Mario Giro, head of West Africa Section, Sant’Egidio community
Andrea Riccardi, founder of the Sant’Egidio community, in one of the canteens where his movement provides meals for the needy.
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Get up, stand up Bob Marley, Jamaican musician (1945-1981) |
The isolation of a movement, a party or a country can lead to war, especially if the international community stands idly by
A lay Catholic
movement dedicated to helping the needy and mediating in international conflicts
An old woman barricades herself in a dilapidated building in the slums
of an Italian city. She refuses to open her door. Her neighbours are convinced she’s
becoming a derelict. A member of the Sant’Egidio community knocks at her door and
starts to speak to her. She replies in monosyllables. He leaves but comes back later
to continue a dialogue that may go on for months, even a year, until she agrees to
open the door and let him in and finally start getting some help.
Using these skills in patient communication based on friendship, the community later
made contact with a guerrilla chieftain hidden away for years in the heart of Africa,
brought him out of his isolation and persuaded him to negotiate instead of fight.
“The Church is a home for everyone, especially the poor,” said Pope John XXIII, who
set the Church on the road to modernization and opened it up to the world, moves
which were endorsed by the Vatican II Council. In line with this, a group of Catholic
students decided in 1968 to set up a movement which would not be an ngo but a Christian
community where religious devotion went hand in hand with putting the Gospel into
practice by personal commitment to the poor. Their leader was Andrea Riccardi, who
now teaches history at Rome University and has been awarded Unesco’s Gandhi Medal
for his commitment to a culture of peace.
A language
of reconciliation
The Sant’Egidio community,
which takes its name from the disused Roman church it has adopted as its headquarters,
today has 20,000 members in some 300 grassroots communities in 34 countries. The
community began by helping abandoned children in the slums of Rome, then went on
to work with immigrants, the elderly, the homeless, the handicapped, Aids victims
and many other groups of disadvantaged people in Europe and in developing countries
of Asia, Latin America and Africa.
One country where Sant’Egidio (St. Giles in English) has been particularly active
is Mozambique, where famine and war raged in the early 1980s. The fighting began
against Portuguese colonial rule in 1963, stopped with independence in 1975, and
started again a few years later for external and internal reasons. The apartheid
regime in South Africa wanted to destabilize all its neighbours who refused to recognize
its regional dominance. Socialist-ruled Mozambique was a front-line target.
Humanitarian aid provided by the Sant’Egidio community disappeared into a bottomless
pit because it was impossible to solve the hunger problem as long as a war was going
on. The search for a traditional mediator–a state or an international organization–failed
because diplomats couldn’t make contact with an invisible armed opposition and thought,
wrongly as it turned out, that the war would not end until apartheid disappeared
in South Africa.
The community reluctantly saw it had no choice but to act as a mediator. Lacking
experience, it had to learn what to do as it went along. It invented a “language
of reconciliation” whose syntax it picked up as a humanitarian organization working
for the poor.
Sant’Egidio had discovered how to talk to all kinds of people from its compassionate
work in a wide variety of constantly changing situations in which its members related
to the poor, shared their lives, spoke their language, went to the same places they
did and regarded them not as welfare cases but as full members of society.
Turning
weakness into strength
Such a dialogue might
be regarded as ineffective when the resources to overcome poverty are unavailable.
But the community refuses to give in to these circumstances. Experience has shown
that its mere presence can be vitally important, even if it doesn’t lead to any immediate
results. In the age of the Internet, isolation, or solitude, is a serious ailment
of our time. Personal isolation or loneliness can drive a person mad. The isolation
of a movement, a party or a country can lead to war, especially if the international
community stands idly by. The persistence of wars in Africa–in southern Sudan, for
example–provides ample proof of this.
The community’s work has also taught it to be patient. When the foreign minister
of an important country travels to mediate in a given situation, he or she has limited
time yet their mission must lead to results. They cannot risk failing because failure
would damage their credibility, because there is pressure from public opinion or
because elections are imminent. But how can conflicts that have taken shape over
several decades be solved in a matter of months? The community has no target date
for results.
Peace negotiations started at the same time in Angola and Mozambique. In Angola,
they were completed in three and a half months, and it was said that the talks in
Mozambique were dragging on. Many people told the mediator he was wasting his time
and theirs too. The negotiations were indeed long–11 sessions over 27 months, between
June 1990 and October 1992. Every detail was carefully scrutinized because the mediator
regarded himself as a beginner. Today the Mozambique peace agreement is still holding,
whilst sadly war has broken out again in Angola.
The community’s weakness is also its strong point. It cannot mobilize an army or
sign enormous cheques. This “weakness” is in fact a guarantee of its sincerity–that
all it’s interested in is peace-making, that it has no weapons except its belief
in friendship and peace. So different sides come to trust it and talk about their
problems freely, without the restraints they would feel if dealing with official
bodies as part of the power plays that are inevitable in such contacts. This familiarity
with the warring parties goes hand in hand with the in-depth understanding of the
societies in conflict, especially in Africa, that Sant’Egidio has gathered from its
local grassroots communities.
A peace process is not just about negotiating and then signing a document. The follow-up
is extremely complex. It involves development and democracy, reconciliation and remembering.
The
community cannot do this by itself and has never sought to do so. It does not believe
in parallel diplomacy but in promoting a synergy of resources and actions.
Gatherings
to pray for peace
A peace accord’s chances
of success depend mainly on those who sign it but also on civil society and the international
climate. So Sant’Egidio encourages consistent and prolonged efforts by many other
international parties–governmental and otherwise–to boost any peace process in which
it is involved. Observers representing the United Nations and the governments of
Italy, France, North America, Portugal, the United Kingdom and even South Africa
took part in the final stage of the Mozambique negotiations.
These talks brought the community into the limelight and it acquired a reputation
and credibility that have since been used by warring parties from Guatemala to Burundi,
from Congo-Kinshasa to Kosovo and Algeria. In Algeria, Sant’Egidio managed to bring
Muslim enemies to the negotiating table by using another of its methods, inter-religious
dialogue.
For more than a decade, Sant’Egidio has organized international gatherings to pray
for peace. These are a key factor in the language of reconciliation because they
build a genuine culture of inter-religious peace. But Sant’Egidio’s commitment to
peace continues to be an extension of its commitment to fight poverty, to which it
still devotes 80 per cent of its efforts.
