By Janet McEvoy

BRUSSELS, Oct 11 (Reuter) - Italian European Commissioner Emma Bonino spent Christmas on a mission to Bethlehem, Easter under fire in Somalia and summer visiting the Dalai Lama and Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Ky.

Responsible for humanitarian aid, fisheries and consumer affairs at the European Union executive, 48-year-old Bonino says she does not have a conventional idea of a holiday. Politics is her passion rather than her job, she says.

The first woman ever to wear trousers at a meeting of the male-dominated Commission, Bonino, who recently condemned the world community's silence over the fate of Afghan women under the Taleban militia, says she does not have a traditional approach to women's rights issues either.

"With the traditional feminist groups I have sometimes a critical dialogue, but I think we respect each other very much," the small, mousy-haired, bespectacled and chain-smoking Commissioner told Reuters in an interview.

"I do not want and I do not think that we women are a category. If we think we are a category to be protected I think we will lose our fight."

An appointee from Italy's small Radical Party, she shot-to political stardom soon after arriving in Brussels in 1995 by riding Spanish fishing boats on the high seas in the EU-Canada "fish war".

Bonino accused Canada of piracy.

Accomplished and confident before the television cameras, she is equally at home riding Landrovers, dodging bullets or visiting-refugee camps.

As soon as news broke of the fall of Srebrenica in 1995, when Serbs were accused of massacring thousands of Moslem men, she visited grieving women refugees in the Bosnian town of Tuzla.

While some observers suggest she is an opportunist and headline-hunter with little long-term political perspective, close political allies say she has a deep commitment and detailed understanding of a wide range of radical aims.

Describing herself as committed to human rights, she has embraced anti-nuclear and anti-military campaigns and actively worked for the decriminalisation of drug use.

But since joining the Commission, Bonino, jailed in her native Italy in the 1970s for fighting for abortion rights, has seemed to distance herself from women's issues and to abandon radical campaign tactics.

"When I was campaigning or going to jail or whatever, I did it not because I liked it, but because I had no other tool to be listened to...Now simply I have another tool to be listened to," she said. "I am privileged."

One of five women on the 20-member Commission -- only two women had ever sat on the body before the present term -- she has openly spoken out against job quotas for women and said the fact that she was a woman did not mean she had to comment about the 1995 U.N. World Conference on Women in Beijing.

However, in early October she lashed out at the United Nations, the world's high-flying women and almost everyone else for not condemning Afghanistan for restrictions on women under the: Taleban.

"I wonder what is the use of the conference in Beijing...if afterwards the same organisations are not saying a word about the violation of the most basic human rights," she told Reuters, predicting the onset of a major humanitarian crisis. The Taleban told women they should stay at home, no longer work and be completely veiled in public. Schools would be closed to girls and men would have to wear beards.

On Wednesday the Commission took up her cause, issuing its own statement about "gender discrimination against Afghan women".

When Bonino entered the Italian parliament in 1976 after leaving prison, she refused to be channelled into health and education committees, domains traditionally reserved for women deputies.

"I wanted to go to industry or foreign affairs or the ministry of the interior...I took firstly the dossier reforming the secret service and then I took the dossier of the anti-nuclear campaign. So I started by not being fixed in a feminine role."

A last-minute appointee to the Commission by former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, she received a mixed bag of dossiers, netting the fisheries portfolio -- about which she admits she knew nothing -- when Norway failed to join the EU. She won over some hostile fishermen first in France then in Britain whith her down-to-earth approach.

In Britain, hate mail from fishermen, deeply resentful of her moves to slash the fleet to save the EU's dwindling fishing stocks, turned into grudgingly respectful correspondence.

As humanitarian aid Commissioner, her underpinning belief is that it is better to prevent humanitarian crises than cure them and that aid is no substitute for political solutions.

"The major message is...look we are not the solution, we do not want to be an alibi for political inactivity. But I refuse to be thought useless just because we are not a solution."

She sees the establishment of an international justice tribunal as a crucial international instrument of peace, believing it could prevent old conflicts boiling over again, as in former Yugoslavia and Africa's Great Lakes region.