BELGIUM EUROPEAN OF THE YEAR

Plain-spoken Italian woman not typical staid Eurocrat

By STEPHANIE GRIFFITH

BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) The French magazine L' Express counts Emma Bonino among the "100 women who make the world go round." A Canary Islands village has named a street after her.

Last year, a panel of politicians, journalists and artists assembled by the French weekly La Vie named her "Eutopean of the Year.'' The British magazine The Economist rates her tops on the 20-member European Commission, the administrative body of the European Union.

There is no end to the cascade of accolades breaking over Bonino, a chain-smoking, plain-talking Italian who runs the European Union's fishing, consumer affair and humanitarian aid programs.

In mid-January, following Europe's mad-cow scare, she was put in charge of a board to monitor food quality and to convince Europeans that the EU cares more about guarding public health than protecting the food industry.

In trying to settle Britain's standoff with its trading partners over mad cow disease, the European Commission has been, accused of being less sensitive to public health than to the beef industry which it gave huge subsidies.

Bonino's prime job is humanitarian aid. In 1996, she distributed dlrs 850 million to the needy worldwide on behalf of the 15-nation European Union, the world's largest aid donor. "My goal is to put some human values into the realpolitik strategies," Bonino, 48, said in a recent interview in her triplex apartment in the chic Sablon section of Brussels.

A coffee table displays her favorite photo: Bonino with Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader of the democracy movement in Burma.

New Yorkers may remember Bonino from protests in the early 1990s, when her desire to fight AIDS and help protect drug users from the disease got her arrested for distributing hypodermic needles in front of city hall.

The turning point in her life - and what propelled her into politics - was the fight over a much publicized abortion that eventually led to the legalization of abortion in her native Italy.

Starting in 1976, she has served in the Italian and European parliaments' and the joined the European Commission in January 1995.

A member of Italy's upstart Radical Party, Bonino has gone on hunger strikes and hoisted placards for many causes - from the abolition of capital punishment to nuclear disarmament to legalization of soft drugs.

Italy's Radicals have long used dramatic methods to avoid being relegated to the sidelines of politics. It's what attracted Bonino to the party.

In Brussels, she doesn't fit the image of a gray, faceless Eurocrat. Her Brussels neighborhood may boast tony antique shops and restaurants, but Bonino's home is a testimony to unorthodoxy - her favorite chair is a re-upholstered castaway she salvaged from the sidewalk.

Television cameras catch her in flak jacket and military fatigues in war situations. She drew gunfire on a recent visit to Sumalia.

She toured central Africa in November and went back in February to get a First-hand look at the refugee crisis there. Similarly, to better understand Europe's fishing sector, she had herself lowered onto a trawler in the heaving North Atlantic.

Her critics contend she is enamored of publicity.

Canadians still harbor hard feelings from Bonino accusing their country of "piracy" in a 1995 fishing dispute with Spain. The Financial Times once labeled her "rent-a-quote" for her eagerness to speak on any issue.

Bonino acknowledges they have a point.

"We tried all the techniques," she says, adding that a little drama sometimes helps get a message across.

"As with every small group, sometimes you need 'fantasia' -imagination - to draw attention to some things that are generally forgotten in traditional politics."

But Bonino insist her message doesn't get lost in hype.

As the EU's humanitarian aid chief she emphasizes "the responsibility and the value of the human being."

"Humanitarian aid is very concrete," she said. "You really save lives. It's about people. It' s my dearest job."

Yet the job has disappointed her at times. Bonino is very critical of the failure of the international community to send a multinational military force to help bring relief to central Africa's Great Lakes region last fall.

A military force, she maintains, would have protected the lives of aid workers and human rights monitors. Three Spanish aid workers were slain recently by ethnic Hutu militants in Ruhengeri, Rwanda. An American colleague, wounded in the same attack, lost a leg.

Bonino also points to thousands of refugees still stranded in eastern Zaire, suffering from cholera and malnutrition.

"I had hoped to save their lives and to achieve a dignified repatriation, taking care of the human rights of people, of the children and the elderly," she says.

Bonino says it's part of a wider problem as Europe redefines itself after the Cold War. "Europe is very reluctant to assume its own responsibility as a political power. We need a common foreign and security policy."

Bonino says that vacuum is "not my vision, not the dream by which the European Union was created."