Emma Bonino, one of Europe's most prominent policymakers, is learning Arabic in Cairo. What could she be after?

RESUME
Born in a peasant family in a small village in the northwest of Italy, Emma Bonino has risen against adversity to become one of Europe’s most vocal–and controversial–figures. From abortion to drugs to world hunger, she has fought (often being the first to do so) for most of the great causes of the last generation–and a few more marginal ones too. Development magazine called her "one of Europe’s most formidable communicators". The Taliban called her "a criminal abortionist and smoker of cannabis". Issandr El Amrani met her and found a frustrated Arabic student.

Emma Bonino is a woman in despair. At least that’s what she says–she’s desperate about the fact that after two months of Arabic lessons, she doesn’t feel like she’s progressing. It’s the first time we meet, and from what I’ve been reading about her (and what I’ve heard about her), I can’t help to be surprised. Could it be that a woman who is equally at ease in the corridors of powers of the European Union or drug legalization marches in New York–not to mention the police stations and holding cells of several capitals–has found her match in the Arabic language?
My gut feeling is that’s probably not the case. For Bonino–to only include her recent achievements–has been an EU commissioner for fisheries and humanitarian affairs, the leader of the maverick Italian Radical Party, the first-ever female candidate during Italy’s 2001 presidential elections as well as a general troublemaker and headline-grabber since she entered politics in 1976. She simply does not seem like the quitting type. And while her current stay in Cairo on what she calls a semi-sabbatical (she still serves as a Euro MP for two-thirds of the month) is downtime in comparison to her previous activities, she is a woman with a plan.
"I decided to study Arabic last May, soon after the presidential election," she says, explaining her decision to come to Cairo. "I was thinking that sooner or later Europe will realize that geography is not option, that the Mediterranean is still there. After the Barcelona Project (the EU’s lukewarm initiative to reach out to the southern Mediterranean), which went so-so, we need a new project with this part of the world. I got interested in knowing more. For me knowing the language has always been very important to understand people. The question was Amman, Cairo, or Rabat?"
She chose Cairo because, while passing through, she began to take an interest in the then high-profile cases against feminist writer Nawal Al Saadawi and rights activist Saad Eddin Ibrahim. She also thought that Egypt’s importance in the region would serve her well, stressing that she "is learning this difficult language for political purposes," not intellectual curiosity. "Most of the establishment people here can read our papers, they know us much better than we know them and their public reaction. Most of them speak our languages–but none of us do."
Right now she denies having any specific ambition behind her drive to know more about the Arab world, although when pressed she does admit that Javier Solana’s current job as top EU foreign policymaker, which comes up for grabs in 2004, is an attractive proposition. Solana has focused much of his tenure on the Middle East, a region where the EU and its individual member states have long played second fiddle to the United States. Europeans, who often play a bigger role as trade partners and have more natural cultural and geographic affinities with countries south of the Mediterranean, are growing frustrated with this situation–especially at a time when the White House has decided to play a less active role as a mediator in the region’s chief conflict. In any case, she has her sights set on getting back in the EU’s powerful commissions, where her unusual politics first came to the world’s attention.
Starting as commissioner for fisheries in December 1994–a powerful post because of the consequences in terms of jobs in the fishing sector–she most famously sailed into the high seas during the EU’s "fish war" with Canada–taking the opportunity to accuse the Canadians of being pirates. She also deftly negotiated a new fishing agreement with Morocco’s King Hassan II after that country reneged on an existing agreement that was seen as unfair. Later, as commissioner for humanitarian affairs, she was most famously held hostage for several hours by the Taliban guards. Though in diplomatic terms, the visit to Afghanistan may have been a disaster, she claims the fiasco enabled a small victory in that it wrecked any chances the Taliban had of being recognized as the legitimate government of Afghanistan by the United Nations, a move she says was scheduled to take place in February 1996.
By any standards, compared to her rather uninspiring (if otherwise capable) fellow commissioners in Brussels, she seemed like she was revolutionizing European politics. "We come from a different background," she explains in defense of her colleagues. "I came from a small minority party, stating at least at the beginning, minority ideas. I think like [EU founding father Jean] Monnet that nothing is possible without people, but nothing lasts without institutions. But I also realize that institutions have an illness by which they become auto-referential. People who have always been in power have a tendency to think in absolutely good faith that if they decide something, that’s enough. They don’t need to explain to people, they don’t need to have a debate–why not? I’m sure that they can."
For most of her political career, Bonino has simply had to grab the media’s attention to get ahead. The method she developed within the Radical Party, which she headed in the early 1990s, could be described as guerrilla politics–although many say it’s just plain manipulative. The party has a long history of campaigning through civil disobedience–in other words, breaking the law and notifying the police about it so that campaigners’ arrests (and the media coverage of them) can bring awareness of the issues to a wider audience. Using this technique, Bonino has herself been arrested countless times–for distributing needles to heroin addicts, giving away cannabis to passers-by, or helping women seeking abortions when they were still illegal in Italy.
At first, getting arrested was not easy. Bonino began her political engagement after being confronted with an unwanted pregnancy at 27. She was forced to seek a clandestine abortion, an experience she describes as "one of the most humiliating of my life." From an apolitical language student and tour guide, she turned into a daring political activist–as she puts it, "something exploded inside me." Realizing that countless other women had faced the same ordeal, she founded the Centro Informazione, Sterilizzazione e Aborto (CISA) along with fellow activist Adele Faccio, a center that provided advice and help to women seeking abortions. CISA’s activities attracted hundreds of women every Tuesday, who were referred to clandestine abortion clinics or sent to European countries where abortion was legal. Although she notified the police of her activities, it wasn’t until a major conservative newspaper published an expose on CISA that she was arrested. She planned for the arrest to take place in her home town of Bra, in Piedmont, on an election day. She was held for two weeks in prison before being released on bail, but the trial never took place.
After that first brush with the law, she joined the Radical Party, which shared her views on abortion, and was elected to the Italian parliament in 1976. By 1978, she had changed the law: the Radicals’ campaign culminated in a national referendum during which Italians made abortion legal. That particular campaign may have been over, but she had found her vocation: "Since then," she recalls, "I found that politics was what I wanted to do."
Her–and her party’s–particular brand of politics are a rather odd mixture of economic liberalism and social libertarianism that does not have a particularly big constituency in Italy, a country traditionally divided between a conservative Catholic right wing and a socialist/communist left wing backed by powerful trade unions (only last week, a trade union managed to mobilize two million Italians in Rome to protest labor reforms). If the radicals’ stance on the economy may attract Italy’s business class, its position on social issues has alienated it–and vice-versa for the left-leaning electorate.
Bonino describes the radicals’ position mainly as a individualist. "The culture of the right of the individual has always been totally absent in my country," she argues. "The two major cultural groupings both have something in common–both the communists and the Catholics–in that for them the rights of the individual simply do not exist. You have the right of the people, the right of the masses, the right of the ‘workers’–the right of any type of group–but the right of the individual is something very disturbing. It doesn’t exist for Catholics because you’ve got paradise and it doesn’t exist for the communists because they are building paradise on earth. That may explain why the establishment doesn’t like us. But from time to time they have to recognize that the only reform made in my country came from our push."
While she may be glorifying the role of the Radicals, Bonino has a point in that the Radicals often took the initiative in breaking social and political taboos. In the 1980s and 1990s, she launched international campaigns to highlight third world hunger (she called it "the Holocaust of our times"), served as general secretary of the Food and Disarmament International Association, campaigned for the worldwide abolition of the death penalty, against the prohibition of drugs, for human rights in Eastern Europe and Russia (she demonstrated with the Solidarity movement in Poland in 1987), for the establishment of an International Criminal Court and countless other causes.
I pointed out to her that her platform seems more like a collection of issues than any coherent ideology–something she partially agreed with. "It’s true that you can see it as issues–but in my feeling there is a common thread, namely that democracy is the least worst system ever invented for human development and that individuals have rights and duties. It’s not an ideology–we always say that it’s quite enough to have some ideas and try to implement them."
That practical streak is part and parcel of Bonino’s reputation. She may be an idealist, but she wants tangible results, whether it’s funding for her party or when hosting a conference called "Poor People Do Not Eat Theories." She has also applied that realism to boosting her own status and that of her party, her critics note. Most notably, she entered into a coalition in 1994 with then and now Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, a man not known for his integrity. That brief dalliance with Berlusconi (it only lasted seven months) catapulted her to the European Union–although she recalls it took a "physical occupation of Berlusconi’s office" to have her appointed as a commissioner. That kind of adroit political maneuvering, combined with her party’s neither-right-nor-left attitude and a populist tendency to advocate referendums for every decision, has been controversial.
Away from her usual forum of controversy, Bonino has nevertheless managed to irk some people in Cairo. Inaugurating her tenure as Distinguished Visiting Professor at the American University in Cairo’s Forced Migration program on 25 March, she drew fire from the gathered crowd of intellectuals for not mentioning the burning issue of Palestine during her speech on humanitarian affairs. She retorted that Chechnya–another one of her ongoing campaigns–is just as valid an issue as Palestine, yet received much less attention.
"I have it as a policy that when I go to Chechnya I try to talk Palestine and when I go to Palestine I try to talk Chechnya," she says. "I think that one of the weaknesses of the human rights movement is that everyone is completely absorbed by his own problem and never, ever gives attention to somebody else’s. The Palestinian question is not only monopolizing everything, but it has become–not only for the establishment but also for a lot of other people–a sort of an alibi to prevent them from dealing with their own issues." She also feels that Egyptians "tend to be much more anti-Israeli than pro-Palestinian."
She has campaigned, along with the Radical Party, for the inclusion of Israel in the EU. "Unfortunately," she says, "and not by chance, the Israeli leadership does not want to even hear about this issue, because one way or another they know that Europe is also a discipline, and that [should Israel join the EU] it will be Europe negotiating with the Arab world." Her vision of the EU’s pacifying influence may not convince many Arabs, though, who particularly in these troubled times would see little reason for Israel being rewarded for years of occupation by membership in the union.
I ask her if, since she is so keen on Israel joining the EU, she would like to see an Arab state become a member–after all, several North African countries have expressed an interest in doing so. "I think it’s important now that we do not see Europe anymore as a geographical, Christian organization. The turning point, when at least theoretically, [was] when the union [became open] to Turkey. Europe is a political project. The criterion to join the EU was set by the European Council Copenhagen, and includes parliamentary democracy, a certain standard in human rights and so forth." For now, in her view, that excludes the Arab countries.
Yet, whether Cairenes appreciate her standpoint or not, Bonino will be among them–learning and watching for some time to come. Her dedication to learning about this place, even though she worries about her progress in Arabic, is indubitable. When she finally leaves Cairo, those new experiences in her baggage, she will be likely to come back in a more official position, and as one of the rare senior European policymakers who understand Arabic and know the region. Let’s hope she leaves with a good impression.

Emma Bonino on...
The idea of legalizing drugs comes not only from an ideological point of view, it comes from [political philosopher Karl] Popper and the open society approach. As a social program, prohibition is completely counter-productive. First of all you create a black market, secondly it will not solve the problem, and third you cannot have a society without vice. Drugs remain a real taboo. Everybody and everybody agrees that prohibition has been a disaster. But then nothing is done. That is the kind of debate that up until now we haven’t really manage to open. It’s quite bizarre. If you have a policy running for the past 20 years, it’s quite normal to analyze the effects and ask whether it works or not, but on drugs the question is not even put [forward]. There is no way to oblige the people who are running the prohibition policy to be accountable. Growth is increasing. Traffic is increasing. It’s just moving. It’s declining in the United States, but it’s up in Europe and Eastern Europe. I just saw an unbelievable BBC report this morning on drugs and AIDS growing exponentially in India.
Italy’s current political crisis
It’s a very complicated issue, with trade unions divided and protesting against liberal policies and against terrorism. The final point is that you cannot run a country with 20 political parties. Even with Berlusconi’s strength because of his wealth, his coalition of six parties hasn’t done a thing in over a year.
The internet
We [the Radical Party] were among the first ones to use e-mail and the web–since 1985. Our people developed a BBS [the precursors of websites] out of need. We tried to have newspapers and bulletins in 11 languages, but we went broke. So we were obliged to develop and use new technologies quite early.
The EU and Egypt’s human rights record
[The EU] uses a policy we call in our jargon "positive engagement". I think they are trying to implement Article 2 [of the EU-Egypt trade agreement, referring to respect for human rights] without going public and being vocal. The problem is whether this low-profile policy is effective or not. Most people in Brussels would say it works slowly but steadily. The divergence is in the methodology–is it better to engage them and push them or is it better to stand up and publicly criticize them? That’s a long-standing debate. I have nothing against timing or going step-by-step. I don’t think that we should say, "either you implement all human rights or we do not have a relation with you," because if we go like that we wouldn’t be talking within ourselves.
Immigration
I think we should at least state quite clearly that economically, demographically, we need them. If you start with this statement, your policy becomes different. Currently, the starting point is that we don’t need them, we let them in out of charity, that they’re only here to steal our houses etc.– then the policy becomes a prohibitionist policy. I’m saying that we should start thinking that we badly need them, that we have been emigrants in millions. It’s not possible and serious simply to say to reassure people that we will be a country free of immigrants, crime, or prostitution. It’s not responsible leadership–leadership means to try to lead somewhere.
Foreign aid
Aid should be used mostly to promote democratic institutions. The illusion is that economic development brings more freedom, democracy–I think that’s not true, it’s not automatic. I know the priority these days is aid to trade, but the most important thing is institutional infrastructure–good administrators may be even more important than good roads.