President Shit-For-Brains did not win the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize. SAD. (snigger)

from The New York Times…

2018 Nobel Peace Prize Awarded to Yazidi Activist and Congolese Doctor

Nadia Murad, a former ISIS captive, and Denis Mukwege, a Congolese gynecological surgeon, were
rewarded “for their efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict”.

By RUKMINI CALLIMACHI, JEFFREY GETTLEMAN, NICHOLAS KULISH and BENJAMIN MUELLER | Friday, October 05, 2018

Ms. Murad visiting her home village in Iraq in June 2017. It was the first time she had returned since being taken prisoner by the Islamic State in 2014.
— Photograph: Alkis Konstantinidis/Reuters.

IN the midst of a global reckoning over sexual violence, a woman who was forced into sexual slavery by the Islamic State and a Congolese gynecological surgeon were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for their campaigns to end the use of mass rape as a weapon of war.

The award went to Nadia Murad, 25, who became the voice and face of women who survived sexual violence by the Islamic State, and to Dr. Denis Mukwege, 63, who has treated thousands of women in a country once called the rape capital of the world.

They have worked through grave risks to their own lives to help survivors and to bring their stories to the world.

Berit Reiss-Andersen, the chairwoman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, said, “We want to send out a message of awareness that women, who constitute half of the population in most communities, actually are used as a weapon of war, and that they need protection and that the perpetrators have to be prosecuted and held responsible for their actions.”

In a year when women have turned the world’s attention to an epidemic of sexual abuse in the home and in the workplace, the award cast a spotlight on two global regions where women have paid a devastating price for years of armed conflict and was a rebuke to what Ms. Reiss-Andersen described as the failure of the global community to prosecute perpetrators of wartime sexual violence.

When the Islamic State overran her homeland in northern Iraq in 2014, Ms. Murad was abducted alongside thousands of other women and girls from the Yazidi minority, the group singled out for rape by ISIS.

Whereas the majority of women who escaped refused to be named, Ms. Murad insisted that she be identified and photographed, and her advocacy helped to persuade the United States State Department to recognize the genocide of her people at the hands of the terrorist group.

Dr. Mukwege's work, meanwhile, has been centered on a conflict half a world away in one of the most traumatized places on the planet, where villagers have fallen prey to militias, bandits, government soldiers and foreign armies: the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

In a bare hospital in the hills above Bukavu, where for years there was little electricity or enough anesthetic, he performed surgery on countless women and campaigned relentlessly to bring attention to their plight.

Dr. Mukwege visiting patients in Bukavu, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in 2007. — Photograph: Hazel Thompson/for The New York Times.

On Friday, from his hospital in Bukavu, Dr. Mukwege told reporters: “This Nobel Prize reflects the recognition of suffering and the lack of a just reparation for women victims of rape and sexual violence in all countries of the world and on all continents.”

He dedicated his prize to “women of all countries bruised by conflict and facing everyday violence.”

In a statement, Ms. Murad congratulated Dr. Mukwege and said she was “incredibly honored and humbled.” She said she shared the award “with Yazidis, Iraqis, Kurds, other persecuted minorities and all of the countless victims of sexual violence around the world.”

Using the Arabic acronym for ISIS, she added: “I think of my mother, who was murdered by Daesh, the children with whom I grew up, and what we must do to honor them. Persecution of minorities must end.”

Born and raised in the village of Kojo in northern Iraq, Ms. Murad, along with her family, was at the center of ISIS' campaign of ethnic cleansing. Kojo, on the southern flank of Mount Sinjar, was one of the first Yazidi villages to be overrun by ISIS, which launched its attack from the south on August 3, 2014.

Residents were herded into Kojo's only school, where women and girls were separated from the men. The male captives, including six of Ms. Murad's brothers, were loaded into trucks, driven to a field outside the town and executed.

The women and girls were forced into buses. Ms. Murad was taken to a slave market, where she was sold to an ISIS judge. While the wives of ISIS members were ordered to wear full-covering face veils and gloves, Ms. Murad was forced to wear makeup and suggestive dresses with spaghetti straps.

At night, the militant forced himself upon her, viciously beating her if she dared to close her eyes during the assault, she recounted. He warned her that even worse things would happen if she tried to escape. When he caught her jumping out of a window, he ordered her to undress. Then he sent in his bodyguards, who took turns raping her until she passed out.

“At some point, there was rape and nothing else. This becomes your normal day,” Ms. Murad wrote in her autobiography, “The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity, and My Fight Against the Islamic State”. “You don't know who will open the door next to attack you, just that it will happen and that tomorrow might be worse.”

She continued, “There is only rape and the numbness that comes with accepting that this is now your life.” But she eventually escaped.

2018 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Nadia Murad addressing the European Parliament in 2016. — Photograph: Vincent Kessler/Reuters.

For years afterward, she refused to wear makeup. She embarked on a worldwide campaign, speaking before the United Nations Security Council, the United States House of Representatives, the House of Commons in Britain and other global bodies.

Whereas other Yazidi survivors testified before the same bodies with a blanket covering them so that TV cameras would not capture their images, Ms. Murad broke with the norms of her honor-based society and insisted on showing her face.

In Yazidi villages in her former homeland, she has become an icon. Many carry her image on their cellphones, and posters of Ms. Murad adorn telephone poles.

Ms. Murad has said that she was exhausted by having to repeatedly speak out, but she said she knew that other Yazidi women were being raped back home: “I will go back to my life when women in captivity go back to their lives, when my community has a place, when I see people accountable for their crimes.”

She became the second-youngest winner of the Nobel Peace Prize after the activist Malala Yousafzai, who was honored in 2014 after surviving a shooting by the Taliban. In 2016, Ms. Murad was named the United Nations' first good-will ambassador for the Dignity of Survivors of Human Trafficking. That same year, she was awarded the Vaclav Havel Human Rights Prize.

In August this year, she announced she was engaged to a fellow Yazidi activist. A documentary to be released this month, “On Her Shoulders”, follows Ms. Murad as she travels the world to enlist global leaders in her fight. In her autobiography, Ms. Murad writes: “I want to be the last girl in the world with a story like mine.”

In Congo, the injuries Dr. Mukwege has treated are ghastly: women who have had assault rifles stuck inside them; others pierced with chunks of wood; some victims collapsing on the hospital steps with deep rope burns on their necks from where they had been lashed to trees. Dr. Mukwege has also treated 2-year-olds and women in their 70s.

“It's not a women question; it's a humanity question, and men have to take responsibility to end it,” Dr. Mukwege once said in an interview. “It's not an Africa problem. In Bosnia, Syria, Liberia, Colombia, you have the same thing.”

Denis Mukwege, winner of the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize, at his hospital in eastern Congo in 2010. — Photograph: Nicholas Kristof/The New York Times.

In 2012, Dr. Mukwege delivered a fiery speech at the United Nations, upbraiding the Congolese government and other nations for not doing enough to stop what he called “an unjust war that has used violence against women and rape as a strategy of war.”

His advocacy nearly cost him his life. Shortly after the speech, when he returned to Congo, four armed men crept into his compound in Bukavu. They took his children hostage and waited for him to return from work. In the hail of bullets that followed, his guard was killed, but Dr. Mukwege threw himself on the ground and somehow survived.

He spent more than two months in exile, but decided that he had to return. “To treat women for the first time, second time, and now I'm treating the children born after rape,” Dr. Mukwege said. “This is not acceptable.”

When he returned, he received a hero's welcome. Banners flew across town with messages like “Welcome our Superman.” To the people in the crowd, Dr. Mukwege urged hoped and forgiveness.

Though he has criticized the Congolese government for acts of sexual violence by its troops, the government congratulated him on Friday for the prize, even while chiding him for politicizing his work.

In awarding the activists, the Norwegian Nobel Committee bypassed an unlikely trio of leaders who had been the favorites among bookmakers around the world: President Trump, Kim Jong-un of North Korea and President Moon Jae-in of South Korea.

They have taken on the herculean task of trying to denuclearize the divided Korean Peninsula, achieving a shaky détente.

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• Steve Wembi contributed reporting to this article from Nairobi, Kenya.

• Rukmini Callimachi joined The New York Times in March 2014 as a foreign correspondent, covering Al Qaeda and ISIS. She is a three-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, including in 2014 for her series of stories based on a cache of internal Qaeda documents she discovered in Mali. She is also the winner of the George Polk Award for International Reporting, multiple Overseas Press Club Awards and the Michael Kelly prize. Before joining The N.Y. Times, Ms. Callimachi spent seven years covering a 20-country beat in Africa, first as a correspondent and later as West Africa bureau chief for the Associated Press. She began her career as a freelancer in India in 2001, where she was lucky enough to get one of the last seats on a plane to the state of Gujarat on the day of a catastrophic earthquake, filing her first story for TIME magazine. Originally from Romania, Ms. Callimachi grew up in Bucharest; Lausanne, Switzerland; and Ojai, California.

• Jeffrey Gettleman, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 2012 for international reporting, is The New York Times's South Asia bureau chief, based in New Delhi. His work has appeared in National Geographic, GQ, Foreign Policy and The New York Review of Books. He studied philosophy at Cornell University before winning a Marshall Scholarship to study at Oxford. He was previously the East Africa bureau chief, based in Kenya, from 2006 to 2017. He is the author of “Love, Africa” a memoir about his experiences in Africa and a whole bunch of other things.

• Nicholas Kulish is an enterprise reporter for The New York Times, covering immigration issues. His recent work has focused on the Saudi Arabian royal family, the Islamic State and U.S. Special Operations forces. Before that, he served as Berlin bureau chief and East Africa correspondent based in Nairobi. He has won the George Polk Award for military reporting for a series about Navy SEALs and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in international reporting as part of a team covering the Islamic State. He joined The N.Y. Times as a member of the Editorial Board in 2005, where he wrote about the rebuilding of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. As a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, he covered the Florida recount and the invasion of Iraq. He is the author of a novel, “Last One In”, and co-author of the non-fiction book “The Eternal Nazi: From Mauthausen to Cairo, the Relentless Pursuit of SS Doctor Aribert Heim by Kulish”. A native of Arlington, Virginia, he is a graduate of Columbia University and was a Fulbright Scholar in Berlin.

• Benjamin Mueller has been a Metro reporter for The New York Times since August 2016. Before that, he was an intermediate journalist and a reporting intern on the Metro desk since June 2014. Previously, Mr. Mueller worked as a reporting intern at The Chronicle of Higher Education, the Los Angeles Times and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Mr. Mueller received his bachelor's degree from Yale University. He is from New York City.

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