OUTSPOKEN POLITICIAN NO FACELESS EUROCRAT

BRUSSELS (AP) The French magazine L'Express counts Emma Bonino among the "100 women who make the world go round."

Last year, a panel of politicians, journalists and artists assembled by the French weekly La Vie named her European of the Year.

The Economist magazine rates her tops on the 20-member European Commission, the administrative body of the European Union.

"My goal is to put some human values into the realpolitik strategies," says Bonino, a chain-smoking, plain talking Italian who runs the EU's fishing, consumer affairs and humanitarian aid programs.

She accused Canada of "piracy" during its 1995 fishing dispute with Spain. But she laments the international community's unwillingness to, support- Canada's attempt last year to assemble a military force to help Rwandan refugees.

Americans remember Bonino from protests in the early 1990s, when her desire to protect drug users from AIDS got her arrested for distributing hypodermic needles in front of New York city hall.

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 and legalization of soft drugs. Television cameras catch her in a flak jacket in war situations. She drew gunfire on a recent visit to Somalia.

Her critics contend she is enamored of publicity.

Bonino, 48, acknowledges that they have a point.

"'We tried all the techniques," she says in an interview at her apartment in the chic Sablon section of Brussels. "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 insists 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."

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

Bonino began her career in the Italian and European parliaments in 1976, and joined the European Commission in January, 1995.

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

Yet the job has disappointed her at times. Bonino is critical of the failure to send the multinational military force Canada attempted to forge last fall to take relief to Central Africa. A military force, she maintains, would have protected aid workers and human rights monitors.

Gunmen ambushed a UN human rights team on Feb. 4, killing a Briton, a Cambodian and three Rwandans in Rwanda. On Jan. 18, Hutu militants murdered three Spanish aid workers and wounded an American. And on Feb. 2, Guy Pinard, a Catholic priest from Quebec, was killed by a gunman while celebrating communion in northern Rwanda.

Bonino points to thousands of Rwandan 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."

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."