Nobel Peace Prize to honour champions of struggle against sexual violence

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OSLO, Dec 7, 2018 (BSS/AFP) – Champions of the fight against sexual
violence, Congolese doctor Denis Mukwege and Yazidi activist Nadia Murad, a
former captive of jihadists, will on Monday receive the Nobel Peace Prize,
which this year highlights rape as a weapon of war.

Murad, 25, and Mukwege, 63, will be jointly presented with the prize in
Oslo, after they were announced as winners by the Norwegian Nobel Committee
in October for “for their efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a
weapon of war and armed conflict”.

Mukwege, called “Doctor Miracle” for his surgical skills, has spent twenty
years treating the horrendous wounds and intense emotional trauma inflicted
on women in DR Congo’s war-torn east.

He has been scathing about the world’s lacklustre response to sexual
violence in conflict.

“We have been able to draw a red line against chemical weapons, biological
weapons and nuclear arms,” he told AFP in 2016.

“Today we must also draw a red line against rape as a weapon of war.”

Fellow laureate Murad has become a tireless campaigner for the rights of
Yazidis since surviving the horrors of captivity under the Islamic State
group, who stormed across swathes of Iraq and Syria targeting her Kurdish-
speaking community.

Captured in 2014, she suffered forced marriage, beatings and gang-rape
before she was able to escape.

The pair have dedicated their prize to the hundreds of thousands of women
around the world who have endured sexual violence.

“Denis Mukwege is the helper who has devoted his life to defending these
victims. Nadia Murad is the witness who tells of the abuses perpetrated
against herself and others,” said Nobel committee chairwoman Berit Reiss-
Andersen, when the award was announced on October 5.

“Each of them in their own way has helped to give greater visibility to
war-time sexual violence, so that the perpetrators can be held accountable
for their actions.”

– Quest for justice –

The co-laureates have come to represent the struggle against a global
scourge that goes well beyond any single conflict, as the #MeToo movement has
shown.

Mukwege has treated tens of thousands of victims — women, children and
even babies just a few months old — at Panzi hospital which he founded in
1999 in DR Congo’s South Kivu.

Murad was among thousands of Yazidi women and girls who were abducted,
raped and brutalised by jihadists during their assault in 2014.

Older women and men faced summary execution during the IS assault, which
the United Nations has described as a possible genocide. Her mother and six
of her brothers were killed.

Murad is now UN ambassador for victims of human trafficking and is at the
forefront of efforts to protect the Yazidi community — and find justice for
the victims of the jihadists, a mission she has embarked on with
international human rights lawyer Amal Clooney.

In early December a UN team authorized to investigate the massacre of the
Yazidi minority said it would finally start fieldwork next year.

More than 6,800 Yazidis were kidnapped, of which 4,300 either escaped or
were bought as slaves, while 2,500 remain missing, according to a recent
report from the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH).

“For me, justice doesn’t mean killing all of the Daesh members who
committed these crimes against us,” Murad said in October in Washington,
using an Arabic acronym for IS.

“Justice for me is taking Daesh members to a court of law and seeing them
in court admitting to the crimes they committed against Yazidis and being
punished for those crimes specifically.”

– Nobel scandal –

The choice to highlight campaigns against sexual violence comes as a rape
scandal has shredded the reputation of the Swedish Academy and led to the
postponement of this year’s Nobel Literature Prize.

A Stockholm court on December 3 found the 72-year-old husband of a Swedish
Academy member guilty on appeal of two counts of rape, jailing him for two-
and-a-half years.

The Nobel Peace Prize — a gold medal, diploma and nine million Swedish
Krona (880,000 euros, a million dollars) — will be officially presented in a
ceremony in Oslo City Hall at 1200 GMT on Monday.

Other Nobel prizes are set to be handed out on the same day in Stockholm,
except the literature prize, which is postponed until 2019.