Nobel Peace Prize Awarded to Denis Mukwege and Nadia Murad

Mangalore Today News Network

The 2018 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded on Friday to two campaigners against wartime sexual violence: Dr. Denis Mukwege, 63, a Congolese gynecological surgeon, and Nadia Murad, 25, who became the bold voice of the women forced into sexual slavery by the Islamic State group.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee said the two were given the award “for their efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict.”

Dr. Mukwege campaigned relentlessly to shine a spotlight on the plight of Congolese women, even after nearly being assassinated a few years ago. Ms. Murad, who was enslaved by the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, has told and retold her story of suffering to organizations around the world, helping to persuade the United States State Department to recognize the genocide of her people at the hands of the terrorist group.

In a year when the “Me Too” movement has turned the world’s attention to survivors of sexual assault and abuse, the Nobel Committee’s decision cast a spotlight on a continuing global campaign to end the use of mass rape as a weapon in global conflict.

Dr. Mukwege works in one of the most traumatized places on the planet: the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

In a bare hospital in the hills above Bukavu, where for years there was little electricity or enough anesthetic, he has performed surgery on countless women who have trudged into his hospital. He has emerged as a champion of the Congolese people and a global advocate for gender equality and the elimination of rape in war, traveling to other war-ravaged parts of the world to help create programs for survivors.

“It’s not a women question; it’s a humanity question, and men have to take responsibility to end it,” Dr. Mukwege once said in an interview. “It’s not an Africa problem. In Bosnia, Syria, Liberia, Colombia, you have the same thing.”

In 2012, Dr. Mukwege delivered a fiery speech at the United Nations, upbraiding the Congolese government and other nations for not doing enough to stop what he called “an unjust war that has used violence against women and rape as a strategy of war.”

His advocacy nearly cost him his life. Shortly after the speech, when he returned to Congo, four armed men crept into his compound in Bukavu. They took his children hostage and waited for him to return from work. In the hail of bullets that followed, his guard was killed, but Dr. Mukwege threw himself on the ground and somehow survived.

He spent more than two months in exile but decided that, in spite of the risk, he had to return.

“To treat women for the first time, second time, and now I’m treating the children born after rape,” Dr. Mukwege said. “This is not acceptable.”

Ms. Murad was abducted alongside thousands of other women and girls from the Yazidi minority when the ISIS overran her homeland in northern Iraq in 2014. She was singled out for rape by the group.

Whereas the majority of women who escaped ISIS refused to be named, Ms. Murad insisted to reporters that she wanted to be identified and photographed. She embarked on a worldwide campaign, speaking before the United Nations Security Council, the United States House of Representatives, Britain’s House of Commons and numerous other global bodies.

Ms. Murad has said that she was exhausted by having to repeatedly speak out, but she knew that other Yazidi women were being raped back home: “I will go back to my life when women in captivity go back to their lives, when my community has a place, when I see people accountable for their crimes.”

Born and raised in the village of Kojo, in northern Iraq, Ms. Murad and her family were at the center of ISIS’ campaign of ethnic cleansing. Located on the southern flank of Mount Sinjar, Kojo was one of the first Yazidi villages to be overrun by ISIS, which launched its attack from the south on Aug. 3, 2014.

Courtesy: New York Times