Two Nobel Heroes, in Their Own Voices

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/05/opinion/nadia-murad-denis-mukwege-nobel-.html

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Two extraordinary human beings today were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize: Dr. Denis Mukwege, who has risked his life to press for peace in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Nadia Murad, who has fought tirelessly for justice for the Yazidi people as they suffer a persecution that probably amounts to genocide.

Mukwege, an old friend, started out as a doctor treating women who had been raped and suffered horrific internal injuries. In his Panzi Hospital in Bukavu, eastern Congo, he tried to repair fistulas caused not only by childbirth but also sometimes by knives, guns and sticks. Increasingly, he came to believe that he needed to address the violence not just with a scalpel and stitches, but also with public advocacy.

As he became increasingly outspoken, he antagonized both his country’s autocratic president, Joseph Kabila, and neighboring Rwanda. In 2012, armed men killed his beloved driver and nearly killed him, after holding his family hostage. Here’s a piece I wrote at the time, and here’s a piece that Mukwege wrote afterward expressing his determination to continue his fight.

To understand the context in which Mukwege works — it has been called the “world capital of killing” — here’s a piece I wrote in 2010 about mass rape and killing in eastern Congo. As I wrote in another piece, the language has had to develop a grotesque vocabulary with words like “autocannibalism” and “rerape” to describe the brutality. Here’s a video I did of the suffering there that Mukwege and his hospital address.

Mukwege was very aware of the risks and deeply concerned about his safety and his family’s, but he persevered and continued to speak up. Here’s a Facebook Live conversation he conducted with me about his work.

He is hailed in the West for his work, but that doesn’t protect him at home and may increase the risk to him; President Kabila is simply jealous of his renown, and this won’t help.

Congo may finally be transitioning to democratic elections, and Dr. Mukwege has been mentioned as an interim president during that process because he is so widely recognized as genuinely committed to his country and not to self-enrichment.

Nadia Murad became a humanitarian leader by a different route. The Islamic State attacked her area, near the Syria/Iraq border, in 2014 and massacred men of her Yazidi people, while kidnapping women and girls to be sex slaves. She was herself forced into sexual servitude, but eventually escaped.

The Yazidi culture is conservative, and most of those who endured this experience did not want to be identified. But Murad stepped up, speaking publicly about what she and so many other women endured, repeating her heartbreaking story and leaving audiences in tears.

It was exhausting and wrenching for Murad to repeat her story, over and over, but she did so and drew global attention to the plight of the Yazidi. She was championed by the human rights lawyer Amal Clooney and wrote a book, “The Last Girl,” taking the title from her hope that she would be the last girl to endure this fate.

Murad perhaps also helped change attitudes among the Yazidi as well. Traditionally, Yazidi women who had been raped found it difficult to marry, but after the horrors of the massacres and kidnappings, many Yazidi men — recognizing that the shame lay in raping, not in being raped — publicly declared themselves willing to marry those sex slaves who had returned to their homeland. Murad is herself now engaged to a fellow Yazidi.

Here’s a Facebook Live interview I did with Murad. I hope you’ll watch her and Mukwege speak, for they are far more eloquent in describing the pain of their peoples. Their own voices should be heard.

What Murad and Mukwege share is enormous courage and commitment to ending atrocities and repression. It’s thrilling to see them both win the Nobel — but I know something they would like even more, and that is peace in Congo and justice for the Yazidi.

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