Denis Mukwege, a doctor who helps victims of sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Nadia Murad, a Yazidi rights activist and survivor of sexual slavery by Islamic State, won the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize yesterday.
They were awarded the prize for their efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war, the Norwegian Nobel Committee said.
“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,” it said in its citation.
“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.”
Mukwege heads the Panzi Hospital in the eastern Congolese city of Bukavu. Opened in 1999, the clinic receives thousands of women each year, many of them requiring surgery from sexual violence.
Murad is an advocate for the Yazidi minority in Iraq, and for refugee and women’s rights in general. She was enslaved and raped by Islamic State fighters in Mosul, Iraq, in 2014.
“Rape in war has been a crime for centuries. But it was a crime in the shadows.
“The two laureates have both shone a light on it,” said Dan Smith, Director of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (Sipri).
“Their achievements are really extraordinary in bringing international attention to the crime.”
Mukwege, a past winner of the UN Human Rights Prize and the European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize, performed surgery on scores of women after they had been raped by armed men and he campaigned to highlight their plight. He also provides HIV/Aids treatment as well as free maternal care.
The hospital has been the subject of threats, and in 2012, Mukwege’s home was invaded by armed men who held his daughters at gunpoint, shot at him and killed his bodyguard.
Before that attack, he had denounced mass rape in the DRC and the impunity for it in a speech at the UN.
Mukwege was in the operating theatre when he was told the news, Belgian broadcaster RTBF reported on Friday.
“He was proud, he was very humbled, and of course excited, about the award. At the same time, he realises that this brings even more responsibility than he already felt for this cause,” a spokesperson for the Dr Denis Mukwege Foundation said.
“She’s crying right now. She’s crying. She can’t talk,” Nadia Murad’s brother told Norwegian public broadcaster NRK after the award was announced.
Murad was 21-years-old in 2014 when Islamic State militants attacked the village where she had grown up in northern Iraq. The militants killed those who refused to convert to Islam, including six of her brothers and her mother.
Along with many of the other young women in her village, she was taken into captivity by the militants and sold repeatedly for sex as part of Islamic State’s slave trade.
She eventually escaped captivity, with the help of a Sunni Muslim family in Mosul, the de facto IS capital in Iraq, and became an advocate for the rights of her community around the world.
In 2017, Murad published a memoir of her ordeal, The Last Girl. She recounted in harrowing detail her months in captivity, her escape and her journey to activism.
“At some point, there was rape and nothing else. This becomes your normal day,” she wrote.
Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi congratulated her on the award, and Vian Dakhil, a Yazidi member of Iraq’s parliament, said: “It is the victory of good and peace over the forces of darkness.”
Murad is the second-youngest Nobel Prize laureate after Malala Yousafzai, who was 17 when she won in 2014.
Norwegian Nobel Committee Secretary Olav Njoelstad said this year’s prize linked the effort to help war victims with those to rid the world of “evil, inhumane” arms by such organisations as anti-nuclear arms campaigner ICAN, last year’s laureate.