Field Reports

Promoting Democracy, Peace, and Solidarity

Andrea Riccardi

On 4 October 1992, the government of Mozambique signed a peace agreement with leaders of the Mozambican National Resistance (Renamo) insurgency, ending the terrible civil war that had torn the country apart for well over a decade. This agreement was possible in part because of the mediation provided by the Community of Saint Egidio, a Rome-based lay Catholic nongovernmental organization. This happy episode raised the Community's profile and occasioned numerous questions about it. Was it, for instance, an emanation of the Vatican? Was it somehow an agency of the Italian government? How could it be that a Community so committed to the poor and their needs had played such an active part in a diplomatic process? The answer to each of the first two questions is no. As for the third, I can best suggest its answer by offering my reflections and my witness regarding the 30-year journey of a group of people who have struggled to make democracy, peace, and solidarity realities in their own lives and in that of the world.

The experience of the Community of Saint Egidio has been centered on this effort. We are not an emanation of anything but a group of [End Page 157] men and women, Christians, free, lay people, who try to live out the true meaning of democracy, peace, and solidarity in Rome and the larger world. We were born in 1968, a time of crisis in Western democracy, as the young revolted against political, religious, and educational institutions, questioning their profound contradictions and demanding authenticity. As one of the students of '68, the Italian Jewish novelist Miro Silvera, has written in his novel Il Prigioniero di Aleppo (The Prisoner of Aleppo):

In 1968, everything was up for discussion: bourgeois love, family, work, political commitment. One could have said almost anything about us, but surely not that we were arrivistes. We did not even know where we wanted to arrive; we wanted to change everything, while those who want to arrive do not want to change anything. Our generation was a laboratory generation that tested on its own skin the discomfort and the purity of change, losing every time. ¹

I agree with these words, except perhaps for the last part about "losing every time." It is not our history always to lose. In 1968, one had the feeling that everything could be changed, especially in the world of young people. This feeling expressed itself more in conflict than in construction--conflict in political life, in the Church, in the education system, in Western culture, and so on. This conflict contained a strong demand for authenticity.

In Europe and in the Americas, the well-to-do sons and daughters of the West, university students, felt an urge to be at the center of things. Many undertook a search for authenticity that took very different paths, some of them terrible. As for myself and some of my high-school classmates in Rome, all of us the children of rather affluent families, the thrust of 1968 met with another important force: the discovery of the Gospel of Christ. This "good news" saved us from the most tragic or ideological currents of '68. I remember the first meetings, the first steps, the first experiences; I remember the strong sense of encountering the Gospel as a word of truth, a word that would never mislead. If I had to identify the two major thrusts that moved the Community of Saint Egidio at its inception, I would have to add to the crisis of democracy in 1968 some mention of the Second Vatican Council. The Council, a three-year series of meetings of the world's Catholic bishops convened in 1962 by Pope John XXIII (1958-63), outlined a new path for the Church in the contemporary world. This path is one of faithfulness to the Gospel and, at the same time, of empathy for contemporary men and women. The Council's premier document, the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (known as Gaudium et spes, from the first words of its Latin text), begins by speaking of this empathy: "The joys and the hopes, the sadness and the anguish of the people of today, especially of the [End Page 158] poor and of all those who suffer, are the joys and the hopes, the sadness and the anguish of the disciples of Christ, and there is nothing genuinely human that cannot find an echo in their hearts." Sometimes, certain words signify well the world into which one is born. The Gospel, we realized, is a word of empathy--unquestionable, inasmuch as it comes from God--offered to contemporary men and women. This word generated an attitude of respect, but at the same time an attitude of closeness in which the hopes and anguish of all were shared.

Dialogue and Solidarity

For our generation, the Second Vatican Council signified a profound detaching of Christian experience from political authoritarianism. This was no secondary matter, for the lack or incompleteness of such detachment had been the problem of the Catholic world between the two world wars. The Council ushered in the full acceptance of religious freedom and pluralism. Also vital is the conviction that Christian life matures more profoundly in democracy and freedom. We have distanced ourselves from the negative utopia of the authoritarian state that rules by imposition and does not favor the appeal to conscience. Sometimes those who are the carriers of values, whether because of an ancient authoritarian tradition, a lack of conviction, or a fear that the required spiritual change will be too great, find it hard to accept the diversity of the other. This is the story of many religious, national, or ideological fundamentalisms, but it is one that I cannot explore here.

For our generation, pluralism and democracy are the path for believers, and the presence of Christians along this path has been crucial. Democracy, in fact, stimulates the responsibility for one's own convictions and not a confused conscience. I have always been touched by what Albert Camus, the great secular French writer, said to the Dominican priests and brothers of Latour-Maubourg in 1946, at a time in which it was not easy for Catholics and nonbelievers to talk to each other:

I shall not try to modify anything of what I think or of what you think to reach a conciliation that would be pleasing for all. On the contrary, what I want to say to you today is that the world needs true dialogue, that the opposite of dialogue is, at the same time, lies and silence, and thus there is no possible dialogue if not between people who remain as they are and who speak sincerely. This brings me to say that the world of today needs Christians who remain Christians. ²

The season of pluralism and democracy in which we live needs men and women who hold strong convictions, but who at the same time realize the need for dialogue. In the heart of '68 as in the following years, on the streets of Rome, on the roads of the world, and in the [End Page 159] poorer areas of cities, the Community of Saint Egidio has lived a commitment to dialogue, believing that this is the true expression of convinced Christians who are rooted in the Gospel. Indeed, a Christian community is a dialogue: between men and women, between different generations, between different cultures. Faith itself, as Pope Paul VI said in his encyclical Ecclesiam Suam, is "dialogue between God and men." No one can impose a world made in his or her own image.

But I would not like to give the impression that Saint Egidio is an organization of intellectuals. First as young people and now as not-so-young people, we have lived our dialogue in solidarity with the other. During our years of existence, we have lived in close proximity to the poorest, both in Rome and in the slums of many other cities of the world. These are the truly other, so often excluded from solidarity and from dialogue. We students discovered another world, the world of misery, a misery that was close at hand but often ignored.

This is how the 15,000 members of the Community live. We share the joys and hopes, the anguish and sorrows, of all, but especially of the poor. For us, solidarity does not mean trying to substitute for public institutions. We have considered the poor as friends and relatives of ours. This is the spirit that moves our work and the services provided by the members of the Community of Saint Egidio, whether helping immigrants, the elderly, those with mental or physical handicaps, the homeless, or people with AIDS. All this work is done in a completely voluntary way, in addition to each community member's job and ordinary civic commitments. Everyday people with families and jobs, the members of the Community of Saint Egidio listen to the Gospel and live in concrete solidarity with the poor. This is solidarity inside the great urban misery, where the difficulty of living is made heavier by loneliness and isolation.

I could cite many forms of poverty, but I only want to talk about one, that of the elderly. Contemporary society has achieved great success in prolonging life, but in a subliminal way it sends the message that old people have to be put aside. The continent of the elderly, and indeed it is already a continent, is the land of sunset--a land where economic, religious, and political figures rarely venture. This land is foreign to our dreams, but it is nevertheless the land where all of us will eventually dwell (at least we all hope to live long enough to get there). It is the land of frailty. The Community has always lived in profound solidarity with the world of the elderly. In a book by Paolo Barbaro, La casa con le luci (The House with Lights), an old lady living in a retirement home tells a young girl: "Anything can knock down old people. A little bit of wind is enough. Down they fall. Here the wind is always strong, very strong. They fall down like leaves." ³ There is an old person inside each of us. The effort to run away from aging is the folly of our society. [End Page 160]

Solidarity is the recognition that the poor and the nonpoor share a common destiny. It is the affirmation of a kinship that our society wants to deny. The culture of solidarity is, furthermore, a challenge to the view that competition is the only guiding value. It is a reservoir, an oasis of concern for the world of the poor, who are so far from our attention and who count for so little.

Working for Peace in Mozambique

What is Saint Egidio? Carlo Maria Martini, a Jesuit priest and Scripture scholar who worked with the Community in the 1970s and is now the cardinal archbishop of Milan, once said:

What attracted me to them? They are the Church beginning once again from its origins. With the poverty of these situations and the Christian enthusiasm of the origins, Saint Egidio took its first steps. Their attention to the people who lived in the Roman slums explains their discovery of the themes, images, and sorrow which are proper to that reality: the cold of winter, the loneliness, the disease, the situation of women. ⁴

Daily solidarity is the commitment of Saint Egidio, a Community that today is present in many European, African, and Latin American countries. On the day the Mozambican peace agreement was signed, a journalist from the Washington Post asked me when we had left our work with the poor in order to take up diplomatic work. I answered that they are the same work. I am still convinced of that. The struggle against poverty leads to struggle against war, the mother of all poverty. This is the story of our work in Mozambique. There we were working in the humanitarian and social field, but we realized that this was useless in a country paralyzed by war. The first problem was peace. We gradually realized that a group such as ours, even if it is not a government agency, may nonetheless bring a certain strength to bear on the side of peace.

The problem of peace has been decisive for Christian conscience in this century; as Christians, we have become aware of the absurdity of war. This awareness, however, penetrates slowly. Not until years after the Second World War, for instance, did we become aware of the full extent of the tragedy of the Holocaust. The long Cold War period was characterized by easy recourse to war, with many local conflicts serving as "proxy wars" between the two large blocs. After the end of the Cold War and its bipolar balance, dreams of peace gave way to other nightmares as the fragmentation of the older geopolitical framework that allowed the use of armed conflict to spread even more widely. Since 1989, warmaking has become the province not only of the state, but of groups below or outside the state. Political factions, criminal gangs, ethnic militias, and insurgent movements of various [End Page 161] kinds have all learned that terrible weapons are widely available for use in winning disputes or forcing political changes.

The growth in recourse to war has been particularly pronounced in Africa, where the state is so often weak. Sometimes war becomes a chronic disease. But our experience has taught us that if war is possible for many, so also is peace. Many can work for peace, and not only states. Working for peace involves more than affirming principles or taking part in public demonstrations. To work for peace, we must move from affirmations of principle to actual encounters with those who make war.

Let us consider Mozambique in this context. The country suffered 16 years of war. A million Mozambicans lost their lives, while close to a million others became refugees, forced to flee to neighboring countries. The strife was said to be a conflict "by proxy" within the larger Cold War framework. In actuality, however, it resulted from a complex process that combined several different factors. Analysts declared at the time that there would be no stopping the war as long as South Africa remained under the apartheid regime. The government of President Samora Machel and his Mozambique Liberation Front (Frelimo) proposed at most to grant amnesty to the Renamo guerrillas, whom it dubbed "armed bandits." In reality, these "bandits" had drawn together most of the discontent that was roiling the country, particularly its northern and central regions, as a result of various changes that the Marxist-Leninist Frelimo government had made. These included efforts to reduce the power of traditional institutions and to suppress organized religion. Renamo achieved a degree of military success, though it remained incompetent in the area of civil politics, and had no realistic prospect of coming to rule the country.

We were sure that the war could have dragged on with no clear result. The problem was to overcome the inhibitions that prevented all sides from entertaining the idea that peace was possible. Rejecting the predominant notion that peace would have to be imposed on Mozambique from the outside, we believed that peace could be--had to be--something that developed between the contending parties. But there were huge obstacles even to the basic task of setting up talks. The government feared that such contacts would tend to legitimate the guerrillas, while Renamo's leaders lacked the skills and political culture to conduct negotiations.

We decided that our first order of business was to get to know Renamo. For months, we worked with Archbishop Jaime Gonzálvez of Beira to establish a stable contact with Renamo's leaders. Our aim was to get them to come to Europe, where we hoped to make a convincing case that they should abandon the logic of purely military opposition. The moment at which the resolve to start talks ripened was when both sides realized that no one could win the war. Negotiations began in July 1990. They [End Page 162] took place on the neutral ground of Saint Egidio, the old building in the Roman district of Trastevere that gives our Community its name.

The government's strategy was to treat the insurgency as a problem purely internal to Mozambique, while Renamo wanted to "internationalize" the conflict. The government pressed for an immediate cease-fire, while the guerrillas were adamant that they would not give up their weapons until a peace agreement was signed. The first major issue was the "status" of Renamo. It was resolved by a "preamble" to the talks that the parties adopted in the summer of 1991. In this document, the parties pledged to work together for peace. Renamo agreed to recognize the Frelimo regime as the government of Mozambique, while the government agreed to recognize the guerrilla movement as the opposition. This represented a success for Renamo, which now entered directly into the framework of the dialogue as a counterpart to the government, but it was also a success for the negotiations as such, for it entailed the affirmation that Mozambique had a state, with a political and juridical system. This underscored the existence of a common destiny and hence of a common interest in bringing an end to the unwinnable war.

The problem for peace was to pass from an armed struggle to a political one within the common framework of the state. At the beginning, a great number of mutual accusations--not all of them unfounded--seemed to hinder mutual recognition. My response was to acknowledge that there were great problems, both those left behind by the past and those lying ahead for the future. Aware of the potential for any problem to generate misunderstanding, I recalled a favorite expression of Pope John XXIII: "Let us try to find what unites us and put aside what divides us."

Readers should grasp the severity of the conflict that we were addressing. Many atrocities had been committed, as a matter of deliberate strategy, by both parties. Renamo wanted to put the government on trial; the government called Renamo a band of terrorists. There was also a certain "pathology of memory" at work: Each side's memories were important to its conception of its own legitimacy and could not be given up, but the bitter memories harbored by each side widened and deepened the great gap between them. How could we overcome the impasse and avoid the repetition of all those tragedies? The answer was to bring the government and the guerrillas to a recognition of each other as parts of the same country and the same state--parts in conflict, to be sure, but parts of the same entity nonetheless.

In the midst of these excruciatingly difficult negotiations, what instruments could we, the "nonprofessional" mediators, use to bring pressure to bear? We did not want our initiative to be isolated, and so worked to get the governments of various countries involved: Italy entered the mediation process directly, while the United States, Portugal, France, and Great Britain were accredited as observers. Private and [End Page 163] public entities were thus united in a common effort. We had no economic leverage, but we did have the strength of representing Mozambican public opinion, which wanted peace. I will never forget how, at a critical juncture in the talks, we laid on the bargaining table a great number of petitions for peace submitted to us by Mozambican Christians. Among the many letters, the leader of the Renamo delegation found one from a parish in Beira that bore the signature of his father, whom he had not seen for years.

The negotiations lasted for two and a half years, including a six-month interruption that began in December 1990. Over time, they fostered evolution in the political culture of the guerrillas. The mentality of a guerrilla fighter feeds on unquestionable certainties and shapes itself in fierce opposition to a demonized enemy. This evolution took time, of course, but only a change of mentality could truly guarantee the passage from armed struggle to a political one. The government, for its part, faced the challenge of abandoning the logic of one-party rule and accepting democratic pluralism.

Also crucial was the climate of trust that we created. Both sides recognized our moral authority and our disinterestedness. The whole process, however, was more than a matter of human relations. On the contrary, it was a considerable achievement in terms of negotiations and documents. One indispensable achievement was the unification, under a June 1992 agreement reached at the Rome talks, of the two contending armed forces. The elections of October 1994 never could have gone forward--much less have enjoyed a chance of success--had the government forces and the insurgents waited for the returns with guns in hand, ready to take the field in the event of adverse result.

Avoidable Clashes

I have said a lot about our work for peace in Mozambique in order to explain something of the Community's methods. Other situations in which we were or are engaged include those in Burundi, Kosovo, Albania, Guatemala, and Algeria. In the last country, we have not had a mediating role, but we have denounced a violent crisis that is devouring an entire society. In the January 1995 Platform of Rome, signed by secular and democratic parties and by the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), we proposed negotiations as a way of escaping the imprisoning logic of terrorism and state repression. The aim is to reestablish democratic institutions (such as elections) in hopes of linking democracy to a wider area of consensus. If democratic life does not resume, Algerians will remain hostages to the blind violence of terrorists and their opponents in a repressive, authoritarian regime. This is how a society becomes corrupted. The women who have been raped, the journalists who have been murdered, the children whose throats have [End Page 164] been slit are representative victims in an Algeria that is the hostage of an insane war. Since January 1995, when we offered the opposition an opportunity to engage in dialogue and to propose a peace platform, twenty thousand more people have died, bringing the death toll to more than sixty thousand since 1992. Our most urgent goal is to avert the "Somaliazation" of Algeria. We are also striving to prevent any more sectors of Islamist opinion from drifting, tragically, toward the terrorism of the Armed Islamic Group. Although the situation does not appear very tractable, we will not resign ourselves to accepting such a devastating conflict.

Our commitment to peace is rooted in the conviction that some clashes are indeed avoidable, whether they be between opposing forces within a given country, or even between civilizations, cultures, or religions. It was in order to prevent such an avoidable clash that in 1993 we became involved in Kosovo, where the ethnic-Albanian majority living under the power of the Serb minority had begun a nonviolent struggle for cultural autonomy and political independence. Even without a profound knowledge of the Serb-Albanian conflict, we realized that the situation of the majority was unbearable. Hence we favored an agreement between Yugoslav president Slobodan Milo(check)eviæ and Ibrahim Rugova (the Albanian president of Kosovo) that would permit the reopening of the schools. We knew that the risk of violent explosions was high if the Albanian-speaking Kosovars were not guaranteed the possibility of living normally, without extra burdens and hardships imposed on them merely because of their ethnic identity. Events in the spring and summer of 1998 have borne us out. Our method in such volatile situations is to seek a negotiated modus vivendi regarding crucial aspects of life in the region (education, health care, and the like) while leaving open the larger question of a future settlement of the overall conflict.

Since 1989, we have seen religious identities play a crucial role both in cementing national identities and in hardening national conflicts. Many even speak of the resurgence of religious wars (I do not agree with this characterization, but it does suggest how religion can add fuel to the flames of war). As the case of the former Yugoslavia emphasized, the divide between Western civilization (secular and Christian) and the Muslim world is becoming a frontier of misunderstanding and sometimes of conflict. Fundamentalism is revealing a disturbing face, with its desire for the "totalization" of control over society, ostensibly for the sake of religion.

The Spirit of Assisi

In 1986, Pope John Paul II invited the leaders of Christian churches and of the great world religions to join him in Assisi, the birthplace [End Page 165] of Saint Francis. They met to pray, not to debate. Amid Cold War divisions, the pope's intuition was simple and basic: Religions should encounter one another, without syncretism but also without hatred, never again one against the other. Despite all difficulties, the Community of Saint Egidio has sought to implement this initial intuition of Assisi. The power for peace that is present in the depths of each religion must emerge. For every religious tradition, peace is a fundamental and sacred value, even if in the historical experience of religions there have been seasons in which this value was either ignored or profaned. It is only by plumbing the depths of one's own religious tradition, stimulated by the problems of the world, that one can retrieve that sacred value. This purges hearts of their anger and educates to peace. The aim of religions--through different paths, to be sure--is to purify and pacify hearts: Holiness and peace, ethics and peace, prayer and peace, they all signify the same thing. Since 1986, the Community has invited leaders of different religious traditions to speak to one other, to pray together. I recall one such meeting on 1 September 1989 in Warsaw, a city that was anxiously thinking back exactly half a century to the beginning of the Second World War but that was also concerned about the contemporary changes that were taking place. I remember the pilgrimage to Auschwitz: Jews, Christians, and Muslims together. Every year this movement of people of faith, assembled to talk and to pray and to put peace at the center of their reflections, has grown.

Today, different religious worlds coexist in nearly every part of the planet. This can lead to growing respect for freedom and the identity of the other; or to tension and conflict. At the end of the twentieth century, a faith that does not develop a "theology of the other" is impoverished indeed. We have worked toward this end, not by convening congresses of intellectuals, but by promoting the encounter of religious leaders who, in some way, represent their people. I think of the first appeal that was signed by religious leaders in Rome at the end of the 1987 meeting: "Religion does not want war. May the word of religion always be peace! May men and women never find in the patrimony of their own religious traditions reasons or incitements to hate one other, to fight, to use war and oppression!" ⁵

A path has opened, a path of religious recognition of "the other," of faith-inspired work for peace, of dialogue (undergirded by religious values) that enhances democratic respect for others. The Community of Saint Egidio has animated a pilgrimage shared by people from different religious traditions--Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus. This pilgrimage has been complicated, and yet simple. Our aim has not been some impossible unification, but rather understanding of and respect for "the other" in all its diversity. Far from being a crusade of religions against secularism or modernity, this pilgrimage has always been intended to celebrate an important aspect of peace, that is, the [End Page 166] ability to live both as actively convinced and self-conscious bearer of one's own tradition and identity, and as a participant in fraternal and open dialogue.

These meetings, which typically gather about three hundred religious leaders from all over the world, have also been attended by important representatives from the secular world. I recall the words of Mário Soares, the former president of Portugal, who attended one of the meetings in Assisi: "[Religions] should not fight among themselves. I would ask religions--especially all the churches that are represented here--to multiply their initiatives for peace. Religions . . . must continue to promote encounter between people, united in the dignity of their own condition and of the immense mystery of living." ⁶

A prominent Italian journalist listening to President Soares asked: "What, then, is faith, and what is the difference between a secular and a religious faith?" Such are the questions that arise along this path of dialogue, that of a pluralism which is full of a desire for interaction and full of strong convictions.

I realize that my account of our Community may seem fragmentary, moving through reflections on bringing peace out of war, on the need for dialogue among peoples and traditions, on the importance of a concrete solidarity with the poor, and on democracy. These are the elements of our life, fragmented and yet possessing a coherence of its own. This is our task, that of meeting people in the concrete circum-stances of their lives, of going beyond walls, whether of diversity or ideology. The world of today displays a rich and complex diversity, but that does not mean that it is doomed to conflict. In closing, let me recall the words of the Koran: "For every one of you We appointed a law and a way. And if Allah had pleased, He would have made you a single people, but that He might try you in what he gave you. So vie with one another in virtuous deeds. To Allah you will all return, so He will inform you of that wherein you differed" (Chapter 5, Verse 48).

Andrea Riccardi is president of the Community of Saint Egidio. The following essay is based on a lecture that he delivered on 9 February 1998 at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. The lecture, one in a series entitled "The Democratic Invention," was cosponsored by the Luso-American Development Foundation, the Mário Soares Foundation, and the International Forum for Democratic Studies.

Notes

1. Miro Silvera, Il Prigioniero di Aleppo (Milan: Frassinelli, 1996).

2. F. Chavanes, Albert Camus: Un message d'espoir (Paris: Cerf, 1996), 11-12.

3. Paolo Barbaro, La casa con le luci (Turin, Italy: Bollati Boringhieri, 1995).

4. Carlo Maria Martini, Address to the Community of Saint Egidio on the occasion of the celebration of its 27th anniversary, 1995.

5. Final appeal of the Second International Meeting "People and Religions," Rome, October 1987.

6. Mário Soares, "Politica e religioni nella prospettiva della pace," in Costruire la pace (Cinisello Balsamo, Italy: Sanzanobi, 1996), 95-104.

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