More than ten years ago, in a sheltered garden in the hills near Rome, a small table had been made ready for lunch. Two enemies sat down for the first time together alone, facing each other. One was Armando Emilio Guebuza, transport minister in the Government of Mozambique, who belonged to what at that time was the countrys only official party, Frelimo. The other was Raúl Manuel Domingos, the guerrilla in charge of the foreign affairs of his rebel army, Renamo. The two men had waged war on each other for almost 15 years, and had never spoken directly, let alone met. But now they were leading the two delegations which had been discussing peace in and around the headquarters of the Community of SantEgidio, a Catholic lay movement based in Romes Trastevere district. There was tension and a sense of expectation.

The first round of peace talks had already been concluded with a document signed by both parties, in which they had described themselves as brothers in a common Mozambican family. The breakthrough had been achieved by the unusual diplomatic method proposed by a Roman history lecturer, Andrea Riccardi, founder of SantEgidio, and by the motley band of facilitators who accompanied him: Fr Matteo Zuppi, a Roman priest beloved of the gypsies and the homeless; Mario Raffaelli, an Italian politician; and the Archbishop of Beira in Mozambique, Jaime Goncalvez, a long-standing friend of the community.

When they began the first talks in private, the two parties could not have been further apart. The government insisted on a cease-fire before any discussions could take place; Renamo, for its part, would not lay down a single weapon without constitutional changes and international guarantees. At the heart of the impasse was the fact that the two sides did not properly recognise each other as interlocutors. But the talks went ahead anyway. Andrea Riccardi stressed the two delegations shared African heritage and the fact of their both being Mozambican patriots; and he quoted the principle of peace enunciated by Pope John XXIII: Let us be concerned with seeking that which unites rather than that which divides us. This, said Riccardi, should be the principle which governed the talks.

The miracle of the Mozambique peace agreement, which is 10 years old on 4 October, began at this point, just when its chances of success had been all but discounted. At that time, in 1990, the group of mediators had not even been selected. The SantEgidio facilitators wanted to widen the negotiation to include other countries, but no one could agree on which they should be. Kenya and Zimbabwe were the first choices, but neither trusted the other.

Which is how the two parties came to call upon the strange mix of non-governmental players put together by SantEgidio: it was Professor Riccardi, Fr Zuppi, Deputy Raffaelli and Archbishop Goncalvez who made up what would become the official mediation group. The long working lunch which allowed for the breakthrough on this crucial question was held in an infernal August heat relieved only by cold white wine and mineral water. A far from insignificant moment arose over the choice of menu. In Mozambique, the head of the table has the right to the head of the fish. Knowing this, the Italian hosts had served two whole grilled fish, so that each delegation leader could have a head. It was these two fish which pointed towards the parties mutual recognition, and the moment when the facilitators became the mediators.

Some chroniclers of the 1990s do not see the peace agreement that followed as a miracle at all, nor even as a story of original peacemaking, but the inevitable consequence of the end of the Cold War. But Mozambique is not far from Rwanda, Burundi, the Congo or Zimbabwe, yet all these countries have been torn apart by civil unrest and war. In Angola - considered Mozambiques West African twin brother because of their shared Portuguese heritage - war has continued into this year.

Boutros Boutros-Ghali, then secretary-general of the United Nations, described the Mozambique peace negotiation as the Italian formula. There was no precedent for it. Its most remarkable characteristic was its lack of institutional support. This was its weakness, but also its trump card, the aspect that gave it credibility; the mediating team had no vested interests, no money to put pressure on the parties, yet had a deep understanding of the primacy of the human factor in the non-traditional conflicts post-1989. In its weakness lay its strength.

At a number of crucial moments, SantEgidio discreetly allowed pressure from civil society to be exerted, as when it organised a solemn ceremony to hand over to the delegates a petition with hundreds of thousands of signatures calling for an acceleration of the peace agreements. Among the names were those of relatives of the Renamo delegation leader, who had for years been without contact with their sons in the Mozambican outback.

Also decisive was the ability to create active links between the governments of countries - including the United States, Britain and Portugal - who were interested in seeing a peaceful solution to the conflict. The group of mediators combined negotiating skills with a grasp of the real difficulties of the protagonists. They always kept in mind the final objective of a peace which became, in the end, a school of democracy in which guerrillas learned how to be politicians, so converting a clash of arms into a political encounter.

The case of Mozambique is something of an anomaly in what might be described as the expanding peace business. Unlike so many initiatives involving huge studies and a whole class of conflict-mediation experts, this was a rare exercise in down-to-earth sobriety: during more than two years the Mozambique peace process cost only US$1.35m. Of this sum, $1m came from the Italian Government and $350,000 from SantEgidio, which paid for hospitality, flights, and communications.

There are short negotiations and long negotiations. This one was slow, by choice. It proceeded, by necessity, step by step, as the parties to the conflict built up mutual political recognition which became effective with the Preamble. It was signed on 18 October 1992 - 16 months after the process began. Another 12 months would be needed before the ceasefire and the conclusive signature, which in turn would require a last marathon of 72 uninterrupted hours of final negotiation. The African presidents who had arrived in Rome for the signing, scheduled for 1 October 1990, were about to go home, according to the news agencies. That the signing of the peace accords should have fallen on 4 October, the Feast of St Francis, had not been foreseen. But it did. An accident?

On Friday next week, Mozambiques peace will be celebrated there as a national feast day. The national anthem has been changed so that all Mozambicans can own it. Almost half of all Mozambicans have been born since the end of the war, which was not followed - as so many civil wars have been - by vendettas. Ten years after the signing of the peace accords in Rome, Mozambique is still at peace, and is a democracy with a growing economy -despite two devastating floods and the even greater devastation of Aids. It is a miracle which began in that most unusual mediation.

Mario Marazziti