A small candle of hope

When events transcending geographies and history occur, other pressing concerns appear routine and mundane. The 2018 Nobel Peace Prize to Denis Mukwege and Nadia Murad announced on last Friday is one such, which should take our minds off worries about oil on the boil, rupee on the slide and abusive election campaigns in the pits. The Norwegian Peace Prize Committee sagaciously recognised the contribution of these two individuals to ending sexual violence as a weapon of war. 

Dr Mukwege has long worked in the Congo to bring healing to the poor women victims. Ms Murad is a victim herself, a Yazidi young woman held as a sex slave by the unspeakably barbaric Islamic State (IS) in Iraq earlier in the decade, who has now turned into an articulate and powerful campaigner against the horrors inflicted on women. In this, the Committee has followed the precedent it had set four years ago of choosing a seasoned activist, Kailash Satyarthi, and a young victim-turned-campaigner, Malala Yousafzai, in the cause of children’s abuse and their freedom of education. That singular award focussed the world’s attention as never before on this often-forgotten issue central to our collective future. The Committee obviously hopes that this experience will be replicated at present.
 

The Yazidis are a minority in Northern Iraq, neither Muslim nor Christian, numbering just half a million and among the poorest.  Their religion is quite similar to the sanatana dharma or ancient Hinduism, based as it is on the worship of the Sun and other elements. Unlike Christians of the region, no one championed them. The IS called them godless devils and singled them out in 2014 for slaughter, regardless of age or sex, in the name of ethnic cleansing.

A large group, about 10,000-strong, was besieged in flight in mid-2014 on Mount Sinjar without food or even water. Many were massacred in the most gruesome fashion. Ms Murad’s village was nearby. She was then a 19-year-old student. She was kidnapped and held captive in nearby Mosul. She was among the hundreds of young women repeatedly brutalised and treated as sex slaves by the rapacious IS marauders. She escaped after three months. Shortly thereafter, she bravely told the world her story, in a book called, most appropriately, The Last Girl. Since then, she has founded Nadia’s Initiative, an advocacy group to create awareness and documentation of the IS acts of genocide and atrocities on women. Amal Clooney is her lawyer. Ms Murad appeared before the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime two years ago. She has taken much the same road as Ms  Yousafzai before her did, at an even younger age.

Dr Mukwege’s land and the neighbouring countries have long been strife-torn. Tribal violence peaked in 1994 in the Rwanda-Burundi genocidal civil war. Those scars have still not healed. After taking his medical degree from the University of Burundi in 1983, Dr Mukwege lived in Bukavu, close to the Rwanda border. Post a residency in Paris, he worked in a Bukavu hospital. When he saw hundreds of women suffering from trauma caused by violent sex, he set up Panzi Hospital in Bukavu in 1999 for them. It has since treated over 85,000 women.

Not much is known in India about these heroic figures and their struggles. Sanjeev Sanyal wrote an opinion piece in The Indian Express (“The massacre of the Yazidis,” August 12, 2014). I learnt about the Yazidis from a well-researched monograph on the region and wrote about their plight in India Abroad (“Speak up India, and act!” August 29, 2014). A reader’s reaction to it said it all: “This is by far the only news item on this tragedy on Indian news websites.”  Dr Mukwege is a complete unknown, much like Mr Satyarthi was before he won the Prize.

A new normal is presently emerging. A pathological liar, obsessive ego-maniac bully and serial abuser of women has gained the pinnacle of power in an otherwise liberal democracy, turning it, with some success, into an idiocracy (a new coinage accepted most judiciously by the venerable Oxford English Dictionary). The time-honoured phrase, ‘sober as a judge,’ is in imminent danger of being rendered meaningless following the ascent of a beer-swilling, intemperate reactionary to a hallowed bench which was occupied not too long ago by such champions of individual liberties and freedom of thought as Earl Warren, William O Douglas and Thurgood Marshall.  A Nobel Peace Laureate who stoically endured a tyrannical state for decades now virtually heads a new incarnation of that regime which has turned on a helpless religious minority. Nation-states all too willing and eager to usher in a globalised society until recently are now busy firewalling themselves against the wretched of the earth fleeing the oppression and destitution of their native lands. Democratically-elected leaders and despots alike the world across are driving their countries into new Dark Ages intolerant of dissent and diversity.

The Peace Prize honouring indomitable individual courage and moral leadership is a most appropriate act of faith in these fraught times, as it was in 2014.  We should all light a small candle, in the hope that the world is not rushing headlong into insanity, not yet anyway.

The writer is an economist