Nobel crusaders

Nobel crusaders

Nadia Murad and Denis Mukwege say, stop the use of rape as a weapon of war.

A decade ago UN recognised that rape can constitute a war crime and a constitutive act of genocide. This year’s Nobel peace prize has been awarded to two exceptional individuals for their fight to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war. Denis Mukwege is a doctor who has spent decades treating rape survivors in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where a long civil war has repeatedly witnessed the horror of mass rapes. Nadia Murad is herself a survivor of sexual war crimes, perpetuated by IS against the Yazidis. Today she campaigns tirelessly to put those IS leaders in the dock in international courts.

When IS militants attacked her village in northern Iraq, they first killed many of the older women and men in her community, including her mother and six of her brothers and stepbrothers, before bussing her to Mosul, where she and the other young women and children abducted along with her, were brutalised as sex slaves. Murad eventually escaped, only to recount her suffering again and again. She underlines that her abduction was no “spontaneous decision made on the battlefield by a greedy soldier.” IS planned it all, even its propaganda magazine discussed sex slaves to lure new recruits. This was part of a military strategy against Yazidis, ultimately aimed at eliminating them altogether.

The fact that the peace laureates come from two different nations underlines that this problem has been widespread, from Rwanda to Myanmar. And the fact that the prize is shared by a man and woman underlines that both sexes have been victims, and both must work together to end the use of rape as a weapon of war.