Anti-rape activists win Nobel Peace Prize for joint effort
A Congolese doctor who has been a fierce critic of his government’s treatment of victims of sexual violence and a Yazidi Kurdish activist who was held captive and raped by members of the Islamic State group are the winners of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, the Norwegian Nobel Committee said Friday.
Denis Mukwege, 63, and Nadia Murad, 25, were jointly awarded the accolade for “their efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict.”
Mukwege is a gynecologist who has treated thousands of women with extreme sexual injuries perpetrated by rebel groups in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Murad is a Kurdish human rights activist from Iraq. She is one of an estimated 3,000 Yazidi girls and women who were victims of gang rape and other abuses by the Islamic State. Yazidis are a Kurdish religious minority group.
The committee received nominations for 216 individuals and 115 organizations for the 9 million Swedish kronor ($1.01 million) award. The list is kept secret for 50 years.
The Nobel committee said that this year’s winners made a “crucial contribution to focusing attention on, and combating, such war crimes.” Mukwege has been nominated for the prize several times. He is protected around the clock at the hospital he established in Bukavu in 2008 by United Nations peacekeepers. A long-lasting civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo has claimed at least 6 million lives.
“I can see in the faces of many women how they are happy to be recognized,” Mukwege said Friday when reached by the Nobel committee.