“Declaring women’s rights vital for world peace, the Nobel Committee awarded its annual Peace Prize on Friday to three indomitable female campaigners against war and oppression — a Yemeni and two Liberians, including that country’s president.
Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, the first woman freely elected as a head of state in Africa, shared the award worth $1.5 million with compatriot Leymah Gbowee, who promoted a “sex strike” among efforts to end Liberia’s civil war, and Yemen’s Tawakul Karman, who called her honor “a victory for the Arab Spring.”
“We cannot achieve democracy and lasting peace in the world unless women obtain the same opportunities as men to influence developments at all levels of society,” Norwegian Nobel Committee chairman Thorbjoern Jagland told reporters.
“This is to highlight an incredibly important issue all over the world but especially in Africa and in the Arab world.”
Karman, 32, an Islamist journalist dubbed the “Mother of the Revolution,” has been a key figure in protests in the capital Sanaa this year. “This is a victory for the Arab Spring in Tunis, Egypt, Libya, Syria and Yemen,” she told Reuters. “This is a message that the era of Arab dictatorships is over.”
Typically, the mother-of-three was out demonstrating in a central square in Sanaa for the departure of veteran Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh when she heard the news.
Johnson-Sirleaf, 72, a former World Bank economist known as the “Iron Lady” by opponents, called the prize a recognition of her nation’s “many years of struggle for justice, peace, and promotion of development” since a brutal decade of civil war.
“The credit goes to the Liberian people,” she said in the capital Monrovia after hearing the announcement from Oslo.
Gbowee, 39, received the news belatedly when she switched on her mobile phone after landing in New York on a book tour.
“All I keep hearing in my head is the song of praise to God,” she said. “My work is for survival for myself and for other women … With or without a Nobel I will still do what I do because I am a symbol of hope in my community on the continent, in a place where there is little to be hopeful for.”
-More on Reuters.
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