Peace Prize Laureates Share From the Heart

The 2011 Nobel awards ceremony was a bittersweet day for women.
Peace Prize Laureates Share From the Heart
(From L) Nobel Peace Prize laureates, Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Yemin Arab Spring activist Tawakkol Karman and rights campaigner Leymah Gbowee take the stage at the Nobel Peace Prize concert in Oslo Dec. 11. (Odd Andersen/AFP/Getty Images)
12/11/2011
Updated:
12/18/2011
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Nobel Peace Prize laureates

The 2011 Nobel awards ceremony was a bittersweet day for women. Falling appropriately on Dec.10, International Human Rights Day, the three remarkable women who co-won of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize delivered lectures displaying their dignity and strength, as they shared about the misery suffered by the countless women they serve.

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Leymah Gbowee from Liberia and Tawakkol Karman from Yemen received arguably the world’s most prestigious prize “for their nonviolent struggle for the safety of women and for women’s rights to full participation in peace-building work.”

Sirleaf, Liberia’s recently re-elected president gave a powerful speech. In it, she touched upon the enormous cruelty against women in war.

“Although international tribunals have correctly declared that rape, used as a weapon of war, is a crime against humanity, rapes in times of lawlessness continue unabated. The number of our sisters and daughters of all ages brutally defiled over the past two decades staggers the imagination, and the number of lives devastated by such evil defies comprehension.

“Through the mutilation of our bodies and the destruction of our ambitions, women and girls have disproportionately paid the price of domestic and international armed conflict. We have paid in the currencies of blood, of tears, and of dignity.”

Violations of women’s human rights are not limited to armed conflicts, however. In many countries, education for girls is seen as a luxury and not as a key investment in the country’s future, Sirleaf said.

But she also talked about her own ravaged country with a sense of hope. Liberia’s youth have made up their minds to make up for lost time. They want education and work, and they want to help rebuild their country.

“They have found their voices, and we have heard them,” she said.

Leymah Gbowee, the other laureate from Liberia, told of how she and some other women started Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace Campaign for $10 in 2003. They wanted to help the women who had become the “’toy of war' for over-drugged young militias” in the cruel civil war.

“Sexual abuse and exploitation spared no woman; we were raped and abused regardless of our age, religious, or social status. A common scene daily was a mother watching her young one being forcibly recruited or her daughter being taken away as the wife of another drug emboldened fighter,” Gbowee said.

Despite the pain and terror, her organization knew that only nonviolence could end the war. Any other way would have been a disaster, she said.

Gbowee quoted Dr. Martin Luther King in her speech: “Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem; it merely creates new and more complicated ones.”

The idea of nonviolence resonated with Liberian women, and the Mass Action Campaign, which began in one community, quickly spread to 50 more. The women confronted warlords and talked to dictators and were a significant force for peace.

Gbowee also said that a lack of women in the decision-making space is the bigger serious problem.

“If women were part of decision making in most societies, there would be less exclusive policies and laws that are blind to abuses women endure,” she said.

Tawakkol Karman from Yemen, who has played a leading role in the struggle for women’s rights in Yemen, both before and during the Arab Spring uprising there, spoke of how civilization has always been created by men and women together. When women are treated unfairly and are deprived of their rights, all social and cultural ills become manifest. Only under democratic circumstances can such a situation be rectified, she said.

“Our civilization is called human civilization and is not attributed only to men or women,” she said.

Karman, 32, the youngest of the laureates, also talked about how the globalized world has brought people together, with common fears and hopes, and she believes that it is on the path to “what is beneficial to people,” despite the missteps. She emphasized understanding, dialogue, and cooperation. And she widened the concept of peace.

“Peace does not mean just to stop wars, but also to stop oppression and injustice,” she said.