While visuals of terror flood our minds, the Nobel prize reminds us of a need to pull back a scarred generation from the precipice
It has taken a long time coming, this acknowledgment of sexual violence as a weapon of war. But with the Nobel Peace Prize committee choosing Nadia Murad, a Yazidi woman who was once a captive of the IS, and Dr Denis Mukwege, a Congolese surgeon, as joint winners, it has once again held aloft the human dimension of global conflicts. While the war machine has become more sophisticated with precision drone strikes, the impact has been devastatingly damaging, leaving a scarred and deep trail of torture, brutality and genocide that are becoming far too common to merit daily headlines. By consistently choosing winners from among crusaders against child violence (this Peace Prize follows close on the heels of those conferred on Kailash Satyarthi and Malalala Yousufzai), the award is consistently reminding us of the reparative need to pull back a scarred generation from the precipice. Sexual violence against women and children have been used by terrorists and combatants systematically across the spectrum to humble their targets into submission with the sharpest tool that even digital warfare cannot yet master, that of unimaginable fear and an indelible legacy of shock and awe. Beginning with the Greeks and Romans, through wars in history and now territorial conflicts, this has only progressed in levels of ferocity. No humanitarian law, including the Geneva Conventions, has been able to serve as a deterrent. And for rogue fighters like the IS, which has spawned a culture of violence and slavery so violent, this human bondage has become the greatest weapon of mass destruction. For when you tame women and children, you have hit deep into the fabric of a community and challenged its spiritual and social core. And with the further weaponisation of the viral media, the cascading impact has instilled a psychosis so ameboid that every human campaigner daring to stand up against such excesses need not just be celebrated, but given a visceral push. Such has been the currency of violence that in many cases official armies and even the UN has struggled with allegations of transgressions by its peacekeepers.
The choices of Nobel Peace Prize winners are even more telling because both have been at the receiving end of the worst war crimes. While Murad was abducted and turned into a slave of the IS fighters, subjected to rape, unwanted pregnancies and other brutalities, sold in a market and forcibly converted to Islam by virtue of being a Yazidi, she endured. With resilience, she escaped from Mosul and instead of leaving her trauma behind, she chose to help free more Yazidi women like her. Dr Mukwege has never tired of healing the ravaged soul of children, some of whom are used as fodder soldiers by captors, and women survivors. Mukwege and his team have treated thousands in Congo and armed rebels even tried to kill him in 2012, forcing him to temporarily leave the country. But he never gave up on rescuing survivors and leading them to hope. According to some reports, during raids in Rwanda, virtually every adolescent girl who survived an attack by the militia was subsequently raped. Many of those who became pregnant were ostracised by their families and communities. Some abandoned their babies; others committed suicide. The situation is almost hopeless for the orphaned and abandoned, further subjected to a second round of exploitation as they are easily trafficked for prostitution in the absence of a rehabilitative mechanism. In Congo itself women have suffered as rebels and soldiers carry out sexual violence and rape. While visuals of terror flood our consciousness, the Nobel prize at least gives the much needed visibility to peace activism.
