Liberia’s President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf won this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, sharing the award with Leymah Gbowee and Yemen’s Tawakkul Karman, for work to promote women’s rights and peace building.
Johnson-Sirleaf, 72, Gbowee and Karman were announced as winners of the 10 million-krona ($1.5 million) prize on Friday by the Norwegian Nobel Committee in Oslo. They were awarded the prize for “their non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women’s rights to full participation in peace-building work,” the committee said.
Johnson-Sirleaf, who became Africa’s first female president in 2005, has been rebuilding a country devastated by civil wars from 1989 to 2003 that killed an estimated 250,000 people. Liberia’s Gbowee, a social worker and a mother of five, is executive director of the Women Peace and Security Network Africa, a group dedicated to promoting women’s participation and leadership. She’s featured in “Pray the Devil Back to Hell,” a documentary about the Liberian women who took on warlords and the regime of Charles Taylor during the civil war.
Karman, a human rights activist from Yemen, has helped organise protests inspired by the Arab Spring that swept across North Africa to protest the rule of Ali Abdulla Saleh.
“Women today are the ones who suffer the most during conflicts and wars, notably due to rape and other violence and this has become of security concern of first order,” said Thorbjoern Jagland, head of the Norwegian Nobel Committee. “It’s the same theme that became important during the Arab Spring — if women aren’t part of the democratisation process, one can’t obtain full democracy.”
ANNUAL PRIZES
Annual prizes for achievements in physics, chemistry, medicine, peace and literature were established in the will of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite who died in 1896, and the first prizes were handed out in 1901.
Last year’s peace prize went to Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo for his struggle to promote human rights and democracy. The decision sparked a diplomatic spat between Norway and China. Liu has been serving an 11-year prison sentence since 2009, on a charge of plotting to subvert the ruling Communist Party. US President Barack Obama won two years ago for his efforts to strengthen diplomacy and cooperation. Other past laureates include US civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr and Mother Teresa.
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The peace prize is the only award to be given in Oslo. The other prizes are announced in Stockholm, including one for economics that was set up by Sweden’s central bank in memory of Nobel.
AMERICA’S SUCCESS
Johnson Sirleaf, a Harvard University-trained economist, said in a speech to the US Congress in 2006 that Liberia, partly populated by repatriated US slaves, would be “America’s success story” in Africa. In August 2003, President George W Bush sent Marines to Liberia as peacekeepers after Charles Taylor agreed to demands to step down.
The turnaround has since helped attract more than $16 billion in investments in mining, farming, oil exploration and forestry industries and driven annual economic growth of five per cent to 9.5 per cent, according the president’s website.
Johnson-Sirleaf first held positions at the nation’s Treasury in 1965 before earning a Master’s Degree from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government in 1971. She later became Finance Minister in 1979 and left the country after a military coup the following year. She has worked for Citibank in Kenya and for the World Bank in Washington. In 1992, she joined as director in Africa of the United Nations Development Program.
‘IRON LADY’
She briefly returned to contest elections in 1997, losing to warlord Charles Taylor and returning to exile. She returned in 2003 when Taylor left the country to head the Government Reform Commission and resigned from that job in 2005 for her successful presidential campaign.
Johnson-Sirleaf, who has been called Liberia’s ‘Iron Lady,’ said in a 2009 New York Times interview that if women ran the world it would be a “better, safer and more productive” world. “A woman would bring an extra dimension to that task — and that’s a sensitivity to humankind.”
She’s running for re-election this month and in an October 2 speech posted on her website said that “no one else could have done a better job than we have,” urging continued development and peace.
Johnson Sirleaf is also chairwoman of the Mano River Union, an effort for political stability and economic cooperation among Sierra Leone, Guinea, Liberia and the Ivory Coast. She was a founding member of the International Institute for Women in Political Leadership, according to her website.
She was born in Monrovia, the capital, and is according to her website the granddaughter of “traditional chief of renown” in western Liberia. She is divorced and has four sons and 11 grandchildren.