Congolese doctor, Yazidi activist, champions in fight against rape in war, win Nobel Peace Prize

A combination picture shows the Nobel Prize for Peace 2018 winners: Yazidi survivor Nadia Murad posing for a portrait at United Nations headquarters in New York, U.S., March 9, 2017 (L) and Denis Mukwege delivering a speech during an award ceremony to receive his 2014 Sakharov Prize at the European Parliament in Strasbourg November 26, 2014. (Reuters photo)
A combination picture shows the Nobel Prize for Peace 2018 winners: Yazidi survivor Nadia Murad posing for a portrait at United Nations headquarters in New York, U.S., March 9, 2017 (L) and Denis Mukwege delivering a speech during an award ceremony to receive his 2014 Sakharov Prize at the European Parliament in Strasbourg November 26, 2014. (Reuters photo)

(Reuters) – 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 on Friday.

They were honored 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,” the Committee 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 Congo city of Bukavu. 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,” Dan Smith, Director of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), told Reuters.

Mukwege, a past winner of the United Nations Human Rights Prize and the European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize, dedicated his Nobel award to all women affected by rape and sexual violence.

He has performed surgery on scores of women after they had been raped by armed men, and campaigned to highlight their plight. He also provides HIV/AIDS treatment as well as free maternal care.

Although the Second Congo War, which killed more than five million people, formally ended in 2003, violence remains rampant, with militias frequently targeting civilians.

The Panzi Hospital has also been the target 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.

Shortly before that attack, he had denounced mass rape in the Democratic Republic of Congo and impunity for it in a speech at the United Nations.

“He has risked his life to help women survive atrocity,” said SIPRI’s Smith.

Mukwege was in the operation room when he was told the news.

Later, speaking at a news conference at the hospital, he said the prize was an important recognition of many women’s trauma.

“Dear survivors all over the world, I would like to tell you that through this prize, the world is listening to you and rejects indifference, the world refuses to stand idly by in the face of your suffering,” he said.

Wivine Moleka, a member of Congo’s ruling PPRD party, said Mukwege was more than just a doctor. “He is a humanist who has taken the pain of women into consideration, pain in their flesh and in their soul. The prize sends a strong signal to everyone about these women who are raped every day,” she said.

Murad said she shared the award “with all Yazidis with all the Iraqis, Kurds and all the minorities and all survivors of sexual violence around the world”.

“For myself, I think of my mother, who was murdered by Daesh,” she said in a statement to Reuters, using an Arabic term for Islamic State.

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 escaped captivity with the help of a Sunni Muslim family in Mosul, then IS’s de facto 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.

The United Nations has called the assaults launched by the Sunni militants against the religious minority in northern Iraq a campaign of genocide.

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, who is also a Sakharov Prize winner, is the second youngest Nobel Prize laureate after Malala Yousafzai.

The award follows a year in which the abuse and mistreatment of women in all walks of life across the globe has been a focus of attention.