SEMINAR ON THE AGREEMENTS SIGNED IN 1992 IN MOZAMBIQUE

On 4 October, on the Miravalle Pass, at the Auditorium named after former Director Alberto Robol, a seminar was held on the theme '32 years since the Rome Peace Accords 4/10/1992 - 4/10/2024', on the anniversary of the signing of the treaty that ended the conflict in Mozambique. After an introduction by the Director of the Campana dei Caduti Foundation, Ambassador Marco Marsilli, the Honourable Mario Raffaelli, former Undersecretary for Foreign Affairs, who represented the Italian government in the negotiations, took the floor. Some excerpts from his speech follow bellow.

There are a number of lessons for us to learn from the experience of the negotiations in Mozambique. The first one is that Peace is possible. Sometimes it may not seem that way, but it can happen.

If I had been told, back in 1983, '84, '85, '86, the years when I first went to Zambia as a representative of the Italian government, that my political experience would cause me to be part of the mediation leading to the end of the internal war, I may not have believed it, because I thought that the timeframe would be much longer. If they had told me back then that in my political experience I would see apartheid eradicated in South Africa, I would have said that they were crazy. And instead, it happened, because it is not impossible. It is not a matter of needing a miracle, but the will of Man. Concrete action is the element that can build the contexts of Peace.

The second lesson is that Peace is never the result of preaching. Good preaching is important, useful, it mobilises our conscience. But what really brings Peace is building political, institutional, and international internal guarantee frameworks that help the parties that shot at each other until the day before to begin to coexist differently.

Moreover, this is a lesson that we Europeans should already be very familiar with. Europe has a history of immense tragedies, of religious, civil and inter-state wars. Two world wars with millions of dead. So, why did we then have seventy years of Peace? Because we have become genetically nicer, more pacifist, or because we have set rules that have allowed the existing conflicts to be managed? Conflicts still exist, because countries do not all have the same ideas or interests, but when tensions arise, there are procedures in place to manage them. This is why we have had seventy years of Peace. And this Peace, which we take for granted, could be put at risk if this mechanism breaks down.

The third lesson we should learn from the Mozambican experience is that Peace can never be the result of one country alone, but is always the result of a regional process involving several states. A stable agreement cannot be reached in one place if the neighbouring states create tensions instead of playing an active part in fostering the dialogue process. This is what I experienced in Somalia where I worked for years, but without results because there are no such conditions there. Because there, the regional and international communities do not play the same game.

The last condition needed in order to reach an agreement is to have mediators with certain characteristics: they must be people who know the dossier, who have knowledge of the territory and what is going on, and they must feel involved, but remain impartial.

I remember once telling the parties that the objective of negotiation is not to become friends, but to build conditions that allow those involved to remain adversaries capable of confronting one another with words and not with weapons. The two years and four months of negotiations served this purpose. (...)

The negotiations began in June 1990. It was the right time because a number of conditions had changed. First of all, the Berlin Wall had fallen. The dialogue between Gorbachev and Reagan favoured missile disarmament and this had led to the end of the 'proxy' wars in Africa, particularly in Ethiopia, but also in Angola, where a peace process contemporary to our own, albeit with a less happy fate, was initiated. So the regional conditions changed, and what was difficult became possible. Not least because each round of negotiations was followed by a meeting with the ambassadors of the European Community, which guaranteed us international support.

After that it still took two years and four months to solve the problems. The first attempt foundered on the issue of mutual recognition. At that time we quickly made the law on political formations, which defined the characteristics a party had to have in order to be accepted as such. This was easy enough.

Then there was an article that I called 'the post-dated cheque', meaning that it was a commitment for the future. And this said that the government of the People's Republic of Mozambique pledged not to pass laws that conflicted with what would be agreed at the negotiating table. It was a huge step forward, because at that point the two sides recognised each other in the negotiations, and what was agreed at the table was a commitment for everyone. So much so that in the end, to make it effective, the Mozambican Parliament approved the agreement that became state law. Then we passed the electoral law and then the reform of the armed forces and the secret services. Finally, with the involvement of the United Nations, we moved on to disarmament and international integration. A Commission was created that in the two years between the signing of the agreement and the first elections had the task of monitoring the proper implementation of the agreements and had the power to intervene. This was a major concession by the government of Mozambique, which gave up part of its sovereignty for 24 months by giving the Commission overriding powers over the executive to verify the implementation of the agreements.

One of the reasons why many Peace agreements do not hold up or fail is that after they are signed, the negotiator ends the game and leaves the parties alone to manage the process. Instead, the opportunity to have two years of 'democratic gymnastics', guaranteed by an appeal centre where problems could be solved, was fully exploited. Tensions did occur and without that instrument the parties would have started shooting at each other again. An 'airlock' was needed.

But there were problems even after that, for the next twenty years. I would go to Mozambique often and I remember that once, after a particularly contested election, there were clashes. I had talks with the parties and they all told me that the choice of Peace was irreversible. That any crisis would be dealt with by diplomatic means.

But why did this happen? Because in the DNA of the political parties the method of negotiation has been internalised, the idea that every conflict can be resolved through mediation has been accepted. However, we must always remember that Peace is not a given forever, it must be constantly cultivated. This is the lesson we can learn from the Mozambique agreements, and we can also use it as an example to be followed in other crisis situations.