Liberia’s president, a fellow Liberian and a Yemeni activist received the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo yesterday for showing how women facing war and oppression can shed the mantle of victimhood and lead the way to peace and democracy.

“You represent one of the most important motive forces for change in today’s world: the struggle for human rights in general and the struggle of women for equality and peace in particular,” Norwegian Nobel Committee president Thorbjoern Jagland said before handing out the prestigious award.

At the lavish ceremony in a colourfully flower-decked Oslo city hall, and with Norway’s royal family and other dignitaries in attendance, Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, her compatriot and “peace warrior” Leymah Gbowee and Yemeni “Arab Spring” activist Tawakkol Karman received their gold medal and diploma.

“You give concrete meaning to the Chinese proverb which says that ‘women hold up half of the sky’,” Jagland told the laureates.

Gbowee, a 39-year-old social worker who led Liberia’s women to defy feared warlords and bring an end to her country’s bloody 1989-2003 civil war, hailed the Nobel Committee for shining the spotlight on women’s struggle for peace and human rights, insisting “this prize could not have come at a better time than this.”

Sirleaf, Africa’s first democratically elected woman president who last month won a second term, also hailed the Nobel Committee’s focus on women’s struggles after the world in recent decades has witnessed “unprecedented levels of cruelty directed against women” in places like the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Sierra Leone and her own Liberia.

An example of someone who found a powerful voice despite almost insurmountable odds is Karman, who at 32 is the youngest person to win the Peace Prize and the first Arab woman to receive a Nobel in any category.

The journalist and mother of three expressed confidence that the “Arab Spring” uprising would succeed .

At a separate ceremony in Stockholm, the winners of the Nobel Prizes for Medicine, Physics, Chemistry, Literature and Economics were to receive their prizes later yesterday.

source: thedailystar.net   

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