Chain-smoking, plain-talking humanitarian chief says her message is not lost in hype

BONINO NO GRAY, FACELESS EUROCRAT

By Stephanie Griffith

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 European 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 Ms Bonino a who runs the European Union's fishing, consumer affairs and humanitarian aid programs.

Ms Bonino's prime job is humanitarian aid. In 1996, she distributed US$850 million (HK$6.63 billion) to the needy worldwide on behalf of the 15-nation EU, the world's largest aid donor.

"My goal is to put some human values into the realpolitik strategies," Ms Bonino, 48, said in a recent interview from her triplex apartment in the chic Sablon section of Brussels.

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

New Yorkers may remember Ms Bonino from protests in the early l990s, when her desire to fight AIDS and help protect drug users from the disease got her arrested for distributing hypodermic noodles in front of city hall. The turning point in her life and what propelled her into politics was the fight over a much publicised abortion that eventually led to the legalisation of abortion in her native Italy.

Starting in 1976, she served in the Italian and European parliaments and joined the European Commission in January, 1995. A member of Italy's upstart Radical Party, Ms Bonino has gone on hunger strikes and hoisted placards for many causes from the abolition of capital punishment to nuclear disarmament to legalisation of soft drugs.

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

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

Television cameras catch her in military fatigues in war situations.

She - drew gunfire on a recent visit to Somalia. She toured Central Africa in November and went back in February to get a firsthand look at the refugee crisis there. To better understand Europe's fishing sector, she had herself lowered onto a trawler in the North Atlantic.

Her critics contend she is enamoured of publicity.

Canadians still harbour hard feelings from Ms Bonino accusing their country of "piracy" in a 1995 fishing dispute with Spain. The Financial Times once labelled her "rent-aquote".

Ms Bonino acknowledges they have a point.

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

But Ms Bonino insists her message doesn't get lost in hype. She emphasises "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. Ms Bonino is 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 autumn. Ms Bonino also points to thousands of refugees still stranded in eastern Zaire.

She says it's part of a wider problem as Europe redefinesitself after the Cold War.

Associated Press