Mozambique: Mario Giro, "Italian peace has become a model"
Rome - "Italy has developed a 'crisis solving' model that has allowed several other conflicts across the planet to be solved and, today, it is studied in French and Anglo-American universities." This is what Deputy Foreign Minister Mario Giro told AGI, on the 25th anniversary of the signing of the General Peace Agreement for Mozambique on October 4, 1992, which ended 17 years of civil war. Mario Giro recalls that "it was an all-Italian peace deal, sealed here in the heart of Rome, in Trastevere", where the Community of Sant'Egidio, which initiated the Mozambican peace process, is located. The signing of the agreement, which took place in Rome, was the conclusion of a peace agreement that was mediated for over two years - with 11 working sessions between June 1990 and October 1992 - by four men, three of which Italian. The key players were Andrea Riccardi, founder of the Community of Sant'Egidio; Matteo Zuppi, who at the time was a priest, now Archbishop of Bologna; and Mario Raffaelli, a 'facilitator' representing the Italian government. The fourth man in this peace agreement was the Mozambican bishop of Beira, Jaime Goncalves, who died in April 2016. With 30 years of experience in the Community of Sant'Egidio, at the forefront of conflict resolution in Africa and other parts of the world, Mario Giro explained that a specific feature of the innovative negotiation process that brought peace to this Southern African country was "the cooperation between institutions and non-governmental bodies" in interreligious dialogue.The Community of Sant'Egidio and the Italian government developed a hybrid model for Mozambique, which former Secretary-General of the United Nations, Egyptian Boutros Boutros-Ghali, had referred to as "typical of Italian flexibility". "This model has come a long way since then and has been re-applied by the Community of Sant'Egidio in other conflict zones in Africa, Central America, some Asian countries and the Balkans," Deputy Minister Giro added. For example in Burundi, South Sudan, Central Africa, the Philippines, Albania and Kosovo, just to mention some of the negotiations and peace agreements reached on the basis of the Italian model.