Women's peace, women's rights: 2011 Nobel Peace Prize awarded to three women

The Norwegian Nobel Committee, on October 7, awarded the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize to three formidable women: Tawakkul Karman, a leader of anti-government protests in Yemen; Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Africa’s first democratically elected female president in 2005; and Leymah Gbowee, also of Liberia who campaigned against the use of rape as a weapon of war.

Karman is the first Arab woman to win the peace prize. The award was recognition for the Arab Spring revolution over the past year, demanding a change in political oppression, and women’s role in the rise of new democracies. Karman, 32, is a member of a political party linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist movement, which the Nobel Committee regarded as “an important part” of the Arab Spring. The Nobel Committee awarded Karman, 32, as a peace prize recipient because she "started her activism long before the revolution took place in Tunisia and Egypt. She has been a very courageous woman in Yemen for quite a long time."

The two Liberian women (Sirleaf, 72, and Gbowee, 32) are the first sub-Saharan African winners of the peace prize since Wangari Maathai of Kenya won it in 2004 for the fight against deforestation by mobilizing women to plant trees. Maathai died last month at the age of 71. Sirleaf is seen as a reformer and peacemaker in Liberia, campaigning to end government corruption and to work for reconciliation after 14 years of civil war. Gbowee, in Liberia, has organized hundreds of female protesters through Monrovia to demand disarmament of fighters, forcing attention on women combatants exploited and raped by warlords. She was honored by the Nobel Committee for mobilizing women “across ethnic and religious dividing lines to bring an end to the long war in Liberia, and to ensure women’s participation in elections.”

It is the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s hope that the prize to Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Leymah Gbowee, and Tawakkul Karman will help to bring an end to the suppression of women that still occurs in many countries, and to realize the great potential for democracy and peace that women can represent.

The last time three co-winners were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize occurred in 1994 to Yitzhak Rabin, Yasser Arafat, and Shimon Peres.

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