Healing lessons from another war-torn society - Mozambique

After the guns of war fall silent, what happens to the people whose main role during the war was to be professional fighters? This is an important challenge for US communities as they welcome back soldiers previously deployed in Iraq.

I came to this small town in southern Mozambique to discuss this with a group of men brought together by an organization of people who had fought - on both sides - in the civil war that ravaged this sprawling, ocean-side country from 1976 through 1992.

We perched on a circle of chairs set outside the local office of a human rights group. Participants included two rights activists, four men who had fought in the civil war, and a traditional healer. They all stressed that communities need to take special steps to reintegrate community members who return home after participation in, or close exposure to, a war.

Jorge Moine, the healer, explained that when a community member returns from war, his or her parents would traditionally sit by a holy tree, and ask the family's ancestors for guidance on reintegrating the returning one. Then there would be special ceremonies to "cleanse" the former fighter of the taint of war before he would be allowed back into the home.

"Some people might do traditional ceremonies. Others might go to a church and say a special mass for this purpose," he said. But one way or another, the transition from wartime behavior to peacetime behavior should be meaningfully marked.

During Mozambique's war, around a million of this impoverished country's 16 million citizens were killed, 5 million were displaced, and numerous shocking atrocities were committed. Despite that violence and upheaval, once the government and the insurgent Mozambique National Resistance (RENAMO) concluded a peace agreement in October 1992, the country rapidly returned to peace. And the peace has proven robust ever since.

How did Mozambique achieve this? Even throughout the civil war, it retained many strong cultural resources for peacemaking and conflict resolution. The ancient traditions of the 16 or so different language groups were one such resource - as were many of its Christian churches.

Churches played an important role throughout the process of making and then consolidating the peace. The first contacts between the government and RENAMO leaders were brokered by local Christian leaders, and the 17 months of negotiations were hosted - in Rome - by a Catholic lay organization, Sant'Egidio. During negotiations, numerous members of the clergy and traditional healers worked in their different ways to prepare the population for the transition to peace.

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