Who are Nadia Murad and Denis Mukwege, the Nobel Peace Prize 2018 ?

Nadia Murad and Denis Mukwege: One year after the Weinstein affair at the origin of the MeToo movement, two heralds of the fight against sexual violence have been decorated.

They were greatly anticipated, at a time when the wave #MeToo shakes the planet and a year after the Weinstein affair. And it is the Congolese doctor Denis Mukwege and the Yazidie Nadia Murad, former slave of the Islamic State group, that the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded this Friday in Oslo (Norway).

Both are "working to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war," justified the members of the award, before President Berit Reiss-Andersen detailed: "Denis Mukwege and Nadia Murad have all both personally risked their lives by bravely fighting war crimes and seeking justice for the victims. "

At the age of 25, Nadia Murad survived the worst hours her people, the Yazidis of Iraq, went through to become a respected spokesperson. This girl with a thin, pale face framed by long brown hair could have spent quiet days in her village of Kosho, near the Yazidi bastion of Sinjar, a mountainous area stuck on the borders of Iraq and Syria. But the dazzling breakthrough of Daesh jihadists in 2014, decided otherwise.

One day in August, on black-flagged pickup trucks, they stormed, killed men, turned them into younger child soldiers, and sentenced thousands of women to forced labor and sexual slavery. Even today, Nadia Murad - like her friend Lamia Haji Bachar, with whom she won the European Parliament's Sakharov Prize in 2016 - keeps repeating that more than 3,000 Yazidies are still missing, probably still captive.

The jihadists wanted to "take our honor but they lost their honor," said European MEPs the one who has been named "UN Ambassador for the dignity of victims of human trafficking".

Nadia Murad lived it in his flesh. Forcibly conducted in Mosul, the Iraqi "capital" of IS's self-proclaimed "Caliphate" - resumed more than a year ago - his ordeal lasted for many months. Torture, gang rapes, sale and multiple resales on the slave markets of jihadists, forced renunciation of his religion: nothing will have been spared him.

For the IS fighters and their ultra-rigorous interpretation of Islam, the Yazidis are heretics. Kurdophones, the faithful of this ancestral esoteric religion believe in the unique God and the "leader of the angels", represented by a peacock. Like thousands of other Yazidies, Nadia Murad was forcibly "married" to a jihadist who beat her, she said in a poignant speech to the UN Security Council in New York.

"Unable to endure so much rape and violence," in her own words, she fled, a project she manages to carry out with the help of a Muslim family in Mosul. With false identity papers, she traveled to Iraqi Kurdistan, a few dozen kilometers east of Mosul, where she joined the cohorts of displaced people in camps.

There, after learning of the deaths of six of her brothers and her mother, she contacted an organization helping Yazidis to help her find her sister in Germany. It is in this country, where she still lives and which she regularly praises the Yazidis, that she awakens to militancy and becomes a spokesman for her people. It is therefore from Germany that she leads "the fight of (his) people", in his words: to recognize the persecutions committed in 2014 as a genocide.

Denis Mukwege, the Doctor who repairs women

With two and a half months of crucial elections in the DRC, the Nobel jurors also rewarded one of the most severe voices against the regime of President Joseph Kabila, more heard abroad than at home. "Man ceases to be a man when he no longer knows how to give love and no longer knows how to give hope to others," Denis Mukwege said in 2015 to Panzi hospital staff he heads in Bukavu. , capital of the province of South Kivu.

Aged 63, married with five children, Dr. Mukwege could have stayed in France after studying in Angers. He made the choice to return to his country, and to stay there at the darkest hours. Deeply believing, this Pentecostal pastor's son "lives his values ​​in everything he does", and above all, he "never gives up," says a European who worked with him for several years at Panzi.

Read the full article