Nobel peace prize shines light on rape in conflict

Congolese doctor Denis Mukwege and Yazidi activist Nadia Murad, an IS sex slave survivor, were presented with the Nobel Peace Prize yesterday, as they challenge the world to combat rape as a weapon of war. Mukwege, dubbed “Doctor Miracle” for his work helping victims of sexual violence, and Murad, who has turned her experience into powerful advocacy for her Yazidi people, will receive the prize at a ceremony in Oslo. The Norwegian Nobel Committee in October said the prize was “for their efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict”.

The laureates, who have dedicated their award to rape victims across the world, have said they hope the Nobel will raise awareness of sexual violence and make it harder for the world to ignore it. “We cannot say that we didn’t act because we didn’t know. Now everyone knows. And I think now the international community has a responsibility to act,” Mukwege told reporters at a news conference on Sunday. The prize was not a “victory”, but could be seen “as the start of a new struggle, a new struggle against this type of evil”, he added.

The surgeon has spent 20 years treating the wounds and emotional trauma inflicted on women in the DR Congo’s wartorn east. “What we see during armed conflicts is that women’s bodies become battlefields and this cannot be acceptable,” he said. Fellow laureate Murad has become a tireless campaigner for the rights of Yazidis since surviving the horrors of captivity under the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria where they targeted her Kurdish-speaking community. Captured in 2014, she suffered forced marriage, beatings and gang-rape before she was able to escape.

She said the Nobel was “a sign” for the thousands of women still held by jihadists. “This prize, one prize cannot remove all the violence and all the attacks on pregnant women, on children, on women and give them justice,” Murad said on Sunday. But she said she hoped it would “open doors so that we can approach more governments”, to bring the perpetrators to court and “so that we can find a solution and actually stop what is happening”.