The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 2

2 NEWS Hm Qyrdlin Thursday May IS 1997 Tanks and F-1 6s back Kurdish faction in 'humanitarian' operation condemned by Baghdad as military aggression against sovereignty Turkish troops pour into north Iraq SYRIA ra-Kurtnh rjaws vv.t- Hl, aLLLLBBBiBnSr 9BnBBnnnnnnnnnnnnnflBm -TflH bb9w BBBBBr wKftPBBKKKKKOIBKtSjUSM nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnB3lBBnnnnnnnnnl njgaMBBBBMBKEgJpafc 'BBKl Ctwte NuttaN In Ankara THOUSANDS of Turkish troops backed by tanks, planes and helicopter gunships poured into northern Iraq yesterday in a combined operation with an Iraqi Kurdish faction against Turkish Kurdish sep aratist fighters. The Turkish foreign ministry announced that pesh-merga guerrillas of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) had launched an operation in the early hours against those of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). which has been fighting for an independent state or autonomy in southeastern Turkey since 1984. After a request from the KDP for help, the Turkish armed forces have been providing air and artillery support and Turkish troops have entered northern Iraq," said a foreign ministry spokesman, Sermet Atacanli. The defence minister, Tur-han Tayan.

told a news conference that Turkey was giving what amounted to "humanitarian aid" to the KDP and, as soon as the operation was over, the troops would pull out. Baghdad condemned "this new Turkish military aggression against the sovereignty of Iraq and its territorial integrity" and called on Ankara to "withdraw its invading troops from inside Iraqi territory Western diplomats in the Turkish capital were sceptical of the government's claims of limited support for a KDP operation. One described the KDP's involvement as a "fig leaf of cover for a Turkish offensive. Turkey's state-run Anatolian news agency said troops v-MrnKjakHf-, lHTiltllnrHrXimnMa1 the military operation of March 1995. Turkey sent op to 90,000 troopa back into the area yesterday photograph fath sabas 7 mti Kurdish villagers in northern backed by helicopters had inflicted heavy losses on PKK fighters in Sarisarilar.

There had been no serious clashes between the KDP and PKK in the region since five months of fighting in 1995. The KDP had allied briefly six-week operation against PKK bases in northern Iraq. The armed forces recently claimed to have limited the PKK threat in south-eastern Turkey. A 10-year-old state of emergency was eased in November when Mardin was troops had crossed the Iraqi border at several points, backed by tanks, artillery, helicopter gunships and F-16 fighter bombers. This would make it a bigger operation than that of March 1995, when 35,000 soldiers took part in a rather than cross over.

Every spring, PKK guerrillas return from bases in northern Iraq to resume their campaign in south-eastern Turkey against the security forces. Sources in the region said as many as 50,000 Turkish Cider With Rosie author dies at 82 Euthanasia row doctor unveils 'coma machine' He grew up in Gloucestershire, went to Spain, then became an institution, writes John Ezard removed from a list of 10 provinces under an emergency govemorate. The military has pressed for the introduction of an economic programme in the region, which suffers from poverty, high unemployment and mass migration. More than 20,000 people have died in 13 years of fighting and some 2,500 villages have been evacuated or destroyed. News of the incursion came as US, British and Turkish officials were presiding over a fourth round of peace talks in Ankara between the KDP and PUK.

The Gulf war allies negotiated a ceasefire between the rival Iraqi Kurdish factions last October but have made slow progress in establishing a permanent peace. The British Foreign Office Minister, Doug Henderson, later issued a statement expressing concern at the Turkish troops' move. "We are urging the Turks not to exceed measures necessary to protect their interests," he said. "We are also stressing to the Turks the importance of respecting human rights and of avoiding actions which might endanger innocent civilians in the region." Dr Philip Nitschke: facing questions over patient's death requirements of the Northern Territory law and died soon after it was quashed. South Australia's director uf public prosecutions, Paul Rofe, who attended the doctor's press conference In Adelaide, said the doctor's account of the death amounted to a technical confession of murder.

But he added that he did not believe any jury in Australia would convict Dr Nitschke. The doctor said Ms Wild, who died on April 17 after four days in a coma brought on by pain-relieving drugs, had been distressed to regain consciousness on the third day. He said: "It is considered to be good medical practice to allow a person to die over two days and yet if you increase the infusion rate and they die over two hours it is' cons id ered to be murder. Clearly there is a grey area somewhere between those two extremes. The need now is to move into that grey area." LAURIE Lee, the most loved writer about the English countryside since John Betje-man, has died in the Gloucestershire village he made legendary, it was announced yesterday.

His death on Tuesday in his birthplace of Slad, near Stroud, followed an apparent recovery from abdominal surgery in March. He was 82. His wife Cathy, whom he married 43 years ago, and their daughter Jessie were with him. Mrs Lee said yesterday: "I do not want to comment now. I need some time to think about all of this.

The funeral will be next week here in A memorial service will be held later. Lee had talked openly for Iraq eye a Turkish tank during with President Saddam Hussein's forces in August to oust a rival Iraqi Kurdish faction, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), from the regional capital, Irbil. That led to American bombing raids on southern Iraq and two three years of his failing health and eyesight. His consolation was that bis last months were spent within reach of the overgrown grassy bank up which his mother scrambled to catch the Stroud bus early this century. "Apart from the stone wails, I am the oldest thing in the valley," he said in an interview last year.

"I used to think that like them I was indestructible. But two of the walls fell down recently and I suppose I shall be the next to fail." This sense of glory in his rootedness sold more than six million copies of his most celebrated book. Cider With Rosie. Earlier this year the memoir, pub- for a production that puts the emphasis on dialectical argument rather than profligate theatricality. Division and debate lie at the heart of the play: Jean-Paul Marat as against the Marquis de Sade.

social revolution as against anarchic individualism, Brecht as against Artaud. Even the form is oppositional, for what we are watching is a group of asylum inmates in Charenton in 1808 performing a play about the French Revolution in 1793, written by de Sade and acted out under the censorious eye of the asylum director and his club-wielding guards. Sams's production puts the months of factional fighting before a ceasefire. Tens of thousands of Turkish troops bad been massing on the border with Iraq for nearly a month. But the military insisted they wanted to prevent PKK infiltration Laurie Lee: 'All of my books are remembered' lished in 1959, was voted the 56th favourite book of the century.

Lee said it was about the glory "of tickling a girl under a haystack when you're not taking love that More soberly, spotlight squarely on Weiss's argument. De Sade stands for the reality of the imagination, the purity of doubt, the danger of unchecked idealism; Marat, lying in his bathtub awaiting the fatal blow from Charlotte Corday. meanwhile argues for popular revolution as against the sanctity of monarchs, priests and privilege. But who in the end is right? Weiss opens up a fascinating debate, but gives us no clear answer; except, of course, that becaup? de Sade is author and director of the event, it is impossible not to see him as the controlling figure. And I suspect that what really intrigues Weiss is the -Jm Queen's Speech Includes 26 bills continued from page 1 just weeks away, Mr Blair made it plain how central that is to Labour's hopes of reshaping government.

"We have reached the limits of the public's willingness simply to fund an unreformed welfare state through ever higher taxes and spending," he warned MPs. Family life and the world of work had changed utterly since the 1940s. "We are undertaking a thorough examination of all aspects of welfare reform." Paddy Ashdown joined Mr Major in promising "constructive though he welcomed the Chancellor's move to give the Bank of England control of interest rate policy a move that Mr Major said would result in fewer jobs and lower growth. Mr Blair insisted his gov ernment had "its feet on the ground and sound values in its heart" to deliver what he called "the people's Robin Cook, the Foreign Secretary, will today lift the 13-year ban on trade union membership at the GCHQ intelligence centre. ha said its popularity showed the modern world 411 yearned lor a rooted-mm it had almost entirely lost.

la a Guardian interview last June, defending his notoriously slow tempo as a writeV he said: "I'm lazy, but that's not the whole story. Look. Barbara Cart-land could paper the walls with her books. Compton Mackenzie wrote 100 novels but no one can remember any of them apart from Whisky Galore. If I'd written four a year one might have been remembered.

But I've written four and they are all Cider With Rosie opens: "I was set down from the carrier's cart at the age of three; and there with a sense of bewilderment and terror my life in the village began. The June grass, amongst which I stood, was taller than me and I Yesterday the Rev. Barry form as much as the content: the notion of lunatics enacting an historical event and thereby demonstrating that violent revolution is inseparable from madness. In short, the play is a mixture of argument and happening. But, in the large circular space of the Olivier, it is not always easy to follow the details of the debate.

And, where Brook treated the inmates as individually haunted obsessives, in Sams's production they become a largely unthrcatening ensem ble who never seem in great danger of turning either on the authorities or on us. The result is a perfectly honourable revival, but one In ANEW euthanasia controversy flared up in Australia yesterday after a doctor who helped four patients to die legally unveiled a "coma machine" designed to keep the dying unconscious. The move came as Dr Philip Nitschke, who led the fight for the Northern Territories voluntary euthanasia code, overturned by the senate two months ago, was due to face police questioning over the death of another patient. Dr Nitschke said his new device used pain-killing drugs to guarantee that the terminally ill would never regain consciousness. He claimed the machine would expose the hypocrisy of current laws which allow doctors to induce death through drug overdoses under ihe guise uf ireuiing pain.

The outspoken Darwin GP believes there is a grey area between euthanasia and accepted medical practice that could be used to help the terminally ill die with dignity. He said the coma machine, currently a prototype, would use a compuier-prugrummed sensor to detect consciousness and to control the flow of drugs through an intravenous drip. "It is a slightly macabre device to provide the patient with the guarantee that they will not wake up, that if they ever look like waking up, it will be sensed, and more drugs at a faster rats will flow into that person," he said. Dr Nitschke faces police questioning over the death of Esther Wild, a 56-year-old nurse who had met the When argument is unequal to theatricality Coker, vicar of Holy Trinity church, Slad, said: "Although people here were prowl of his International NMtation as a writer, they will remember him more as a fellow-villager and miss his presence among The poet, Michael Horowitz, who also lives in Slad, said: "His prose and poetry will liv as long as there are lovers of life, nature and literature." People travelled from all over the world to talk to him in his local pub, the Woolpack Inn. The landlord, David Tar-ratt, a friend for 30 years, said that a "blanket of sadness" had descended over the village's 240 residents.

"The village will never be the same without him. He was such an entertaining man who always had time for visitors who came to see him from all over the world," he said. 1 19 that never ignites into a sensory experience. David Calder as de Sade persuasively puts the case for fantasy and imagination, Corin Redgrave is an eloquently militant Marat, but the performance of the evening comes from Anastasia Hille as Charlotte Corday. There is something astonishingly trance-like about Hllle, as if every movement required a vast effort of will.

I suspect in the end it takes a director of genius to combine Weiss's peculiar blend of polemic and passion. What we get at the Olivier is a carefully controlled experiment in which the intellectual argument wins out over the underly ing anarchy SHOULD I WDnuary.paoa Michael Billington Olivier PETER Weiss's play MaratSade became a post-war landmark largely because of a legendary production by Peter Brook at the Aldwych In 1964: an unforgettable essay in violence and study of madness. Now it is decently revived by Jeremy Sams at the in-the round Olivier, but one wonders if this is the ideal space DIRECT Debit DD YOUR DOUGH DIRECT DEBIT IS THE EASIEST WAY TO BUDGET YOUR BILLS AND YOU EVER NEED TO, DDs ARE EASILY CANCELLED. JUST CONTACT YOUR BANK. UK BANKS AND BUILDING SOCIETIES.