Oslo: Three women who fought injustice, dictatorship and sexual violence in Liberia and Yemen accepted the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize on Saturday, calling on repressed women worldwide to rise up against male supremacy.
“My sisters, my daughters, my friends find your voice,” Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf said after collecting her Nobel diploma and medal at a ceremony in Oslo.
Johnson Sirleaf, Africa’s first democratically elected female president, shared the award with women’s rights campaigner Leymah Gbowee, also from Liberia, and Tawakkul Karman, a female icon of the protest movement in Yemen.
By selecting Karman the prize committee recognized the Arab Spring movement that has toppled autocratic leaders in North Africa and the Middle East. Praising Karman’s struggle against Yemen’s dictatorship, Nobel committee chairman Thorbjoern Jagland also sent a message to Syria’s leader Bashar Assad, whose crackdown on a monthslong rebellion has killed more than 4,000 people according to U.N. estimates.
Karman is first Arab woman to win the prize and at 32 the youngest peace laureate ever. A journalist and founder of the human rights group Women Journalists without Chains, she also is a member of the Islamic party Islah.
Wearing headphones over her Islamic headscarf, she clapped her hands and smiled as she listed to a translation of Jagland’s introductory remarks.
In her acceptance speech, Karman paid tribute to Arab women “without whose hard struggles and quest to win their right in a society dominated by the supremacy of men I wouldn’t be here,” according to an English translation of her comments in Arabic.
“This should haunt the world’s conscience because it challenges the very idea of fairness and justice,” Karman said.
No woman or sub-Saharan African had won the prize since 2004, when the committee honored Wangari Maathai of Kenya, who mobilized poor women to fight deforestation by planting trees.
Sirleaf, 73, was elected president of Liberia in 2005 and won re-election in October. She is widely credited with helping her country emerge from an especially brutal civil war.
The 39-year-old Gbowee long campaigned for the rights of women and against rape, challenging Liberia’s warlords. In 2003, she led hundreds of female protesters through Monrovia to demand swift disarmament of fighters, who continued to prey on women, despite a peace deal that should have ended the 14-year civil war.
“We used our pains, broken bodies and scarred emotions to confront the injustices and terror of our nation,” she told the Nobel audience in Oslo’s City Hall.
She called the peace prize a recognition of women’s rights.
“We must continue to unite in sisterhood to turn our tears into triumph,” Gbowee said.
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