CAIRO — Three women from Africa and the Middle East who symbolized nonviolent struggles to improve their nations and to advance the role of women’s rights were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday.
Sharing the award were Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Africa’s first democratically elected female president; her countrywoman Leymah Gbowee, a peace activist who challenged warlords; and Tawakkul Karman, a Yemeni human-rights leader seeking to overthrow an autocratic regime as part of the regionwide Arab Spring movement.
“We cannot achieve democracy and lasting peace in the world unless women obtain the same opportunities as men to influence developments at all levels of society,” said the citation read by Thorbjorn Jagland, head of the Nobel committee, based in Oslo.
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf
Sirleaf, 72, became Africa’s first democratically elected female president in 2005, after earlier losing to notorious warlord Charles Taylor in 1997 elections. She is running for a second term Tuesday against stiff opposition, and the Nobel could give her a needed boost.
Critics say that with all the international aid and investment, Liberia’s government should have done better in restoring services and rebuilding the infrastructure ravaged by years of war in the West African nation.
Still, Bineta Diop, founder and executive director of Women Africa Solidarity, said the Nobel recognizes Sirleaf’s “passion and commitment” to her people and the rebuilding of her country.
“Monrovia has begun to breathe again,” Diop said. “Ms. Sirleaf has worked to fight corruption that existed before and during the war, establish laws to protect women from sexual violence, give jobs to child soldiers, and rebuild roads, hospitals and schools.”
Fellow Nobel Peace laureate Desmond Tutu said Sirleaf deserves the prize “many times over.”
“She’s brought stability to a place that was going to hell,” he said Friday.
Leymah Gbowee
While Sirleaf has led in the political arena, Gbowee, 39, often took to the streets in Liberia, leading a group known as the “women in white.”
Gbowee’s assistant, Bertha Amanor, described her as a “warrior daring to enter where others would not dare.”
That fearlessness was evident on a November day in 2003 when Gbowee led hundreds of female protesters through the battle-scarred capital, Monrovia, demanding swift disarmament of fighters who were raping women and girls of all ages. Fourteen years of near constant civil war had ended in a peace deal three months earlier, but the rapes continued. Gbowee led the women, whose white attire symbolized hopes for peace, straight to Monrovia’s City Hall.
“We the women of Liberia will no more allow ourselves to be raped, abused, misused, maimed and killed,” she shouted. “Our children and grandchildren will not be used as killing machines and sex slaves!”
Gbowee, who was in New York on Friday, said she was shocked to learn that she had won a Nobel Peace Prize for her work.
“Everything I do is an act of survival for myself, for the group of people that I work with,” she said. “So if you are surviving, you don’t take your survival strategies or tactics as anything worth of a Nobel.”
Tawakkul Karman
She is known among Yemenis as “the iron woman” and the “mother of the revolution.” A conservative woman fighting for change in a conservative Muslim and tribal society, Karman has been the face of the mass uprising against the authoritarian regime of President Ali Abdullah Saleh.
The 32-year-old Karman has been an activist for human rights in Yemen for years, but when she was arrested in January, it helped detonate protests by hundreds of thousands demanding the ouster of Saleh and the creation of a democratic government.
When the Nobel announcement was made Friday, Karman was where she has been nearly every day for the past eight months: in a protest tent in Change Square, the roundabout in central Sana that has been the symbolic epicenter of the revolt.
“This prize is not for Tawakkul; it is for the whole Yemeni people, for the martyrs, for the cause of standing up to (Saleh) and his gangs. Every tyrant and dictator is upset by this prize because it confronts injustice,” she said from her tent as she received congratulations from other activists.
Karman is the first Arab woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
The Los Angeles Times and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
