OSLO, Norway, Dec 10, (AP): Three women who fought injustice, dictatorship and sexual violence in Liberia and Yemen accepted the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize on Saturday, calling on repressed women worldwide to rise up against male supremacy.
“My sisters, my daughters, my friends — find your voice,” Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf said after collecting her Nobel diploma and medal at a ceremony in Oslo.
Sirleaf, Africa’s first democratically elected female president, shared the award with women’s rights campaigner Leymah Gbowee, also from Liberia, and Tawakkul Karman, a female icon of the protest movement in Yemen.
By selecting Karman, the prize committee recognized the Arab Spring movement that has toppled autocratic leaders in North Africa and the Middle East. Praising Karman’s struggle against Yemen’s regime, Nobel committee chairman Thorbjoern Jagland also sent a message to Syria’s leader Bashar Assad, whose crackdown on rebels has killed more than 4,000 people according to UN estimates.
“No dictator can in the long run find shelter from this wind of history,” Jagland said. “President Assad in Syria will not be able to resist the people’s demand for freedom of human rights.”
Karman is the first Arab woman to win the prize and at 32 the youngest peace laureate ever. A journalist and founder of the human rights group Women Journalists without Chains, she also is a member of the Islamic party Islah.
Wearing headphones over her Islamic headscarf, she clapped and smiled as she listened to a translation of Jagland’s introductory remarks.
Karman paid tribute to Arab women “without whose hard struggles and quest to win their right in a society dominated by the supremacy of men I wouldn’t be here,” according to an English translation of her acceptance speech in Arabic.
She criticized the “repressive, militarized, corrupt” regime of outgoing President Ali Abdullah Saleh, but also lamented that the revolution in Yemen hasn’t gained as much international attention as the revolts in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Syria.
“This should haunt the world’s conscience because it challenges the very idea of fairness and justice,” Karman said.
Gbowee, 39, long campaigned for the rights of women and against rape, challenging Liberia’s warlords. In 2003, she led hundreds of female protesters through Monrovia to demand swift disarmament of fighters, who continued to prey on women, despite a peace deal.
“We used our pains, broken bodies and scarred emotions to confront the injustices and terror of our nation,” she told the Nobel audience in Oslo’s City Hall.
She called the peace prize a recognition of the struggle for women’s rights not only in Yemen and Liberia, but anywhere that women face oppression.
“We must continue to unite in sisterhood to turn our tears into triumph,” Gbowee said. “There is no time to rest until our world achieves wholeness and balance, where all men and women are considered equal and free.”
Karman says she believes the pro-democracy revolts that have swept the Arab world will help “drive out” al-Qaeda terrorists.
Karman told The Associated Press on the eve of Saturday’s award ceremony that the autocratic leaders that were toppled from Tunisia to her native Yemen created an environment where extremism could grow.
“When there is dictatorship, you will find extremism and you will find terrorism,” said Karman, a female icon of the protest movement in Yemen. “I am so confident that these peaceful revolutions and new governments in the Arab region and the rest of the world will drive out terrorism.”
Karman, said she’s not worried that conservative Islamist parties would roll back women’s rights, and she expects women in Yemen to hold top political offices, including that of president, “in the near future.”
“I am not afraid of the future. If we did we would not make this revolution,” Karman said. “We should not marginalize anyone. Participation in the political life is the only way that will drive extremism (away), so I am not afraid.”