This year's Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to three women: President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf of Liberia, her fellow Liberian Leymah Gbowee, and Tawakkui Karman, the woman who was one of the leaders of the uprising against the Yemeni leadership.

by Peter Hooghiemstra and Jannie Schipper

The three have been awarded the prize "for their non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women's rights to full participation in peace-building work," as Norwegian Nobel Committee president Thorbjoern Jagland said in his announcement in Oslo on Friday.

Radio Netherlands Worldwide's correspondent Bram Posthumus in Monrovia, Liberia, said,

"Leymah Gbowee is one of the initiators of the Lebanese women's peace movement. She played the main part in ending the terrible civil war that lasted from 1989 to 2003. She put an end to the big conferences of top leaders in far too expensive hotels, which made the whole so-called peace process drag on and on and on. It was Leymah Gbowee who got the Liberian man, and particularly the Liberian woman in the street involved in the peace process."

Posthumus recalls a famous story illustrating Gbowee's role:

"Together with her colleagues of the women's peace movement she blocked a hotel room in Accra, Ghana, where those warlords were meeting about the umpteenth peace accord, which they knew in advance they would ignore. She blocked the room telling the men, 'We'll stay here until you promise to stop fighting.'"

First woman president
Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf's history is quite different. She hails from a family of politicians and had a career abroad, including as a banker with major international bodies in the US. She made several attempts to become involved in Liberian politics.

Her activities landed her in jail in 1985. And it put her face to face with the notorious warlord Charles Taylor. As Bram Posthumus said, "She never made it a secret that she gave financial support to Taylor in the first phase of the war. It's interesting that a Nobel Peace Prize can end up with somebody who did not really start out as a pacifist."

In 2005 Sirleaf was the first woman to be elected president of an African country. The atmosphere in Liberia at the time was comparable to South Africa just after apartheid, Posthumus said.

"Following that, she absolutely consolidated the peace. And she changed Liberia, and the capital Monrovia in particular, beyond recognition. Monrovia was in ruins; now it's a pleasant place to be."

Honouring the Arab Spring
Tawakkul Karman's Nobel Prize is actually a tribute to the Arab Spring rebels. Yemeni journalist Karman was one of the first who tried to get President Saleh to resign. She was arrested in January, but after her release she resumed her actions.

At the time Karman told Radio Netherlands Worldwide: "I'm asking the citizens to just protect the system against the robbers who are holding Yemen hostage, who changed the republic into their own kingdom, and made it to a country of destruction and war, of poverty and terrorism."

"Freedom Square"
Since 2007 Tawakkul Karman has been leading the weekly protests on a square in the capital Sanaa which has been renamed Freedom Square. She is also the founder of Women Journalists Without Chains.

Awarding the Nobel Prize to Karman will cause mixed reactions in Yemen, according to Yemeni journalist Othman Turath: "The protestors will be happy, but regime supporters will accuse the Nobel Committee of bias."

Turath says that Karman's activism is unusual: "Unlike Egypt and Tunisia there is no 'civil society' in Yemen which protests peacefully. Yemen is brimming with arms, yet Karman has been able to protest peacefully over the past few months."

Tawakkul Karman has said that she is dedicating the Nobel Peace Prize to all activists of the Arab Spring.

(rk)