25/03/2004

Community of Sant'Egidio receives peacemaking award

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- The Rome-based Community of Sant'Egidio, a Christian lay movement dedicated to evangelization and charity, received the Common Ground International Peacemaking Award March 18 at a ceremony at the Austrian Embassy in Washington.

The award was among those given annually by Search for Common Ground, the world's largest nongovernmental organization dedicated to conflict resolution with offices in Brussels, Belgium, and Washington.

In a news release, Search for Common Ground cited Sant'Egidio for "its many remarkable accomplishments," including "its role as a behind-the-scenes facilitator in the Mozambique peace process, and in Guatemala, where fratricidal conflict lasted more than 30 years."

Sant'Egidio, which began in Rome in 1968 and now has 40,000 members working in more than 60 countries worldwide, also was praised for hurricane relief work in Central America, refugee aid in Africa and the Balkans, an anti-personnel land-mine campaign and actions worldwide against slavery.

Paola Piscitelli, president of the Community of Sant'Egidio USA, accepted the award for Sant'Egidio.

Search for Common Ground also honored the Pontanima Choir from Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, with its Common Ground Reconciliation Through the Arts Award. A group of Catholics, Orthodox, Muslims and Jews who formed in 1996, the choir was honored for its dedication to healing post-war Bosnia

through the spirituality of music.

Also, the Common Ground Interfaith Cooperation Award was given to the Rev. James Movel Wuye and Imam Muhammed Nurayn Ashafa, former adversaries and now co-directors of the Inter-Faith Mediation Centre in Kaduna, Nigeria, for their efforts to reduce community violence.

Other awards honored lifetime achievement, international diplomacy, sports through diplomacy and community peace-building. John Marks, founder and president of Search for Common Ground, said the awards acknowledged "outstanding people who ... have taken the task of finding common ground to new heights. We celebrate the courage, strength of spirit and resolve that they have brought to the transformation of conflicts at the international, national and community levels."