When his son died, Sebastiano Bazzoni took up his humanitarian work. Kate Holmquist meets the Italian who has inspired Irish colleagues to give up their time and bonuses for good causes.
Children raped by their fathers and uncles who are trying to rid themselves of HIV, nuns being infected with HIV by priests, and women persecuted by their husbands for getting the Aids virus, even though it was their husbands who gave it to them. No food, no water, no petrol, and gangs of government soldiers tearing down everything in sight - homes, schools and markets. In the past five years, Zimbabwe has deteriorated from being a vibrant, relatively well-off country by African standards to a living hell, due to the contempt Robert Mugabe has for most of his own people.
Mugabe's Murambatsvina Campaign - roughly translated as "drive out the rubbish" - has left 1.5 million people homeless, so that children and adults with Aids are dying on the streets. Police have levelled homes, schools and, in Harare, food stalls that the poor rely on for affordable sustenance. All public transport in and out of Harare has been banned, yet there is no petrol, so that sick people cannot reach medical care.
If you could go into Zimbabwe with a small medical team, a few nuns and a small amount of money and help just 1,000 mothers and children, would you? Sebastiano Bazzoni, international financial director of Dublin-based Pioneer Investments has done just that with his Onlus charity, which is supported by hundreds of the company's Irish employees.
The Drop the Debt Campaign will make the situation worse in Zimbabwe and elsewhere in Africa, Bazzoni believes. "Live 8 will achieve nothing, only negatives. Mugabe is a brutal dictator who is killing his own country. He has described the people as 'rolling bands of maggots'. To drop his debt is criminal because the people will not benefit."
An accountant with a photographic memory for names and dates, Bazzoni's charmed life ended when tragedy pulled him down into a personal hell.
On November 12th, 1999, a UN aircraft carrying a humanitarian aid team of medical specialists to the Balkans, crashed into a mountainside, killing all 24 people on board. Among them was Sebastiano's eldest son, Roberto Bazzoni, a 37-year-old orthopaedic technician with a young family, and his best friend, Antonio Siriana, an orthopaedic surgeon. They had been travelling to Stubbla to begin the process of giving artificial limbs to those disabled by landmines.
Sebastiano Bazzoni felt he had a choice: to go under, or to continue his son's work. "Either you try to forget about it, that people are dead, or you try to do things to help make sense of your grief. I have been a doer all my life. It is more comfortable for me than trying to forget."
He travelled to Kosovo with a bodyguard, found out what was needed, then set about providing it. Within six months of his son's death, Bazzoni had set up Onlus (Italian for charity) and raised €500,000, much of it from colleagues at Credito Uno Italiano who surrendered their annual bonuses to the new charity. On November 11th, 2000, the first anniversary of Roberto's death, Onlus's centre for people with disabilities caused by landmines was inaugurated.
Since then, Onlus has rapidly expanded its humanitarian work into Kazakhstan, the Democratic Congo and Zimbabwe, focusing on hospitals and empowerment programmes for mothers and children with HIV, as well as humane homes for orphans. Programmes are organised by local people, often working with nuns and Italian doctors.
Bazzoni is a driven man who is described by his liaison and administration officer, Elaine Dolan (who travels with him around Africa and the Balkans) as "mad! completely mad!". She means it as a compliment, but Bazzoni riles at the description over dinner at a Dublin restaurant. The maitre d' asks at the end if Bazzoni enjoyed his meal. "A disaster, but a nice disaster," Bazzoni replies.
Pasta and Italian coffee are best avoided in Dublin due to their poor quality, Bazzoni remarks. Fortunately, his wife is an excellent cook so at home in Ballsbridge, he doesn't suffer.
Bazzoni has little time for the Catholic Church and, in particular, the Pope - any recent Pope. "I have a huge faith in God, yes, but I have no faith in human beings, particularly those in churches," he adds.
Nor does Bazzoni have much regard for his fellow Italians, whom he sees as petty and inward-looking, not to mention their reputation for corruption where money and politics are concerned. After 40 years with Credito Uno Italiano, Bazzoni wanted to set up an international investments firm and saw Dublin's IFSC as the perfect home for it. But nobody would take an Italian investment company seriously, particularly in the US, he believed. So he purchased Pioneer Investments, a Boston firm in which the US market had faith.
Even now, Bazzoni dresses in a blue, button-down Oxford shirt and blazer, the uniform of the Boston Brahmin, and he could even pass for one, until one hears the Italian accent. He prides himself on always getting what he wants. "I can be very persuasive - in life and in love," he says jauntily.
Many of Pioneer's 1,700 Dublin employees have volunteered their time to working for projects and fund-raising, but Bazzoni doesn't like any project that smacks of PR-driven "corporate responsibility". The meaning for him is simple: surviving grief by following his son's example and doing all that one man can do.
* Onlus will host a fundraising gala on Thursday, Nov 3, at the Royal Courts of Justice in London featuring an opera performance by D'Accademia Del Teatro Alla Scala. Tables, £4,000 each. Tel: 01-4802466, see www.robertobazzoni-onlus.com
