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Mozambique, in southeast Africa, is a big country spanning some 500,000 square miles spread out along the shores of the Indian Ocean. It became independent in 1975 after an anti colonial war that lasted more than ten years. It had been an overseas province of Portugal, and in Lisbon people still feel nostagia for Mozambique. This nostalgia is no surprise:
Mozambique has great beauty, with its varying landscapes from savannahs to hills to great rivers, limitless shores, clear fantastic clouds, and ever so many stars of the sort you
see only in the Southern Hemisphere.
This book tells the story of independent Mozambique and in particular the story of the Mozambican peace, which was signed in Rome after long and patient negotiations on October 4, 1992. It is the story of a mediation effort that caused a sensation because it was brought about by government organizations and people of good will, with an active collaboration
1w the Community of Sant�Egidio. Furthermore, the carefully articulated peace process saw the involvement of various internationa1 forces and institutions.
The peace in Mozambique was defined by Boutros Boutros then�secretary general of the United Nations, as an "Italian peace", because the peace talks took place in Rome and because three
of the mediators were Italian: Andrea Riccardi and Matteo Zuppi of Sant�Egidio,� and Mario Raffaelli, a member of pariament representing the government in Rome. The fourth mediator, the Catholic archbishop of Beira, Jaime Goncalves, was Mozambican.
(from the Introduction)
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