Brasília – The Nobel Peace Prize this year will be shared by three women. The decision was announced on Friday (7) by the Nobel Committee. The winners are Liberian president Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, activist Leymah Gbowee and Yemeni journalist and activist Tawakkul Karman.
The choice this year should be seen as a strong sign from the committee that the Nobel is in favour of the fight for equality among genders, especially in the developing world. The Nobel Peace Prize choices in recent years have been surrounded by controversy.
Johnson-Sirleaf and Gbowee were chosen for their work to mobilize Liberian women against the civil war in the country, while Karman was awarded for her fight for the rights of women and for democracy in Yemen.
On announcing the award winners, the Norwegian Nobel Committee said it hopes that the choice of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Gbowee Leymah and Karman Tawakkul should result in their "helping put an end to repression against women in many countries and to identify the great potential for democracy and peace that women represent."
The committee that chose the winners this year included five members. The three award winners will receive gold medals, a diploma and will share 10 million Swedish krona (around US$ 2.7 million), at a ceremony in Oslo on December 10th. The Nobel Peace Prize this year had a record number of nominations – including people and institutions, there were 241 nominations.
It was expected that the winners would include people related to the Arab Spring, like activists Esraa Abdel Fattah and Ahmed Maher – founders of the April 6 Youth Movement.
Also nominated were Google executive Wael Ghonim, who helped inspire protests against the government in Tahrir Square, in Cairo, the Egyptian capital, and Tunisian blogger Lina Ben Mhenni, who reported the movement in Tunisian cities on the Internet. Cuban dissident Oswaldo Payá, Arab TV Al Jazeera and the European Union were also nominees.
The Nobel Peace Prize is one of the five awards created by industrialist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, and is the only one based in Norway. The others are delivered in Sweden.
Last year, the choice was Chinese activist Liu Xiaobo, who has been in home arrest for 11 years, in China, for organizing a pro-democracy movement. The government of China protested against the choice. According to authorities in the country, Liu is a criminal who violated the Chinese law. In 2009, the Laureate was American president Barack Obama, who had been in office for just ten months.
Obama had inherited from his predecessor, the Republican George W. Bush, a country immersed in two wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, and did not manage to comply with his promise of closing the prison in the US base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where there are human rights abuses against prisoners, captured during the so-called War on Terror.
*Translated by Mark Ament
