This is the only story of mine that the New York Times ever spiked outright (as opposed to reframing with Western spin). I thought i’d written it desk-proof. It was a “profile”, submitted in response to appeals from the news desk for soft-focus fluff to offset the war stories. Apparently it was too long on opinion and too short on whimsy.
New York, Jan 24, 2003
Friends:
We are once more into a moment when coverage of one story — Iraq and the apparent build-up to war there — is dominant. There is a natural tendency at such times to assume that our interest in other parts of the world diminishes. It is true that it may be harder to get pieces on other areas and subjects onto the front page. But it is by no means impossible: Amy Waldman’s wonderful fronted Polio story from India last week shows what can be done. Our appetite for a wide variety of enterprise remains strong, increased, if anything, by the need to offset war stories with pieces of a different tone. Of late, we have not had a lot to offer. Please try to come through over the next couple of weeks with some engaging and surprising enterprise.
In the past year, Seth Mydans and Frank Bruni have written eleven splendid Saturday Profiles, or over 20 percent of all the profiles we’ve published. Seth has offered us a Thai TV host, a pool shark, a columnist on Bangkok’s Red Light district, a couple of dancers, an artist and a detective. Frank has written about a teenage novelist, a priest who is a film critic, a local politician in Athens and a Sicilian writer. As the range of these subjects suggests, there is no limit to what can be done with this space. What the pieces have had in common has been their vividness and immediacy. We have had many other splendid profiles, not least Marc Lacey’s fronted story today about the agonizing choice made by one African mother. But I would like to urge all of you who have not written one to do so and, in general, suggest that three or four such pieces a year would be welcome. Please remember how important the photographs are.
Thank you.
Roger
TIRANA, Albania – Emma Bonino is difficult to pin down. Her libertarian opinions defy easy categorization on the political spectrum and she is usually doing several things at once.
Ms. Bonino, a 54-year-old veteran of Italian and European Union politics, has brought her Transnational Radical Party to Albania for the second session of its 38th Congress. The other delegates include Arab intellectuals, Afghan women’s leaders, a transvestite and a man who spends the weekend handcuffed to a shopping trolley full of chains.
A commitment to spreading democracy and safeguarding human rights is the only obvious factor linking the party’s diverse membership, which includes almost a third of Albania’s members of parliament. That and the enigmatic personality of Ms. Bonino, who has devoted her 25 years in politics to empowering individuals rather than the governing establishment.
In practice, this means getting very personally involved.
As she sat down for an interview in Tirana’s main conference center, while scanning a newspaper article attacking the authoritarianism of Arab leaders, Ms. Bonino decided to return to the debating chamber.
“Please excuse me for a moment,” she said as she darted off, throwing a pashmina shawl across her slight shoulders. “They’re voting now and I have to be there.”
Politics has always been personal for Ms. Bonino. She began her career in the 1970’s by getting pregnant and having a highly publicized illegal termination that landed her in jail for a short spell. It also got her elected to Parliament, where she helped to rewrite Catholic Italy’s restrictive laws on abortion and divorce.
Since then, her focus has broadened to cover the rest of the world, guided by the same principle that if you want something to change, you have to make it happen yourself.
An idealist of the baby-boom generation she may be. But unlike many of her peers, Ms. Bonino is also bluntly realistic about Europe’s failure to develop a common political clout to match its combined wealth, especially when it comes to foreign policy.
This has been most glaringly apparent in the Balkans, where American might, backed by the military, still wields more influence than European promises of prosperity to come. Ms. Bonino was a staunch advocate of intervention to stop the wars here in the 1990’s and she is as frustrated as many Americans that it was left to the United States to pick up the pieces.
“Europe is like a teenager - we don’t want to grow up and take greater responsibility,” she said. “Instead we feel like we’re in a citadel, comfortable in our economic miracle and relying on the Americans to take care of us.”
Ms. Bonino has other ideas. Europe needs more economic deregulation to prosper in the future, she believes, and it has to extend more of its advantages to others if it wants to avoid being swamped by immigrants and attacked by terrorists.
As a commissioner for humanitarian issues on the European Union’s executive in the late 1990’s, she had an annual aid budget of $1.5 billion to back up her calls for increased spending on development assistance. But in her eyes, the battle has barely begun.
“In the past, if you mentioned democratization and civil rights as vital components of foreign policy you used to be denounced as a crazy visionary with no grip on reality,” Ms. Bonino said, drawing on the first of several cigarettes as she settled into her stride. “Now at least no one says this in public, but democracy remains an empty slogan for much of the world.”
The lobby of Tirana’s Palace of Congresses, a concrete relic of Stalinist rule, is littered with papers outlining Radical Party resolutions for action: from recommendations on engaging China to a proposed rewrite of the United Nations Convention on Drugs.
There is also a photocopied article from the Economist magazine entitled “The triumph of English”, which concludes that the language’s pre-eminence “not only destroys the tongues of others; it also isolates native English-speakers from the literature, history and ideas of other peoples.”
The prospect of a widening gulf in understanding between cultures alarms Ms. Bonino, who is as comfortable speaking English and French as she is Italian. Since last December, she has rented an apartment in Cairo, where she spends 10 days a month learning Arabic during breaks in her duties as a member of the European Parliament.
A year of shuttling back and forth to Egypt has raised eyebrows in Brussels, where Ms. Bonino had already earned a reputation as a maverick. During her time as a European commissioner, she flew to Afghanistan to campaign for women’s rights and was promptly arrested by the Taliban, with a C.N.N. camera crew in tow.
Unlike many Brussels bureaucrats, she has presence without pomposity and is adept at exploiting it to court publicity — much to the annoyance of her political rivals.
“My colleagues say: ‘she’s gone crazy again’,” Ms. Bonino said, bubbling with irreverent enthusiasm. “Of course you could have a more comfortable time learning Arabic in Morocco but it’s not going to help you understand Middle Eastern politics. I’m not studying the language to open a restaurant.”
She was drawn to Egypt because of its “façade of democracy”, she said, intrigued as to why the United States provides President Hosni Mubarak’s government with so much military assistance while at the same time criticizing its record on human rights.
Her conclusion? “We’re still more interested in stability than promoting democracy, even if that is the only way to secure long-term stability,” she said. “When Mubarak says ‘it’s me or the Islamists’ it works to get money. But his real fear is moderate democrats – that’s why so many of these people are in jail.”
Stressing that there are “no miracle solutions,” Ms. Bonino still believes Western governments could do more by increasing development aid to the region — and spending it on projects that offer ordinary people new perspectives and opportunities.
“You can’t think about getting rid of Mubarak without providing an alternative to the mosque,” she said.
But her experience in Egypt has forced her to accept that such a forthright manner of speaking does not always work to her advantage.
“It’s not easy being a woman alone in Cairo without political status or a job,” she said.
“In a city of 16 million people you’re not physically lonely, but you can feel isolated intellectually – you learn pretty quickly that you’d better shut up most of the time.”
That is not to say that she has changed. The contrast between her directness and diminutive, and distinctly feminine, form makes her as charming as she is confrontational.
“I feel that just being myself makes some waves – exactly as it did in Italy in the 1970’s,” she said. “My poor concierge in Cairo can’t understand why one night homosexuals are coming to visit then the next evening it’s the foreign ministry car.”
There is a common misconception among Europeans, she said, that the Middle East has very little to do with them. “But sooner or later we will have to look south and develop a project for this region before more people start pouring towards our borders, looking for a better life.”
More importantly, Ms. Bonino believes, the West could undercut support for terrorists if it invested more of its wealth in building a brighter future for ordinary people.
“You can’t fight terrorism with military tools alone or just spend all this money on the army,” she said. “Defending civil rights and trying to build democracy and empower people is not a quick fix, but a way to achieve peace and development.”
As the prospect of war in Iraq looms closer, Ms. Bonino believes her message is timelier than ever.
“The world would clearly be a better place without Saddam Hussein,” she said, “but we have to avoid inventing another like him.”
