Nobel laureates: End sexual violence in war
OSLO, NORWAY — An Iraqi woman who became a global advocate for victims after being raped and tortured by Islamic State militants and a Congolese surgeon who has treated countless rape victims in his war-torn nation won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for fighting to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war.
Dr. Denis Mukwege was in surgery — his second operation of the day — at the hospital that he founded in 1999 in Congo’s eastern Bukavu region when the announcement came Friday that he and Nadia Murad had won the prestigious prize. He learned of it because he heard colleagues and patients crying.
“I can see in the faces of many women how they are happy to be recognized. This is really so touching,” the 63-year-old gynecological surgeon told the Nobel Prize organization.
“Dr. Mukwege brings smiles and helps repair women from the barbaric acts of men in Congo,” said Solange Furaha Lwashiga, a Congolese women’s activist.
Murad was one of an estimated 3,000 Yazidi girls and women kidnapped in 2014 by IS militants in Iraq and sold into sex slavery. At 19, she was raped, beaten and tortured before managing to escape after three months. After getting treatment in Germany, she chose to speak to the world about the horrors faced by Yazidi women, regardless of the stigma in her culture surrounding rape.
At 23, she was named the U.N.’s first Goodwill Ambassador for the Dignity of Survivors of Human Trafficking.
This year’s peace prize announcement comes amid a heightened attention to the sexual abuse of women — in war, in the workplace and in society — that has been highlighted by the “#MeToo” movement.
“We want to send a message that women who constitute half the population in those communities actually are used as weapons and that they need protection, and that the perpetrators have to be prosecuted and held responsible,” said Berit Reiss-Andersen, chairwoman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee.
“#MeToo and war crimes is not quite the same thing, but they do, however, have in common that it is important to see the suffering of women,” she said.
Many of the women treated by Mukwege were victims of gang rape in the central African nation that has been wracked by conflict for decades. Armed men tried to kill him in 2012, forcing him to temporarily leave the country.
“This particular type of war crime has been more invisible, because the victims have such a stigma and no one is willing to speak up on their behalf,” Reiss-Andersen told The Associated Press.