by Stefano Vaccara
NEW YORK (USA) (ITALPRESS) – Emma Bonino was a small giant of Italian politics, but perhaps it was even more than international politics. He managed to fight and win global battles without a superpower, not even a country with the diplomatic weight of France or the United Kingdom. With Marco Pannella, on the other hand, he was able to use the weight of Italy to the fullest extent, influencing foreign policy and dragging it on battles for human rights that many governments initially considered utopian.
The moratorium on the death penalty, the International Criminal Court, the fight against female genital mutilation: Bonino had the rare ability to take a seemingly minority cause, build them around international alliances and turn it into politics.
For those who, like me, have known her especially in New York and the United Nations, this is the Emma that remains more impressed. I met her and interviewed her many times, first as a political chronicler of America Today and as a correspondent of the Glass Palace of Radical Radio and then for La Voce of New York. He came to the Glass Palace often to fight battles that many diplomats considered impossible, if not annoying.
It was the radical specialty shared with Pannella: taking a utopia and forcing politics to discuss it until it became possible. It happened with the universal moratorium on the death penalty, until the historic vote of the UN General Assembly of 2007. It happened with the International Criminal Court: here too Pannella and Bonino were considered visionary, but there is no Peace Without Justice, founded by Emma in 1993, was the protagonist of the mobilization culminated in the 1998 Rome Statute. And it happened with female genital mutilation. Bonino traveled mainly among African capitals, building alliances with governments, associations, women and making friends the First Ladies. That campaign helped to transform a taboo into a universal issue of human rights until the resolution of the 2012 General Assembly.
Once in New York, he said, “Promoting rights is a process, it is certainly not an event. You have to be a little stubborn.” He was stubborn. The relationship with Pannella also lived with this energy. I remember them as two calamite: so similar to be irresistible and, sometimes, just for this reason, repel. Two characters capable of making sparks, united by the same almost fundamentalist belief in democracy and rights. Even interviewing them meant attending the same rite: compulsive smokers, they could light a cigarette while they still had another whole in their mouths.
In 1997, as a European Commissioner, Bonino went to Afghanistan to denounce the condition of women. Kabul was stopped and held for hours along with his delegation. What strikes today is not only the courage of that journey, but the political warning that he launched then: the West could not turn to the other side in front of a fundamentalist regime that erased women from society, eluding that what happened in Afghanistan would remain confined there. That indifference, he warned Bonino, risked becoming a boomerang for the same West.
That Emma dies on September 11th makes that alarm almost prophetic. Four years after that journey, America would have been attacked by Al Qaeda, the organization of Osama bin Laden who in Afghanistan ruled by the Taliban had found refuge and the basis from which to prepare his terrorist war against the West. Bonino had understood before many others that the rights of Afghan women were not a distant and marginal issue: they were also the political signal of the nature of a regime and ideology that supported it. He never stopped applying the same principle: the rights are especially valid when defending them becomes diplomatically uncomfortable. He did so as a European commissioner, a foreign minister in the Letta government and then a senator, continuing also in the Foreign Commission to use his international weight.
I saw him again after the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi, when in New York he met Hatice Cengiz, the fiancée of the Saudi journalist killed in the consulate of his country in Istanbul. Bonino summoned journalists – not only Italians – and asked the United Nations, Europe and the United States not to sacrifice the search for truth to the geopolitical interests and Saudi petrodollars. She was still Emma. When he became a foreign minister in 2013, his name gained even more weight in the UN corridors and even became a credible candidate for the first woman Secretary General of the United Nations. The disease, announced in 2015, arrived on the eve of the season that would lead to the choice of the successor of Ban Ki-moon and the election of António Guterres.
We will never know where it could come, nor if Russia and China, certainly not enthusiastic of many of its battles on human rights, would have allowed the radical Italian without hair on the language to reach the UN summit. But the fact that his name circulated says a lot about the international dimension conquered. Today we know where some of the battles fought by her and Pannella arrived.
The International Criminal Court exists. The moratorium on the death penalty has become a battle periodically reaffirmed by the General Assembly. Female genital mutilation is recognized by the UN as a violation of human rights. Marco and Emma: two radical musketeers who claimed to change the world when the world explained to them that they could not. Pannella left ten years ago. Today, on September 11th, Bonino is leaving. Already, there is something deeply symbolic in the fact that the woman who had tried to wake the West in front of the Afghanistan of the Taliban left just on the day when America recalls the attack that, four years after that alarm, would change history.
Some of the battles at the United Nations Emma Bonino fought and won at the Glass Palace. And perhaps for those who dedicated life to politics there is no more important monument: to leave behind a utopia that everyone judged impossible and that, thanks to you, has become reality.
– Photo Onu –
(ITALPRESS).
