Women of Peace

Espen Rasmussen

This year's Nobel Peace Prize goes to three extraordinary women - two from Liberia and one from Yemen. Espen Rasmussen followed them in the days leading up to the award ceremony~~The Nobel Peace Prize this year has been awarded to three women - Ellen Sirleaf-Johnson and Leymah Gbowee from Liberia and Tawakkul Karman from Yemen. The Nobel laureates will travel to Oslo for the Peace Prize ceremony at Oslo's City Hall. On 11 December they will officially open the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Exhibition called SHEROES at the Nobel Peace Center. Espen Rasmussen has portrayed the three laureates commissioned by the Nobel Peace Center. Each of the three women was awarded the prize for 'their struggles for democracy and human rights and the promotion of security and equal participation in peace processes for women.' Below, a short biography for each laureate.~~Ellen Sirleaf-Johnson (b. 1938)~Sirleaf-Johnson served as Liberian minister of finance in 1979 and went on to head the Liberian Bank for~~

Development and Investment but fled the country in 1980 following Samuel Doe's military coup. When Charles Taylor, now awaiting sentence on war crimes chargesat the Special Court for Sierra Leone, launched his assault on Doe's regime in 1989, Sirleaf-Johnson initially supported him. But the two soon fell out and it was not until 1997 that she returned to her native country to contest elections, which Taylor won with a landslide.~~After yet another bout of civil war in Liberia ended with Taylor's removal, Sirleaf-Johnson stood for the presidency once again in 2005, winning with 59% of the vote. In her election campaign she asserted that she wanted 'to bring motherly sensitivity and emotion to the presidency’ as a way of healing the wounds of war.'~~Though criticised for her support of Charles Taylor by Liberia's post-war Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which recommended that she be barred from political office, Sirleaf-Johnson has apologised for her earlier mistakes and was re-elected as Liberian president in the elections of 2011. Within Liberia, the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize~~only four days before the 2011 election sparked controversy but was played down by Sirleaf Johnson as a coincidence which was not mentioned in her campaign.~~She has worked for a wide variety of organisations - from the World Bank to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Organisation of African Unity where she was tasked with investigating the Rwandan genocide. Upon hearing of the peace prize she said that she was accepting “this honour on behalf of the Liberian people ... particularly...Liberian women who have consistently led the struggle for peace, even under conditions of neglect.’~~Leymah Gbowee (b. 1972)~Gbowee worked as a social worker and trauma counselour under a UNICEF programme during the first Liberian Civil War between 1989 and 1996. Moving between Ghana, where she lived in poverty as a foreigner, and Liberia, once again experiencing civil war at the end of the 1990s, Gbowee began volunteering for the Trauma Healing and Reconciliation Commission to 'repair the psychic and social damage left by the war.'~~By 2002 she was mobilising large numbers of women for Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace group whose mass protests helped to end the crumbling regime of Charles Taylor in 2003, sending the former leader into exile and ultimately to prison. ~~The Nobel Committee noted that she "mobilised and organised women across ethnic and religious dividing lines to bring and end to the long war in Liberia and to ensure women's participation in elections. Leymah Gbowee has written a book about the effects of war on women entitled 'Mighty Be Our Powers: How Sisterhood, Prayer and Sex Changed a Nation at War' and is now organising a peace summit in Ivory Coast which has recently been convulsed by civil conflict. ~~Tawakkol Karman (b. 1979)~Karman is a Yemeni journalist,, activist and advocate of human rights and freedom of expression. In Yemen's recent political strife she has been a vocal opponent of the long-serving president Ali Abdullah Saleh who agreed to a transition of power on 23 November 2011.~~More... ~~