A congolese gynaecologist and an Iraqi woman who was taken hostage by the Islamic State group when she was only 21 in 2014 have become co-winners for the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize for their “efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war.”
In Congo, they call him “Doctor Miracle” for his surgical skill and dedication in helping women overcome the injuries and trauma of sexual abuse and rape.
Denis Mukwege is a crusading gynaecologist who has spent more than two decades treating appalling injuries inflicted on women in DRC.
He has also emerged as an excoriating critic of President Joseph Kabila, set to be replaced in the pivotal December 23 elections.
He set up the Panzi hospital in 2015 in his war-weary native province of South Kivu, part of an eastern region riven by a conflict involving government forces and various rebel groups.
“A man ceases to be a man when he does not know how to give love and when he no longer knows how to give hope to others,” Mukwege told his staff in 2015.
Women abuse critic
A father of five, the tireless 63-year-old is an outspoken critic of the abuse of women in war and has repeatedly accused the world of failing to act.
He had been repeatedly nominated for his work with gang rape victims from the conflicts that have ravaged his homeland. His work was the subject of an acclaimed 2015 film titled: “The Man Who Mends Women.”
“Denis Mukwege is the foremost, most unifying symbol, both nationally and internationally, of the struggle to end sexual violence in war and armed conflicts,” Nobel committee chairwoman Berit Reiss-Andersen said when the award was announced in October.
“His basic principle is that ‘justice is everyone’s business’.”
Mukwege has dedicated the prize to women victims of conflict and violence around the world.
“For nearly 20 years I have witnessed war crimes committed against women, young girls, tots and babies,” Mukwege said, adding that he had operated on some 50,000 women victims of rape and sexual abuse.
Taken hostage
Nadia Murad survived the worst of the cruelties and brutality inflicted on her people, the Yazidis of Iraq, by the Islamic State group before becoming a global champion of their cause and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
Murad, who was taken hostage by IS in 2014 but escaped, is the first Iraqi to receive the prestigious award.
“For me, justice doesn’t mean killing all of the Daesh members who committed these crimes against us,” she said shortly after winning, using an Arabic acronym for IS.
“Justice for me is taking Daesh members to a court of law and seeing them in court admitting to the crimes they committed against Yazidis and being punished for those crimes specifically,” she said.
The slender, dark-haired woman once lived a quiet life in her village in the mountainous Yazidi stronghold of Sinjar in northern Iraq, close to the border with Syria.
But when the jihadists stormed across swathes of the two countries in August 2014, her nightmare began.
IS fighters swept into her village, Kojo, killing the men, taking children captive to train them as fighters and condemning thousands of women to a life of forced labour and sexual slavery.
Murad was taken by force to Mosul, the Iraqi “capital” of the IS’s self-declared caliphate, where she was held captive and repeatedly gang-raped, tortured and beaten.
IS fighters wanted “to take our honor, but they lost their honor”, said Murad, now a United Nations goodwill ambassador for survivors of human trafficking.
Seen as heretics
For the jihadists, with their ultra-strict interpretation of Islam, the Yazidis are seen as heretics.
The Kurdish-speaking community follows an ancient religion, revering a single God and the “leader of the angels,” represented by a peacock.
Like thousands of Yazidis, Murad was sold and forcibly married to a jihadist, beaten and — in contrast to the official wives of IS leaders — forced to wear makeup and tight clothes, an experience she later related in front of the United Nations Security Council.
“The first thing they did was they forced us to convert to Islam,” Murad told AFP in 2016.
Shocked by the violence, Murad set about trying to escape, and managed to flee with the help of a Muslim family from Mosul.
Using false identity papers, she managed to cross the few dozen kilometres (miles) to Iraqi Kurdistan, joining crowds of other displaced Yazidis in camps.
There, she learnt that six of her brothers and her mother had been killed.
With the help of an organisation that assists Yazidis, she joined her sister in Germany, where she lives today.
The Yazidis numbered around 550,000 in Iraq before 2014, but some 100,000 have since left the country.
Many others who fled their hometowns to Iraqi Kurdistan remain reluctant to return to their traditional lands.
Since fleeing, Murad has dedicated herself to what she calls “our peoples’ fight.”
‘Atrocities on women’s bodies’
In his French autobiography, “Plaidoyer pour la vie” (“Plea for Life”), Mukwege recounts the “depths of horror” he encountered in South Kivu.
Mukwege recounted how rapists had inserted a gun into a woman’s genitals and fired.
“Her whole pelvis was destroyed. I thought it was the work of a madman, but the same year I treated 45 similar cases,” he said of the incident in 1999 — the year he set up Panzi hospital in the provincial capital Bukavu.
“I have witnessed mass atrocities committed against women’s bodies and I cannot remain with my arms folded because our common humanity calls on us to care for each other.”
The 450-bed Panzi hospital treats more than 3,500 women a year, though not all for sexual abuse.
It provides free consultations and performs reconstructive surgery on women who have suffered serious internal injuries.
Mukwege’s work has also put his own life on the line. He narrowly escaped an attack on his life in October 2012, in which his guard was killed.
He now lives under the permanent protection of UN peacekeepers at his hospital.
Murad and her friend Lamia Haji Bashar, joint recipients of the EU’s 2016 Sakharov human rights prize, have advocated to reveal the fate of 3,000 Yazidis who remain missing, presumed still in captivity.
She has also campaigned for displaced Yazidis to be taken in by European countries and for the acts committed by IS to be recognised internationally as genocide.
High-profile supporter
The Yazidi cause has won a high-profile supporter — Lebanese-British lawyer and rights activist Amal Clooney, who also penned the foreword to Murad’s book, “The Last Girl”, published in 2017.
That same year, the UN announced it would begin gathering evidence on IS war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide that would be used to try IS militants in Iraqi courts.
Announcing the Nobel’s recipients in October, committee chairwoman Berit Reiss-Andersen said: “A more peaceful world can only be achieved if women and their fundamental rights and security are recognised and protected in war.”
Yet in contrast to all the tragedies that have befallen her, recent pictures on Murad’s Twitter feed show happier times.
In August, she announced her engagement to fellow Yazidi activist Abid Shamdeen.
“The struggle of our people brought us together & we will continue this path together,” she wrote.
Underneath, a photo showed her next to a young man in a bow tie, her face still framed by her long brown hair, but this time, bearing a broad smile.
