'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Catholics and peacemaking

To mark the passing of Pope John Paul II, I want to pay tribute to the work much of the Catholic church did under his leadership in the field of peacemaking.

During Washington's ever-more-ominous preparations to launch the fateful March 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Pope spoke out repeatedly against the madness of war. See, e.g., here and here.

That latter link is to the text of an address the Pope made on January 13, 2003 to the diplomatic corps in the Vatican. In it, he said:

"NO TO WAR"! War is not always inevitable. It is always a defeat for humanity. International law, honest dialogue, solidarity between States, the noble exercise of diplomacy: these are methods worthy of individuals and nations in resolving their differences. I say this as I think of those who still place their trust in nuclear weapons and of the all-too-numerous conflicts which continue to hold hostage our brothers and sisters in humanity. At Christmas, Bethlehem reminded us of the unresolved crisis in the Middle East, where two peoples, Israeli and Palestinian, are called to live side-by-side, equally free and sovereign, in mutual respect... And what are we to say of the threat of a war which could strike the people of Iraq, the land of the Prophets, a people already sorely tried by more than twelve years of embargo? War is never just another means that one can choose to employ for settling differences between nations. As the Charter of the United Nations Organization and international law itself remind us, war cannot be decided upon, even when it is a matter of ensuring the common good, except as the very last option and in accordance with very strict conditions, without ignoring the consequences for the civilian population both during and after the military operations.

I believe that John Paul's firm stance that war "is always a defeat for humanity" was strongly informed by his own personal biography, since in his own younger years his own hmeland was ravaged by foreign armies and the wars between them. He knew whereof he talked.

(Unlike too many people in the United States today, who have no real idea of what war does to a homeland... This is both because the US has not known war in its own homeland since the civil war of the mid-19th century, and because too many Americans seem to lack the moral imagination to even try to think of what it's like to live--as most Iraqis are nowadays forced to-- without public security and with interruptions in vital services that pose a constant threat to public health and to the survival of many of the country's physically weaker souls.)

Anyway, since I've been working all this week on the portion of my current book project that deals with Mozambique, I also wanted to share a little portion of the book that describes the signal role that the Rome-based Catholic lay organization Sant' Egidio played in shepherding the 1992 General Peace Agreement which brought an end to 15 years of horrendous, extremely atrocious civil war inside that country.

(I have such deep admiration for our friends of Sant' Egidio! I wish we Quakers were one-tenth as committed and as effective in our peacemaking! Oh well, we can all try to do our best, I guess.)

The following excerpt comes from Chapter 8, "Mozambique from war to peacemaking":

(quotation starts)

How the conflict was ended

As described above, the General Peace Agreement (GPA) of October 1992 was the fruit of a lengthy interaction between the two fighting parties that had been launched, though only very tentatively, with the peace feelers of 1988. A number of aspects of this negotiation were significant, including the following:


• it was negotiated directly between the two Mozambican parties, rather than between the Government of Mozambique and any outside government;

• its principal outside sponsor was a low-profile non-governmental group that had its own very constructive views of how successful negotiations should be pursued, and of the appropriate role for a sponsoring organization such as theirs;

• the peace plan that emerged was explicitly linked to the provision of a process for the peaceful, democratic reconciliation of political differences in the out years;

• the non-governmental sponsors were able to engage external governmental and UN backing for the peace process as it became necessary; and

• this backing could be offered before the question of war-crimes prosecutions became a prominent concern of the international community.


Regarding the first of these factors, it was notable that the [Frelimo-run] government launched its first tentative peace overture toward Renamo—the one that led to the conclusion four years later of the GPA—a few years after the failure of an earlier attempt to secure peace by reaching a state-to-state agreement with South Africa. I have written earlier about the significant role that the white regime in Rhodesia had played in supporting the birth of Renamo; as that white settler regime headed toward its end, South Africa's powerful and vicious security services stepped into the breach and increased their support of Renamo as part of their "Total Strategy" to roll back the advances of black liberation forces in the region. In 1984, the governments of Mozambique and South Africa concluded the Nkomati Accord, in which each side pledged it would not allow its territory or resources to be used to launch attacks against the other. But the pressures on each side to continue the intervention in the affairs of the other continued to mount, and the Nkomati Accord rapidly broke down.

When President Joaquim Chissano reached out through the Protestant church leaders to the Renamo leaders in 1988, he probably judged that Renamo still enjoyed considerable foreign backing; but on this occasion he was reaching out to Renamo qua Renamo, even though this was a very controversial thing to do in most Frelimo circles. For more than a decade by then, Frelimo's ideology had tarred Renamo as being nothing more than a gang of law-breaking bandidos armados whose only "political" agenda was dictated by outside hands. In reaching out to Renamo qua Renamo, and holding out the hope of a negotiated, political settlement with it, Chissano was according Renamo more stature as a legitimately Mozambican force that was pursuing a possibly legitimate political agenda within the country than many Frelimo people were happy with. (When I spoke with long-time Frelimo central committee member Marcelino Dos Santos in 2003, he still said, "I will never speak about a 'civil war' in Mozambique. It was a war against South Africa. They fought a war against Mozambique through an instrument called Renamo." Indeed, the fact that Renamo did not hold any political congresses of its own until early 1990 somewhat validates this view that prior to that date it had been mainly a proxy force for outside powers.) However, once the majority of Frelimo's leaders had decided they wanted to try to negotiate a peace with Renamo they realized they would need to ramp down their previous demonization of it as a necessarily illegitimate force, and start thinking about Renamo's people as, first and foremost, fellow-countrymen. Renamo's leaders had to undertake a similar shift: from describing the Freliomo government as an illegitimate, Moscow-imposed "tool" of Soviet imperialism, to granting it recognition as being composed of "fellow-countrymen". The new ideology of "fellow-countrymen" took some time to take root, but as it did it helped to color many other aspects of the negotiations.

Anglican Archbishop Dinis Sengulane was one of the leaders of the (Protestant) 'Christian Council of Mozambique' who went to Kenya to meet with the Renamo leaders in 1988. I met him in 2003 in his church's slightly run-down headquarters complex in a busy part of Maputo. "The leaders of the churches had been going to visit President Chissano periodically since 1984," he explained.


We kept saying to him that the way to peace is through dialogue. We kept repeating that. We kept saying to him, 'If you speak to the people you call 'bandits' you are not legitimizing their role but you're legitimizing your own role as national leader…

At some point, Chissano acquiesced. He said, 'Alright, I'm ready to talk to them, but you won't find anyone in Renamo who will talk to us'…

It wasn't an easy task we had. We had to be discreet, and make our contacts with no publicity. We had to have a lot of patience. We had to be impartial. And we were deliberately trying not to be an intermediary. We wanted the government to talk to Renamo, not to us!

No doubt, our prayers and our Bible study helped us do our task. Once we had the green light from both sides, we said to the Catholics, 'We know you want the same thing,' and got them involved too. Then, Sant' Egidio offered a neutral place for the meetings between the two sides.

The churches acted as a facilitator. We didn't mind which denomination people wanted to have in that role!

Meanwhile, while the negotiations continued in Sant' Egidio, we all had a lot to do here in Mozambique. We went and talked to the people, preparing them for peace and asking them what they wanted from it. 'Turning swords into plowshares' was really an approach born from the people here. But you know it is a very Christian concept!

Sengulane has written a memoir of his contribution to the peacemaking. Its title is Vitória sem Vencidos ("Victory without Losers"). That title was, he said, his personal slogan throughout his peacemaking efforts. He and the chief Catholic prelate in Maputo, Cardinal Alexandre Dos Santos, both recalled that an important message of their message during their peace-making work was to stress the need for a forward-looking rather than backward-looking perspective. "We can't solve anything if you speak about the reasons you are fighting," Dos Santos told me in 2003. "You need to just try to find the way to get peace. You want to speak about the way to find a meeting of the minds, not speak about the differences… I told people, 'We are not here to discuss the reasons, or the past, but the we to get peace!'"

The people of the Sant' Egidio Community who took up the peace-facilitation role later used a very similar approach in their work. Matteo Zuppi was one of the two Sant' Egidio coordinators of the talks. He has written that when his S.E. colleague Andrea Riccardi opened the first meeting the Frelimo and Renamo negotiators held in Rome, in July 1990, he

recalled the biblical story of Joseph and his brothers who, after years of separation and division, found each other again as members of the same family. Riccardi wanted to express a hope that the same would happen with the Mozambicans… It was a gamble: peace was possible, even though buried under mountains of distrust and confrontation. We will look for what unites us, and put aside what divides us. And the uniting factor was the Mozambican identity, membership of the same family. This was our conviction and our hope. I would also say that this was the working method for the entire negotiations: a method we always defended, even when it seemed simpler and more natural to give way to the things that divided, and there were plenty of those!

After that first meeting—the one that began with the famous handshake—[Renamo military leader] Raúl Domingos and his Frelimo counterpart, Armando Guebuza, issued a Joint Communiqué in which they "acknowledged themselves to be compatriots and members of the great Mozambican family", and stressed their commitment to finding a peaceful settlement. From then on, right through to the conclusion and promulgation of the completed GPA in Rome 27 months later, the negotiators and their Sant' Egidio facilitators worked according to the incrementalist philosophy that Riccardi had spelled out.

By the time that Chissano, [Renamo leader Afonso] Dhlakama, their chief negotiators, their Sant' Egidio and Italian sponsors, and an assembled gathering of international dignitaries met in Rome in early October 1992 to sign the GPA, it consisted of seven fairly detailed Protocols and four appended documents. The first two Articles of Protocol I ("Basic principles") stated,

1. The Government undertakes to refrain from taking any action that is contrary to the provisions of the Protocols to be concluded and from adopting laws or measures or applying existing laws which may be inconsistent with those Protocols.
2. RENAMO, for its part, undertakes, beginning on the date of entry into force of the cease-fire, to refrain from armed combat and instead to conduct its political struggle in conformity with the laws in force, within the framework of the existing State institutions…

Of the six remaining Protocols two dealt explicitly with the modalities for the democratization process to which both sides were now committed. Protocol II defined the "Criteria and arrangements for the formation and recognition of political parties", and Protocol III defined the "Principles of the Electoral Act". Thus, with the conclusion of the GPA, the Government had offered a full amnesty for all earlier acts of political violence, Renamo had committed itself to foreswearing armed action and waging its struggle through only legitimate political means, and the electoral mechanisms had been established through which this political struggle could be pursued. Those three policy commitments formed the key underpinnings of the successful peacebuilding of the years that followed.

Well, I guess that's a fairly dry bit of political and diplomatic history there, but it tells you the general gist of what Sant' Egidio did.

The thing to note is that that peacemaking process was indeed very successful. Since 1992, Mozambique has seen three rounds of generally free and fair democratic elections. Renamo, which had been responsible for truly unspeakable atrocities during the civil-war years, has become institutionalized into its role as a purely political opposition party. And though the country is still--after 400 years of Portuguese colonial rule, preceded by several centuries in which it was the target of slave-raiding by both Arab and European enslavers, and followed by 15-plus years of bitter civil war fomented by the vicious White minority regimes in Rhodesia and apartheid-era South Africa--dirt-poor, and suffering badly from massive under-development, it is basically peaceful and stable, and the vast majority of its people lead basically decent lives.

What a gift the church-based peacemakers gave them by facilitating that negotiation process. What great people those church leaders-- inside Mozambique and outside it-- turned out to be.

Regarding Sant' Egidio, their home community in Rome-- the one that hosted the Mozambique peace talks-- had been founded with the direct interest of the Pope, and its members always tried to live out his (and their) vision of God's will for the church.

Let's hope the new pope will continue, and further build on, this peacemaking tradition.