The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 2

2 I NEWS The Guardian Thursday September 18 1997 Almost 90 countries sign up to treaty Clinton bows to pressure from American military Robin Cook hails work of Princess Diana US scuppers global landmine ban Harry Joyce in Oslo and Ian Black In London emption for "smart" anti-personnel mines that protect antitank mines; and a provision letting countries withdraw from the treaty if they are victims of aggression. China also poses a threat to the credibility of any ban as it is the largest producer of landmines and has not yet agreed to sign the treaty. Even if no more mines are laid, there are still 300 million devices across the world, according to the Red Cross. tiations at the Geneva-based Conference on Disarmament. Stuart Maslen, legal adviser to the Landmines Campaign of the Red Cross, praised the efforts of the Princess of Wales: "She stressed the personal angle of the issue.

In previous years, people had talked about the military and security implications but she took the humanitarian view and I think that did concentrate people's minds." The US sought three opt-outs from the treaty; one to let the US continue to use devices in Korea for nine years; an ex their way to be a part of this treaty." Mr Cook conspicuously made no comment on the US decision, saying only that Britain would urge "as many countries as possible" to sign. But one British diplomat said: "It's very disappointing that the Americans felt they were not able to sign. It would have been stronger if they'd felt able to do Britain, which announced a unilateral landmine ban a longstanding Labour pledge in May, hopes to use the treaty to give impetus to wider nego The US had demanded special status in any accord. Critics said this would have made the treaty almost worthless. "It would have been completely watered down if other countries had joined the Americans," said Pernilla Springfeldt, a Swedish anti-mines activist.

Most campaigners put a brave face on the failure to bring the US in. "What was important to us was a good treaty, not numbers," said Jack Selebi, the conference president. "I think in a few years' time they will find Cook, the Foreign Secretary, said: "This achievement is due in part to the work of Diana, Princess of Wales, who did so much to focus the attention of the world on the horrific effects of anti-personnel mines." The terms agreed in Oslo set out an uncompromising ban on the production, use, stockpiling and transfer of anti-personnel mines. Anti-mine lobbyists had hoped a US signature might persuade Russia, China, India and Pakistan to ban weapons which have killed and maimed hundreds of thousands across the world. But President Bill Clinton, under pressure from his own military, said he could not do it: "No one should expect our people to expose our armed forces to unacceptable risks." Mike McCurry, the White House spokesman, said: "We are determined to continue to press for the eradication of anti-personnel landmines.

We regret that the document emerging from Oslo will not meet some of the necessary precautions that the United States insists upon," countries, including Britain, but lacked the vital endorsement of the world's only superpower. Nevertheless, campaigners greeted it as an historic step: "This is a victory for humanity," said a triumphant Louise Doswald-Beck, heading the International Red Cross team in Oslo. "It shows that it is possible, with determination and perseverance, to make significant improvements in international humanitarian law." Hailing "the beginning of the end for Robin Trimble risks all as Unionists return to talks THE United States yesterday spurned intense pressure to back a worldwide ban on anti-personnel landmines, saying its security would be compromised if it signed a treaty hailed as a victory for humanity and a tribute to Diana, Princess of Wales. The treaty, negotiated in the Norwegian capital Oslo, was supported by nearly 90 Outgunned Los Angeles police HEBEjEEEfijBEfifiEflfiEfiBEfijBfiEflEBEEBJflEEH tEaBBHBiiiHiNBBBNBNHNHBiNBnN jBf on live television on February 28. Both robbers were killed Clearing the killing fields, Online page 14 ists are also opposed.

So the stakes for Mr Trimble's leadership are high. David Ervine, leader of the PUP, said: "We feel we in the PUP have broken lots of ground so that others can walk on it. I say simply: Let the debate begin. We are ready for it." Mr Ervine said that face-to-face talks would take place. The only outstanding issue was timing.

Ms Mowlam, clearly delighted, welcomed the parties' return. "We pay tribute to the courage it has taken for them to come in, stick to their principles, abandon some of the old political divisions, and try by talking to move this process forward." While there were worries the previous day that the Markethill bomb, believed to be the work of a splinter group, the Continuity Army Council, was designed to bomb the Ulster Unionists away from the negotiating table, it was suggested yesterday they had been bombed to it. Ms Mowlam rejected that. She said: "I think that under-estimates the Unionists' understanding of the importance of talking and reaching accommodation across the community." Gerry Adams, Sinn Fein president, welcomed the Unionists and said he wanted them in talks in the same room. But his language was more pointed than it had been in recent days.

"The Unionists wrecked the last peace process because they were afraid of change. They are still afraid of change." While there was undoubted optimism around Stormont yesterday, Mr Trimble is ask ing that Sinn Fein be ex cluded because he believes the IRA is implicated in the Markethill bomb. George Mitchell, the former US sena tor who is chairing the peace talks, threw out a similar plea from the Democratic Union ists because they were not in the negotiating room. Leader comment, pane 18 gest the character's "downright There is a fine Scottish Emilia from Maureen Beattie, speaking up for abused women everywhere, and good support from Clifford Rose as a sententious Venetian Duke and from Trevor Peacock as a bitter Brabantio. But the joy of this Othello, co-produced with the Salzburg Festival, is that it combines a wealth of realistic detail down to Iago's surreptitious pawing of the grieving Desdemona with a sense of the play's tragic architecture.

Machine gun rules in new Wild West Christopher Reed on the bank robbery epidemic in Los Angeles John Mullin Ireland Correspondent BkAVID Trimble, leader Bof the Ulster Unionists, BlBr put his political career on the line yesterday when he led his party into talks on Northern Ireland's future less than 24 hours after a republi can bomb ripped through a Protestant village. Although face-to-face debate with Sinn Fein is some way off, Mr Trimble's decision to take his team into Stormont brought republicans and Unionists under the same roof for negotiations for the first time in 70 years. Mo Mowlam, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, hailed the move as courageous. Mr Trimble, aware of the critics within his own party and in the Democratic Unionist Party and UK Unionists, both of which are boycotting the all-party talks, mounted a strong defence as he arrived at Castle Buildings. He was flanked by the Progressive Unionist Party and the Ulster Democratic Party, the loyalist fringe groups.

They were also returning to negotiations. Mr Trimble said: "We have no illusions about the character of Sinn Fein. We have not invited them to the table, but we are not afraid of them. We will not run away from them. We are not there to negotiate with them, but to confront them to expose their fascist character.

"We are not prepared to tolerate Sinn Fein being portrayed as a party of peace, and Unionists as the problem. The truth is Unionists are geniune democrats, but if we are outside the process that truth will not be recognised." He insisted that, with the Ulster Unionists present, "there will be no united Ireland, there will be no joint sovereignty, no joint author ity actual or otherwise Re-entering talks the day after the terrorist bomb at Markethill infuriated the DUP and UK Unionists. Sections within the Ulster Union- a scientific experiment: he memorably makes him a squat, shaven-headed, implicitly impotent nihilist, gnawed by the "daily beauty" he sees in others' lives. There is a superb moment when he sits beside Othello whispering into his ear the words that prompt the general's epileptic fit: for this Iago, it's the ultimate symbol of destruction, possession and power. Claire Skinner, though deeply moving as she listens to a black recording of the Willow Song, is slightly too fragile a Desdemona to sug- photograph: mike meadows police forces, and federal departments which now have 60,000 armed agents.

The Los Angeles police department's M-16 guns were donated by the defence department and are similar to those used by US soldiers in Vietnam. They will be carried in the boot of police sergeants' cars and used by specially trained officers. They are part of $26million (16.4 million) worth of equipment supplied to US police forces in the last two years, including body armour, military helmets, and infra-red viewers. California's Republican governor Pete Wilson, a former marine, brandished one of the M-16s at a press conference and declared: "Never, ever again do I want to see officers from the LA police department outgunned." black leader in a Maughamlike colonial society, disintegrates with total conviction: at his lowest, he is reduced to ransacking Des-demona's dressing-table and sniffing the bed-sheets. Yet, in the final scenes, he captures the broken music of a tortured soul.

Simon Russell Beale's Iago, who at one point illustrates his diabolical plan with the help of playing cards, reminds one of Au-den's description of Iago as the joker in the pack. But Russell Beale is more than a practical joker carrying out with bank robbers shown Van Nuys incident was pronounced dead and the other underwent emergency surgery, California's senator, Dianne Feinstein, was appealing to Israel not to export tens of thousands of Uzi and Galil machine guns to America. She sent a strongly-worded letter to the prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, asking him to intervene. This week she called on President Bill Clinton to help stem imports of rifles that are theoretically illegal but subvert the law through cosmetic changes to their specifications. At Van Nuys two bank security guards, both retired police officers in plain clothes and carrying concealed guns, spotted the robbers in their car behind the Great Western Bank.

The men pulled on ski-masks and one carried a 9mm semi-automatic pistol. But Sam Mendes's brilliant new production solves both these difficulties: not only does it boast a first-rate Othello in David Harewood thus nailing the racist lie that there are few good classical black actors but it reminds us that this is a domestic tragedy with public implications. Mendes and his designer, Anthony Ward, set the play in a 20th century colonial world. Venice is a place of war-maps, phones and brandy bottles, where a black general is prized for his valour, regardless of new magazines into their sputtering rifles. Ten police officers and five passers-by were injured and both robbers were killed.

One bled to death with 29 bullet wounds. The LA force immediately complained they had nothing to match the robbers' AK-47s. Their 9mm Beretta pistols would not even penetrate their armour. One robber was shot through the head with a rifle an officer obtained from a nearby gun shop. Public criticism may focus on the ambush in Van Nuys.

Security experts say aggression often provokes determined robbers into armed response. The two guards worked for a security firm in California that has 17,000 guards nationwide. They are part of an American armed corps made up of increasingly militarised by his mixture of self-regard and insecurity? Or Iago, the active embodiment of evil? Mendes shrewdly suggests they are absolutely inter-dependent: that Iago's poison is able to work only because of some lurking doubt inside Othello. Harewood comes before his Venetian political masters with an air of indolent assurance. But once in Cyprus, where Desdemona and Cassio exchange mutually appreciative glances, his certainty crumbles.

Harewood, as the isolated take cover during a shootout the area with bullets for an hour as live television relayed the mayhem. The FBI has designated greater Los Angeles the "bank robbery capital of the with a fifth of all US bank robberies committed in the area. Last year they totalled 1,226, more than three a day. In almost every case the robbers were armed or pretended to be. Los Angeles comes by its title because armed bank robbers in stolen cars can speed away from robberies on the motorways and be 20 miles away in 20 minutes.

They can abandon their cars and disappear before police arrive. Even as one robber in the Michael Billington Othello Cottesloe Theatre OTHELLO is currently the least performed of Shakespeare's major tragedies: partly because of the problem of casting the title role and partly because the play is thought to lack the mythic dimension of a Lear or Macbeth. i.V-.'JMIVtt", AS POLICE in Los Angeles yesterday launched an investigation into a bank robbery that left one man dead and another injured, fears were growing that the purchase of 600 M-16 automatic rifles for the city's police department will turn the sprawling megalopolis into a trigger-happy Wild West with machine guns. The robbery on Tuesday, in which guards engaged in a gunfight with five thieves at a bank in busy Van Nuys Boulevard, recalled a bloody shoot-out earlier this year. Then, two robbers wearing body armour held police at bay with AK-47s and sprayed Othello in a colonial context memorably contrives to bring out the broken music of a tortured soul diuduuwiom: It is unclear who fired first, but more than a dozen shots were exchanged.

The robber with the gun fell to the ground, another was wounded, and a third sprinted through the bank and escaped. The other two sped off in their stolen car. The gunfight caused a doctor's surgery to be evacuated and 10 local schools were put on alert. One woman trembled as she pleaded in vain with police to let her through a barrier to bring food to her 85-year-old father. Such incidents cause so much terror that for almost the rest of the day the area was deserted.

Several residents recalled the battle of February 28 in North Hollywood, which they saw on television. LA police were outgunned by two bank robbers in black armour who walked boldly about thrusting race. Cyprus becomes a sun-bleached, garrisoned outpost, all louvred windows and parquet floors, where the military have too much leisure. The period is indeterminate, though I spotted Cas-sio reading a Penguin Classic, which dates the action as post-1946. The main point is that Mendes, like Trevor Nunn before him, strengthens the tragedy by allowing it to grow out of an accumulation of domestic detail.

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