Congolese doctor Denis Mukwege and Yazidi activist Nadia Murad, an Islamic State (IS) sex slave survivor, were presented with the Nobel Peace Prize yesterday as they challenge the world to combat rape as a weapon of war.
Mukwege, dubbed “Doctor Miracle” for his work helping victims of sexual violence, and Murad, who has turned her experience into powerful advocacy for her Yazidi people, received the prize at a ceremony in Oslo.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee in October said the prize was for “for their efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict.”
Photo: Reuters
The laureates, who have dedicated their award to rape victims across the world, have said they hope the Nobel will raise awareness of sexual violence and make it harder for the world to ignore it.
“We cannot say that we didn’t act because we didn’t know. Now everyone knows and I think now the international community has a responsibility to act,” Mukwege told reporters at a news conference on Sunday.
The surgeon has spent 20 years treating the wounds and emotional trauma inflicted on women in the the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s (DR Congo) war-torn east.
Photo: AFP
“What we see during armed conflicts is that women’s bodies become battlefields and this cannot be acceptable,” he said.
Fellow laureate Murad has become a tireless campaigner for the rights of Yazidis since surviving the horrors of captivity under the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria where they targeted her Kurdish-speaking community.
Captured in 2014, she was forced into marriage, was beaten and gang-raped before she escaped.
She said the Nobel was “a sign” for the thousands of women still held by militants.
“This prize, one prize cannot remove all the violence and all the attacks on pregnant women, on children, on women and give them justice,” Murad said on Sunday.
However, she said she hoped it would “open doors so that we can approach more governments” to bring the perpetrators to court and “so that we can find a solution and actually stop what is happening.”
The co-laureates have come to represent the struggle against a global scourge that goes well beyond any single conflict.
“Each of them in their own way has helped to give greater visibility to war-time sexual violence, so that the perpetrators can be held accountable for their actions,” said Nobel committee chairwoman Berit Reiss-Andersen when the award was announced in October.
Mukwege has treated tens of thousands of people — women, children and even babies just a few months old — at Panzi Hospital, which he founded in 1999 in South Kivu, DR Congo.
Murad, now UN ambassador for victims of human trafficking, was among thousands of Yazidi women and girls who were abducted, raped and brutalized by militants in 2014.
Older women and men faced execution during the Islamic State assault, which the UN has described as a possible genocide. Murad’s mother and six of her brothers were killed.
A UN team authorized to investigate the massacre of the Yazidi minority is to start fieldwork in Iraq next year.
Murad said that “steps toward justice” had given her hope.
However, “not a single ISIS terrorist” has appeared in court, she said, adding that “this injustice will continue in this world if it is not dealt with now.”
The Nobel Peace Prize — a gold medal, diploma and 9 million Swedish Krona (US$1 million) — were officially presented in a ceremony at Oslo City Hall.
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