Sant’ Egidio, a community of socially engaged Catholic Italians,
managed to achieve in the 1990s what superpowers and hardened
professional diplomats could not: broker peace to end the civil war
in Mozambique. The approach of the lay organization hinged on
personal contacts and cultural understanding of both parties.
“Unlike governments, we had no political or economic interests to
promote.”

Located in the old Roman neighborhood of Trastevere, hidden behind
the church of Santa Maria Trastevere, lies the Piazza Sant’ Egidio,
a small square from which the Comunità di Sant’ Egidio (Communit of
Saint Egidio) derived its name and where it has its headquarters.
The home of the lay community, a former sixteenth-century
monastery, hosted the negotiations in the early 1990s that led to
the signing of a peace agreement between the warring factions of
the bloody civil war in Mozambique.
Sant’ Egidio’s approach to mediation has been taken as an
inspiration by many individuals and organizations seeking to
resolve conflicts. Word about the community’s “intervention” in the
Mozambican conflict spread quickly, leading to invitations from all
over the world for the community to mediate peace, including in
Kosovo, Algeria, Liberia, and Guatemala.
Although efforts to broker peace, as it did in the case of
Mozambique, are certainly one of Sant’ Egidio’s biggest and most

eye-catching achievements, this is certainly not its only core
activity. Founded in 1968 by a group of deeply religious young
students with a vocation to help the poor, Sant’ Egidio chose
prayer as one of its essentials, along with helping deprived
people, often on a very personal basis. Until this day, the
community focuses a lot of attention on its daily prayer sessions
at several locations in Rome. Almost all members, most of whom have
regular, often high-powered jobs, spend some hours a week to help
children of poor families with their homework, provide food to
homeless people, or in other ways help deprived persons in need.
Over the years, especially after its successful contribution to
making peace in Mozambique, the community became increasingly
involved in seeking negotiated solutions to armed conflicts. In the
perception of the organization’s founder, Andrea Riccardi, this
peace work is a natural continuation of its efforts to improve the
lives of the poor. “War is the mother of all poverty, which makes
everybody poor, even the rich,” he once summarized the drive to
commit himself to conflict resolution. Over the years, its
activities have spread to other cities in Italy and to seventy
other countries, and Sant’ Egidio’s membership has grown to over
fifty thousand in 2004.
Sant’ Egidio stresses that every conflict is different and requires
its own approach. However, the story of the Italian organization’s
involvement in the Mozambican conflict indicates there are certain
specific characteristics in the community’s handling of conflict
and mediation that could be called a “Sant’ Egidio method.”
Developing personal relationships and understanding the culture of
the belligerent parties are some of its most dominant
features.

The War in Mozambique
Sant’ Egidio’s involvement with the Mozambican peace process
originated from a personal friendship that started shortly after

the African country had gained independence from Portugal in 1974.
In 1976, a young Mozambican priest, Dom Jaime Gonçalves, was
studying in Rome and became a friend of the community. A year later
he was nominated bishop of the Mozambican port city of Beira. He
shortly afterward returned to Rome for a synod and took this
opportunity to discuss the suppression of Christian churches by the
Marxist regime in Mozambique with his friends at the community.
Sant’ Egidio decided to start to work to enhance religious freedom
in Mozambique. In 1981, it arranged a meeting between the then
Italian Communist Party leader Enrico Berlinguer and Gonçalves.
Berlinguer promised to use his influence to persuade the regime in
Mozambique to soften its restrictions on religious organizations.
This effort led to good contacts between Sant’ Egidio and the
Mozambican government. The community also managed to gain trust
among the senior ranks of the rightist rebel movement Resistência
Nacional Moçambicana (RENAMO), which was fighting the leftist
Frente de Liberaçâo de Moçambique (FRELIMO) government since the
mid-1970s. Thanks to its good contacts, Sant’ Egidio in 1982
managed to negotiate the release of priests and nuns held captive
by RENAMO. The community also had close ties to the Italian
government and the Vatican, which increased its credibility in the
eyes of the conflicting parties.
The war between the national army of the FRELIMO government and
RENAMO was bloody and distressing. RENAMO built up a gruesome
reputation as the “Khmer Rouge of Africa,” through a series of
atrocities committed against the civilian population. The Marxist
FRELIMO government, on its part, alienated large sections of the
population through its oppressive politics. Its economic policies
also did little to help the country. Mozambique’s infrastructure
and economy began to fall apart. This was one of the reasons why
Sant’ Egidio organized several humanitarian relief operations in
Mozambique in the early 1980s.
After several efforts by foreign powers, including Kenya and the

United States, to broker peace in the mid-1980s had failed, RENAMO
contacted the Vatican and Sant’ Egidio in April 1989 with the
request to help set up a unilateral cease-fire in Nampula Province.
Sant’ Egidio invited rebel leader Afonso Dhlakama to come to Rome.
He accepted, after some initial hesitation, and attended a few
meetings set up by the community. At around the same time, the
FRELIMO government made clear, in contacts with Sant’ Egidio, that
it was interested in direct negotiations with RENAMO. Sant’
Egidio’s leaders took this as a signal to move quickly. They
immediately took steps to convene a dialogue in Rome. On 8 July
1990, representatives of the Mozambican government and RENAMO
officially met for the first time at the Sant’ Egidio’s
headquarters, after some officials from both parties had met
informally at a World Cup match in Rome in June that year. The
official meeting was the beginning of a peace process that would
last twenty-seven months, consisting of eleven meetings under Sant’
Egidio mediation, leading to the signing of a peace accord on 4
October 1992. The mediating team consisted of Mario Raffaelli,
representing the Italian government; Matteo Zuppi, a priest and
member of Sant’ Egidio; Andrea Riccardi, founder-member of the
community; and Bishop Jaime Gonçalves.

No Magical Solutions
The Sant’ Egidio–steered peace process was treated with suspicion
and apparent envy by some outsiders. Every negotiating session that
did not produce the expected result, meaning peace on the ground or
a cease-fire, was treated by the media as a failure.
Political figures who were excluded from the discussions found it
in their interest to say that the negotiations were going nowhere.

Prior to each meeting, a mediation team would talk with each side
to find out what its delegation was thinking of the current
situation, and to brainstorm about their possibilities and share

information. This process was necessary to determine whether the
time was right to actually get together and sit around the table
again. Only with the explicit consent of the mediation team would
the community organize a meeting between the parties. If the team
refrained from giving the green light, a meeting would not only be
a waste of time and money, the mediators reasoned, but could also
have negative impact on the entire process. In some cases, the team
decided it was better to hold a secret meeting, out of sight of the
press.
The cautious and meticulous approach Sant’ Egidio adopted
contributed to the creation of an atmosphere in which close
cooperation between the factions was possible. In addition to the
two Mozambican parties, many states and nonstate actors became
involved as well, adding to the momentum and helping parties to
come closer to one another.
There is no doubt that the negotiating process was complex. The
final result was the outcome of a series of small steps gradually
taken by the two parties in the conflict. There were no magical
emotional solutions for resolving the war. The reason was simple:
RENAMO would only lay down its arms if it would receive sufficient
guarantees for the postwar period: guarantees of its members’
physical security, guarantees that it would not face legal
prosecution, guarantees of free political life, guarantees of
access to a minimum of financial means in order to be able to set
up its organization as a political party, and guarantees of being
able to compete democratically for power. RENAMO moved with a high
degree of mistrust, not only toward its adversary, the FRELIMO
government, but toward everyone. RENAMO seemed to be convinced that
a large part of the world was on FRELIMO’s side, and that almost
everyone was its enemy. For this reason, before giving up its arms,
it wanted to accumulate all possible and imaginable guarantees.
It took the mediators time to understand this position and to get
used to the exhausting negotiating tactics of RENAMO. They had

hoped for a shorter and less unnerving peace process; yet they
understood that the peace process could not be accelerated by
handing ultimatums to RENAMO, but by helping it to organize a
political discourse and to formulate rationally its fears and
preoccupations about the postwar period. British ambassador Richard
Edis later commented that much credit was due to the skill,
persistence, and what has been termed the legendary patience of the
Italian clerical and lay mediators, because these prevented the
negotiations from breaking down.
The FRELIMO government, on its part, continually showed impatience
with what it considered to be the tortuously slow pace of the
negotiations. It frustrated the government that RENAMO seemed to
deliberately keep up the negotiations from time to time. The
apparent inability of the government, in the early stages of the
process, to grasp the concerns of the rebel group provoked RENAMO
to raise the stakes even higher, out of fear that the government
would try to get around its requests or would try to deceive it
once peace would have been reached. Experts Moisés Venâncio and
Stephen Chan, however, remarked that the FRELIMO government also
was partly responsible for the slow progress of the talks.
“The Maputo regime expected the rebels to sign a peace agreement
overnight,” they observed in hindsight.

Maputo assumed that its superior political sophistication and what
was generally seen as its wide support in the international
community would facilitate a quick agreement with RENAMO. All
FRELIMO wanted was a cease-fire and then to iron out what it
thought were a few of the rebels’ political issues. In fact, Maputo
may never even have expected the rebels to insist so constantly
that the talks should touch upon so many political questions. [.
. .] FRELIMO could not seriously have expected a movement with
little or no political dimension to easily lay down its main
negotiating weapon, military force, without getting some form of

compensation (Morozzo della Rocca and Riccardi n.d.: 6).

As the process continued, it became clear that the issue of a
cease-fire should be dealt with in the later stages of the
negotiations, after other issues regarding the postwar period would
have been ironed out. The turning point in the process came with
the signing of a preamble, a non-agenda document in which the
government and the rebel group, after they had barely overcome
their stubborn political stances and mental reluctance, finally
accepted the necessity of reaching a mutual acknowledgment of the
other’s right to exist. With the preamble, the rebels recognized
the legitimacy of the government within the existing legislative
framework, and the government recognized the legitimacy of RENAMO’s
desire to become a political movement. According to the mediators,
it opened the road to the final agreement reached in 1992, and
signed by Dhlakama and Mozambican president Joaquim Chissano.
The peace agreement turned out to be sustainable and was followed
by democratic and free elections in 1994, which further stabilized
the country.

Conclusions
It is not easy to deduce “rules” from the Mozambican experience
that could be applied elsewhere. Peacemaking in all cases is
constructed and shaped in specific conditions. “There is no
standard formula for making peace,” as the Sant’ Egidio mediators
remarked. Still some conclusions can be drawn from Sant’ Egidio’s
experience. “In particular, the mediation of peace in Mozambique
teaches us that cultural understanding of the conflicting
parties—which obviously differs from conflict to conflict—is
crucial for success,” they said. Matteo Zuppi, one of Sant’
Egidio’s mediators, elaborated on the difficulties of the mediation
work. He said the mediators were dealing with two systems of logic,
going in two totally different directions. They had to use both

formal and informal, technical and less technical instruments.
“I learnt that I had to join technique with intuition and
patience,” Zuppi said. The mediators needed the parties to
understand themselves what they really wanted. They found a formula
based on bringing together parties who are driven by completely
diverging motives and considerations. He added that they relied
heavily on personal relationships.

I remember the U.S. State Department sent in a group of very good
professional negotiators to help the peace process. They kept
drafting documents and proposals that very much amused the
delegations. In December 1991, they, quite rightly, tried to
achieve a Christian truce. They were an officer and a lawyer, and
they were very good, very professional, so we let them go on.
After a few days they were desperate. They bumped into a wall of
misunderstanding: technique could not substitute for personal
relations with the parties (Morozzo della Rocca and Riccardi n.d.:
3)

Another characteristic of Sant’ Egidio’s approach was to refrain
from putting pressure on the parties or setting ultimatums. As it
had no real power to back any threats, it would not have been able
to do so convincingly. Therefore a “nonthreatening approach” was
used. The inability of the mediators to promise any financial
gains, simply because Sant’ Egidio did not represent any donor or
other body capable of disbursing loans or funds, is considered to
be another cause of their success. The mediators did not have
military or economic tools. They did not “buy” peace by offering
money. Nor did they offer the individuals who were negotiating
peace the sort of per diem honoraria that are characteristic of
some of today’s’ peace processes, which have the unhappy result of
multiplying the number of participants and lengthening the duration
of negotiations, as the talks themselves become a source of income

for many individuals. The peace talks in Rome were a clear example
of a “result-oriented” process, rather than a “process-oriented”
one.
The Roman peace mediation was politically realistic, attentive to
the many legal, strategic, and diplomatic elements. It explored
several approaches, involving various bodies and actors, but it was
also simply based on the dream that everyone could make
peace.



Contact
Community of Sant’ Egidio
Piazza S. Egidio 3/a
00153 Roma, Italy
Tel.: +39 06 585 661
Fax: +39 06 5800 197
E-mail: info@santegidio.org
Website: www.santegidio.org

Selected Bibliography
Edis, Richard. 1995. “Mozambique’s Successful Peace Process: An
Insider’s View.” Cambridge Review of International Affairs
2.
Hume, Cameron R. 1994. Ending Mozambique’s War: The Role of
Mediation and Good Offices (Washington, DC: United States
Institute of Peace Press).
Morozzo della Rocca, Roberto. 1997. Mozambique de la guerre à la
paix. Histoire d’une médiation insolite (Paris:
L’Harmattan).
Morozzo della Rocca, Roberto, and Luca Riccardi, n.d. “The Sant’
Egidio Peace Process: Unpublished Report” (Rome: Sant’
Egidio)

Vines, Alex. 1996. RENAMO: From Terrorism to Democracy in
Mozambique? (London: James Currey).