DAGENS NYHETER (swedish daily), page 15

By Mats Carlbom

She has been in prison. She has been in cross fire in Somalia, she has met survivors from Srebrenica, and she has sold shoes in New York.

Today, Italian EU Commissioner Emma Bonino begins a two-day visit to Sweden She will meet with Annika Ahnberg, Minister of Agriculture and Leif Blomberg, Minister of Consumers' Affairs, among others.

She is usually described as a brilliant pedagogue, strongly committed to her causes. And her background definitely sets her off against most of her colleagues.

Radical though she is, it was right wing former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi who appointed her to her present job. He needed support from the Radical Party in a vote of confidence, so he appointed the Radical Party secretary, Emma Bonino, as EU Commissioner.

He had certain difficulties in reaching her, however. At the time she was carrying a plackard, demonstrating outside the UN building for increased humanitarian aid to the third world.

As Commissioner, she runs three completely different sectors: Consumer Policy, Fisheries and Humanitarian Aid. It is the last sector that is dear to her heart, and she has travelled to war zones like Somalia, Rwanda and Bosnia.

But she has had to devote most of her time to fisheries policy. Her consequent message to angry fishermen in different EU countries has been:

- If the fishing fleet is not reduced, we will run out of fish.

In British Cornwall she was received by fishermen burning EU flags. But after she had spoken to them, British press reports, the fishermen left full of thoughts, feeling that they had met someone who knew what she was talking about.

Emma Bonino was born born in 1948 in a working class family in the town of Bra, close to Turin m Northern Italy. She studied languages at the university, went out with an engineer, got pregnant and did what was forbidden: she had an illegal abortion.

She did not do it in secret, however. Later, she explained that the hypocrisy upset her. Society considered abortion a crime, but let women pay large sums on the black market to have them done.

She put herself at the head of a campaign to legalize abortions and told about her own abortion. This led to trial and three weeks in prison, and the Pope called her a "witch". Abortions were legalized in 1978 in Italy.

She has brought her thoughts about political activism with her to the EU Commission. Politics need two platforms, she says: Institutions and pressure from people outside them.

It was the campaign to legalize abortions that led her into party politics. The main issues with the Radical Party, which became her platform, are equality, pace and human rights.

She has been a Member of both the Italian Parliament and of the European Parliament. It came as a suprise to most people when she became one of Italy's two ESU Commissioners last year. Today, however, everyone speaks of the activist who came into power with great respect.

"If the EU Commission wants to improve its position in Great Britain, it should send more Commissioners like Emma Bonino", the influential British paper Financial Times recently stated.