Claudio Maria Betti does not want to belong to anybody, he says. Not to the Left, not to the Right. It shows.
Betti was in Australia in February, as the United States and Australia began to marshal forces in the Gulf. Iraq’s deputy prime minister, Tariq Aziz, had been in Rome to see the Pope. The Pope’s envoys had carried pleas for peace to the East and to the West: Etchegaray to Baghdad and Laghi to Washington.
With a tall, imposing figure and a deep smoker’s voice, Claudio Betti’s presence, energy and good humour belies the gravity of his mission. Since 1998 Betti has been the Director for Special Operations for Rome’s Sant’Egidio Community and is personal assistant to the founder and president, Professor Andrea Riccardi. Betti’s CV reads as a chronicle of global peacekeeping for the last 20 years: Lebanon, Mozambique, Iraq, Algeria, Guatemala, Burundi, Kosovo and Serbia.
Riccardi began the Community of Sant’Egidio in Rome in 1968, in the renewing spirit of the Second Vatican Council, and Betti joined shortly afterwards. At that time, brokering international peace deals was probably the farthest thing from Riccardi’s vision or Betti’s plans.
Riccardi and his small group of high school students began with visits to the slums on the outskirts of Rome. The next step was an afternoon school for children. They founded a community which now, 35 years later, has 40,000 members in more than 60 countries. The Church of Sant’Egidio in Rome’s Trastevere district is still the administrative and spiritual home of the movement.
Why has Sant’Egidio thriven when so many other peace movements have failed? It is the poor, Betti says, that have saved them ‘from becoming one of those ideological entities, which sooner or later lose their reason for existing’. One quickly discerns in Betti a typically Italian suspicion of ideologues.
When Betti joined the community, the first thing he was asked to do was to help a child with his homework. Twenty years later he was brokering peace in Mozambique: ‘in a very Roman way—by flattering, by shouting.’ The people of Sant’Egidio persuaded the Mozambique government to engage in talks with rebels. They then persuaded the rebels to talk to the government. Betti and his colleagues intended simply to bring the factions to the table. Someone else would take over the mediation. No-one did, and Sant’Egidio was ‘stuck with a process’. After 27 months of negotiations, the parties established a