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Nobel Peace Prize Winners Demand Global Action on Mass Rape

Nadia Murad, center, and Dr. Denis Mukwege accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo on Monday. They were honored for their campaigns to end mass rape in war.Credit...Tobias Schwarz/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

LONDON — Nadia Murad and Dr. Denis Mukwege, who won this year’s Nobel Peace Prize for their campaigns to end mass rape in war, condemned on Monday what they called the international community’s indifference to wartime sexual violence and pleaded for new efforts to arrest or punish those responsible.

“Thank you very much for this honor,” said Ms. Murad, 25, a Yazidi woman who was forced into sexual slavery by the Islamic State, “but the fact remains that the only prize in the world that can restore our dignity is justice and the prosecution of criminals.”

Two months after being jointly awarded the prize, Ms. Murad and Dr. Mukwege, 63, a gynecological surgeon from the Democratic Republic of Congo who has treated thousands of women in a country once called the rape capital of the world, delivered blunt and searing speeches at the Nobel awards ceremony in Oslo.

In a year when survivors of sexual violence and the #MeToo movement focused the world’s attention on sexual abuse in the home and the workplace, the award cast a spotlight on two regions where women have paid a devastating price for years of armed conflict.

Ms. Murad described growing up in the northern Iraqi village of Kojo, where she dreamed of finishing high school and opening a beauty parlor.

“I did not know anything about the Nobel Peace Prize,” she said. “I knew nothing about the conflicts and killings that took place in our world every day. I did not know that human beings could perpetrate such hideous crimes against each other.”

Kojo became one of the first Yazidi villages to to be overrun by the Islamic State, or ISIS, in August 2014. Women and girls were separated from the men, who were driven to a field outside the town and executed. Ms. Murad said she lost her mother, six brothers and her brothers’ children. She was taken to a slave market, where she was sold to a judge.

Ms. Murad criticized Iraqi and Kurdish leaders for failing to protect the Yazidi minority, and said the international community had “stood idly by watching the annihilation of a complete community.”

In the years since she escaped sexual slavery and began speaking publicly about the plight of the Yazidi minority, the perpetrators had faced no punishment, she said. She asked that the United Nations protect Yazidis seeking to return to their villages and that the world provide asylum and immigration options to victims.

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The awards ceremony cast a spotlight on two regions where women have paid a devastating price for years of armed conflict.Credit...Berit Roald/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

But she said the fate of more than 3,000 women and children in the Islamic State’s grip was still not known and that girls continued to be sold as slaves and raped daily.

“It is inconceivable that the conscience of the leaders of 195 countries around the world is not mobilized to liberate these girls,” she said. “What if they were a commercial deal, an oil field or a shipment of weapons? Most certainly, no efforts would be spared to liberate them.”

Dr. Mukwege echoed her calls for prosecuting wartime rapists. He said nations should draw a “red line” against mass rape in war by penalizing leaders who tolerated or used sexual violence.

“This red line would consist of imposing economic and political sanctions on these leaders and taking them to court,” he said.

Dr. Mukwege recalled an 18-month-old girl who arrived in an ambulance at Panzi Hospital in Bukavu, where for years there was little electricity or sufficient anesthetic. He walked into an operating room to find the nurses sobbing; the girl had been penetrated by an adult. Her bladder, genitals and rectum were badly injured.

“We prayed in silence: ‘My God, tell us what we are seeing isn’t true,’” Dr. Mukwege said. “Tell us it’s a bad dream.”

Villagers in eastern Congo have fallen prey to militias, bandits, government soldiers and foreign armies. Dr. Mukwege said hundreds of thousands of women had been raped, more than four million people had been displaced and six million people had been killed.

“This human tragedy will continue if those responsible are not prosecuted,” he said.

Everyone who uses a smartphone, Dr. Mukwege said, was benefiting from minerals mined in Congo under often inhumane conditions that help fuel war and conflict. He said the United Nations had already found evidence of hundreds of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Congo.

Dr. Mukwege urged global institutions to name the perpetrators and lend support to survivors. He described the case of a woman named Sarah who had been repeatedly gang raped but who recovered from her injuries and, with a $50 grant, built a small business and bought a plot of land.

“The Congolese people have been humiliated, abused and massacred for more than two decades in plain sight of the international community,” Dr. Mukwege said. “I call upon you not only to award this Nobel Peace Prize to my country’s people, but to stand up and together say loudly: ‘The violence in the D.R.C., it’s enough! Enough is enough! Peace, now!’”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 10 of the New York edition with the headline: Laureates Urge ‘Red Line’ on Mass Rape. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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