair. The remarks in his 45-minute speech to the Trades Union Congress contrasted with his "no surrender" declaration before his speech a reference to his trade union links plan which he is determined to press at the Labour party conference. But his willingness to change key aspects of Labour's industrial and economic policy clearly delighted union leaders, particularly John Edmonds, of the GMB.

Mr Edmonds has been one of Mr Smith's most outspoken critics on the issue of one-member-one-vote, but he said: "We will now work together over the next three weeks before the party conference to settle our differences. It is a minor constitutional tiff." Bill Morris, general secretary of the Transport and General Workers' Union, said the speech had vision and content and lifted delegates, while Bill Jordan, president of the Amalgamated Engineering and Electrical Union, said Mr Smith had delivered everything the unions had asked him for. He had established his right to win the trade union links issue. But Mr Smith's uncompromising remarks on arriving in Brighton yesterday underlined the problems which still lie Kasparov and Short, hunched over the board 'as if scrutinising their tax returns' during the first game of the world championship PHOTOGRAPH. STEVEN SIEWEBT metal fans in first of The 24 Silences No thrills John Ezard THE 112-year-old Savoy Theatre, damaged by fire in 1990, reopened in July with Roriz's ballet The Seven Silences of Salome.

Yesterday it was taken over for the first of a much stranger series of entertainments, The 24 Silences of Garry Kasparov and Nigel Short. By last night it had already produced as well as a first game victory for Kasparov the longest silence in the his tory ot tne English stage. were earned. There is no need to amend them, because they are sensible and clear. Mr Smith's remarks sug gested he is not prepared to oacK down on nis linns plan, which has received the over whelming support of Labour's national executive.

In private. he has said he will call for a special party conference if he tails at tne nrst attempt. Mr Smith's stance is designed to play on the unions' lack of unity. Not all feel strongly on this issue. Between now and Labour's conference, they will come under pressure to compromise.

It was being acknowledged last night that Mr smith new policy commitments have transformed the atmosphere for constitutional negotiations. Mr Smith promised that a Labour government would give all workers basic employment rights on their first day in a job, regardless of hours worked. This would include protection against unfair dismissal, minimum health and safety standards, and the right to union recognition. This commitment contrasts with Tony Blair's caution as employment spokesman before the last election. Just as satisfying for critics of Labour's modernisers' was Mr Smith's support for the use of "all instruments of macro-economic including the exchange rate and borrowing levels, to achieve sustained growth and rising employment.

Mr Smith's remarks on economic policy were widely interpreted as signalling a shift away from policies identified with Gordon Brown, the shadow chancellor. Stress on union link, page Leader comment, page 17 for all 22 Nacc countries, but first and foremost the Visegrad group. At the same time the summit will stress the priority of working with Russia and the CIS states to build a common European security framework. "Nato heads of government may not settle on a specific date for east European membership, or even agree a detailed timetable," one Nato source said last night. "But for the first time they will make it clear this is a right for the countries of central and east Europe.

That means we will have crossed the Rubicon." In practice, the timetable is likely to parallel the preparations to admit the Visegrad countries to membership of the European Community, the source said. The Visegrad six are still only associates oftheECbutat the Edinburgh summit last year they were given a clear promise of eventual full EC membership, probably towards the end of the decade. "We are not talking here about some kind of halfway house membership, or of association with Nato, but of full membership including Article 5 of our charter," the Nato source continued. This is the article which guarantees that all members of the alliance will come to the military aid of any member which is attacked. Until now Nato governments have ruled out extending this guarantee to the' countries of central and eastern Europe, for fear of rupturing co-operation with President Yeltsin and playing into the hands of his nationalist critics in the Russian parliament.

seats, where push-button terminals offered a Times Pre-dict-A-Move prize competition for guessing what Gazza and Nige would do next. From a seat in the stalls the chess board used was too small to suggest a living game. Kasparov and Short leant over it as if scrutinising their tax returns. By a third of the way through the silence, the Miss World-seekers together with more than half the 20 to 55-a-head audience had gone. In the Gallery Bar the grandmaster Jonathan Levitt was Nato brings the east in from the cold 'We prisoners had to drink urine to survive' This, apart from the preservation of silence, was a new style: Huxley's game absorbed into the era of mega-hype.

More than 500 reporters and 100 photographers had been drawn to the London hotel by the breakaway Professional Chess Association and its sponsors the Times for a 1.7m world play-off "a Miss World-style contest," as one organising official wearily said. The new style was not only in the commentaries but in the bars where "merchandise is and on the our own backs gnarled with the pierced metal. Prisoners said drunken Croatian guards had fired through the doors, particularly over a period of three days in July. Estimates of the numbers of dead on these occasions ranged from three to 10. "They would beat us every day," said a prisoner cowering in a corner of one of the hangars.

After the shootings, said another, "one man had bullets in his leg for three days before he could get any help." The men were kept in what are effectively giant dark human chicken coops. During July, they said, the heavy steel doors were kept shut and apart from a single meal each day, the men saw no daylight for 15 Eyewitness Ed Vulliamy in Capljina THEIR burning eyes, cropped heads and shrivelled, sickly torsos emerged only as one became accustomed to the darkness: hundreds of men, some of them gaunt and horribly thin, crammed like factory farm beasts into the dank and putrid John Palmer in Brussels NATO governments are rapidly preparing to admit their former enemies in eastern Europe into full membership of the alliance. In a radical change of strategy, the 16 Nato countries seem likely to abandon their opposition to extending security guarantees to former members of the Warsaw Pact when Nato heads of government meet next January. The speed with which Nato is moving reflects not only pressure from their one time Warsaw Pact adversaries but, crucially, a switch of policy by the Russian government. This was signalled by President Boris Yeltsin last month during an official visit to Warsaw.

The Russian leader said Moscow would no longer object if Poland and other east European countries sought full membership of Nato. Until now, the "Visegrad Six" Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania and Bulgaria have had to be content, together with the Baltic states and the republics of the Commonwealth of Independent States, with membership of the North Atlantic Co-operation Council (Nacc). Only last month the US secretary of state, Warren Christopher, writing in Nato Review, declared: "At an appropriate time, we may choose to enlarge Nato membership. But that is not now on the agenda." However, at the special Nato summit planned for next January, alliance leaders are expected to set out their formal acceptance of full membership for heavy This threatened to be breached early on, when two international adjudicators strode to the footlights and glowered at the audience. Either the audience was guilty of chuckling at a remark by headset commentators or too many headsets had the volume turned up.

And if purists did overhear some of the remarks they would have found them unusual for a chess match. "Gosh Gazza's deep in thought," exulted a grandmaster, "this is quite a victory for Nigel." spaces of two large underground hangars. The murky hangars were two of the six sheds that constitute the Dretelj prison camp, built into the hillside on the edge of the Bosnian Croat town of Capljina, south of besieged Mostar. The former Yugoslav army storage installation, now run by the Bosnian Croat HVO army, was visited by the Guardian yesterday in the first access achieved by the press since the camp was established at the beginning of July. The 1,428 prisoners were Muslim men rounded up off the streets and from their homes in Capljina, Stolac and other towns in the Mostar region, part of the savage "ethnic "We were testing the ventilation system in the plant.

It is a chemical part of testing and not connected in any way with the uranium testing which began last Thursday." In August BNFL was given the go-ahead to begin uranium testing at the 2.8 billion plant. Although the Government has said it is "minded" to allow Thorp to begin operating, a final decision will not be announced until December. An extended public consultation period ends on October 4. Greenpeace was granted a judicial review last week to be heard next week of the decision to allow uranium commissioning. But it was refused a court order preventing BNFL tional impact.

Tetchy, ferocious, bullet-headed; he asks with scorching rage, if death is no more than pitch blackness: "What would have been the point of going through all those enervating charades in the first place?" Yet the wonder of this performance is Holm's buried sense of longing for his absent children. I have seen Lears that have moved me less. Leveaux's production also combines the concrete and the mysterious: the classic Pinter mix. Anna Massey's enigmatic Bel regards her domineering spouse with patient tolerance yet there is no mistaking her hollow-eyed despair when her sons reject her on the phone. Douglas Hodge, in ill-fitting check jacket, and Michael Sheen, in singlet and shorts, as the two sons, pass the time in name-brandishing games yet Thorp leak 'not nuclear' Guardian Crossword No 19,817 Set by Pasquale defiantly high-minded.

"If by exciting you mean very clear attacks and initiatives, maybe it's not exciting," he said. "I don't think Heavy Metal fans would find it exciting. But if you like a game of positional balance and are into the finer things in life, maybe it is." On the commentary a dissident grandmaster recalled: "Someone once said watching a chess match was like watching grass grow." And there are 23 more games. Leonard Barden, page 1 5 stares that followed us. The beefy guards who patrolled the site either snarled or smiled unpleasantly to themselves as we passed.

As we left the camp, a car coming from its direction, with official HVO number plates, crashed into the side of our car, trying to force us off the road. We presumed a connection with the day's events. The US defence secretary, Les Aspin, may visit Sarajevo next week to inspect the situation in the beleaguered Bosnian capital, US defence officials said yesterday. Regime of fear in prison camp, page Martin Woollacott Commentary, page 16 llfflo Ba URAL 0 2 foUr VhJm A 18 HIU -JBUMFMajM CROSSWORD SOLUTION 10,810 6 Communicate across an institute in Boston (8) 7 One who lives it up takes big car round the avenue (5) 8 Early engineer making bridges span one expanse of water (10) 12 E.g. Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice on bill showing bed (4-6) 15 Scottish hero's collecting a bark from trees (9) 16 Where you may see robbers? They're unlikely to be at churchl (8) 19 A man in charge of very small things (6) 21 Sound ot feet may be quiet after a vehicle (5) 22 Lady to appear divided and repeatedly upset (4) Solution tomorrow I This was when Kasparov pondered for IS minutes, apparently thrown off his stride after Short looked about to play what one commentator called the "razor-sharp Marshall What was unusual was that a soccer-style nickname was being used for a player in a game of which T.H.

Huxley once said: "The chessboard is the world; the pieces are the phenomena of the universe; the rules of the game are what we call the laws of nature. The Player on the other side is hidden from us." cleansing" of Muslims now in full swing as the Bosnian Croats establish their racially pure mini-state of Herzeg-Bosna within the frontiers of riven Bosnia-Herzegovina. Talking to the prisoners was not easy. Men leaned forward from the huddles that gathered around to whisper snatches of recollection or fear, or else took us back into the shadows to speak in hasty fragments of testimony. "I am afraid to speak; I'm afraid they will beat me." said one man, running a finger across his throat.

At the back of the hangars, the walls were pock-marked with bullet holes, and bullets had obviously been fired through its metal doors, their from proceeding with the tests pending the review's outcome. Greenpeace said yesterday's evacuation illustrated its case. "If they cannot deal with the non-radioactive materials safely then we have no confidence that they can deal with the highly radioactive spent fuel," a spokesman said. BNFL said late last night that a technical team was carrying out checks to establish the cause of the leak and ensure there was no recurrence. "We would expect to return to normal operations by early tomorrow morning," said a spokesman.

Evacuation of the plant was a precaution and all emergency systems had worked. somehow suggest, by replicating their father's behaviour pattern, they are still tied to him. And Claire Skinner as Bridget, hovering over the scene like a ghost, implies that she herself is the victim of some irreparable childhood wrong. The play is much funnier than I have probably suggested. The piss-taking Pinter humour and the undercutting of verbal pretence are all there.

But what makes this an extraordinary play is that Pinter both corrals his familiar themes the sub-jectiveness of memory, the unknowability of one's lifelong partner, the gap between the certain present and the uncertain past and extends his territory. He shows, with unflinching candour, that in an age shorn of systems and beliefs we face "death's dateless night" in a state of mortal terror. David Sharrock A CHEMICAL leak during tests caused the evacuation of 280 workers from the controversial Thorp re-pro cessing plant at Sellafield, Cum bria, yesterday. A member ot British Nuclear Fuels' fire brigade was receiv-ine medical treatment after being overcome by fumes. About 15 people received medical checks for throat irritation, a spokesman said.

He aaata: ine lean naa nothing to do with radioactivity. There was a release of nitrogen oxide. the 280 people working in the vicinity were evacuated as a precaution. days. For one stretch of 76 hours, they had been left without food or water, incarcerated in the steaming heat.

"We had to drink our own urine to survive," said one prisoner. "For a long time, at the beginning, we were in the same place, and where we lived and slept was also the toilet," said another. Commander Tomo Sakota, who took over the camp six weeks ago, said: "I feel sorry for all these men, and no one would be more pleased than me if the camp was closed." As ever with these visits, a theatrical game of power and deception was played, and it was hard to work out what truths lay behind the desperate 23 One composer sounding like another but lacking his finish (6) 24 It may be her doing if men sit uneasily (8) 25 Support and love girl, making this? (8) 26 Wheel for machine at the press (6) Down Rugger player has no hesitation becoming captain (4) Stranger, outwardly sound as a bell, is close to collapse (9) Predicament? Get rid ot England's leaderl (6) Ideal man lirst ruled women with difficulty (6,9) 5) Tomorrow in jryf Comedy and anguish in Pinter's most moving work ARTS: "We're trying to show the pronunciation of an age group that is younger. It's Prince Andrew rather than the Queen." Terry Coleman meets the woman who has edited the New Shorter Oxford Dictionary's 3,800 pages. STYLE: "I'm not the best singer, dancer or actress in the world" says Dannii Minogue.

"When you're lucky number comes up, you go for it." Kylie, Jason, Dannii and now the twins, Gayle and Gillian: Catherine Wilson on how soap stars are being remade as pop stars. EUROARTS: The cameraman put a wary hand outside the hole, to try to recover his equipment. A bu-st from a Kalashnikov sent him back under cover, where they all waited for the snipers' dinner time to come round. La Stampa reports from a film set in Sarajevo. SCIENCE: The ancient murrelet gets thrown in at the deep end.

It hatches from an egg in a burrow, and within two days finds itself out on the open ocean, learning to fend for itself. Science Guardian on evolution's odd bird out. COMPUTER: The seeing chip: Clive Davidson reports on the microchip that works as a camera, with potential applications from doll's eyes to hi-tech security systems. Plus: Jack Schofield cuts DOS down to size. continued from page 1 Ralph bluntly puts it, thinking is no answer to life's meaning.

This is Pinter as we ve never Quite seen him before: nakedly emotional in his presentation of this bedridden, suburban Lear. But, characteristically, the play also switches wildly between poetic threnody and verbal comedy and weaves many ot his accumulated themes. There is that hunger for an ascertainable past, the sense that love and friendship are sub ject to betrayal, the feeling that family life is a brutal battleground of sibling rivalry and paternal bullying. But what makes this Pinter's most moving work is the ineradicable gulf between parents and children. Ian Holm, returning to me stage after a long absence, gives a superb performance as Andy that remlorces Pinter emo Across I Island financier establishing scholarships (6) 5 Important friend must take precedence over heartless colleague (8) 9 Country round has to be worked out (8) 10 These days evil is what you get in the news (6) II State has aim to put this on privatised lines? (7,5) 13 Hindu festival taking up half the vacation (4) 14 Artist's kettle? (8) 17 Increase the attractiveness of resort tor audience (8) 18 Proper country gathering (4) 20Not on the side of the bookmaker? Anything such is an improvement (3,3,6).