Nobel winners call for justice to be done
OSLO: This year’s Nobel Peace Prize winners yesterday called for justice for the victims of sexual violence in conflicts around the world, a day before they will receive the award for their efforts to put an end to rape as a weapon of war.
Denis Mukwege, a doctor who helps victims of sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Nadia Murad, a Yazidi rights activist and survivor of sexual slavery by Islamic State, will jointly receive the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize at a ceremony in the Norwegian city today.
Mukwege heads the Panzi Hospital in the eastern Congo city of Bukavu. The clinic receives thousands of women each year, many of them requiring surgery from sexual violence.
Murad is an advocate for the Yazidi minority in Iraq and for refugee and women’s rights in general. She was enslaved and raped by Islamic State fighters in Mosul, Iraq, in 2014.
Murad has campaigned for a UN investigative team to collect and preserve evidence of acts by Islamic State in Iraq that may be war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide.
The team began its work in August.
Murad, speaking at a news conference at the Norwegian Nobel Institute yesterday, said that not a single person in Iraq had yet faced justice for raping Yazidi women and girls, adding that 3000 Yazidi women and girls are still in sexual captivity with IS fighters.
Her fellow Nobel laureate, Mukwege, who lives in the grounds of the Panzi Hospital and frequently receives death threats, said justice needed to be included in any peace process.
The Second Congo War, which killed more than five million people, formally ended in 2003, but violence is still a problem in the country.
Winning the Nobel Peace Prize, he said, would help to bring perpetrators to justice.
‘‘It will help the international community take its responsibilities when it comes to the victims of sexual violence.’’ — Reuters