How Leymah Gbowee earned the 2011 Nobel Prize for peace
Leymah Roberta Gbowee is an African peace activist responsible for organising a peace movement that brought an end to the Second Liberian Civil War in 2003. This led to the election of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf in Liberia, the first African nation with a female president
A Social Worker by Profession, Leymah has over ten years been a Case Worker and Peacebuilding Practitioner. During her tenure as coordinator for WIPNET/WANEP, Ms. Gbowee organized collaborative peace-building initiatives for a network of women peace builders from 9 of Liberia's 15 counties. She also served as the commissioner-designate for the Liberia Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
She obtained Master of Arts in Conflict Transformation from Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. She also received Training on Conflict Prevention and Peacebuilding at the United Nations Institute for Training, the Healing Victims of War Trauma Center in Cameroon, and Non-Violent Peace Education in Liberia. In recognition of her role in the Liberian Peace Process, the Women's Leadership Board of the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University gave its 2007 Blue Ribbon Award to her.
But how this whole activity started?.
Gbowee was 17 when war first broke out in 1989 as warlord Charles Taylor led an uprising to topple president Samuel Doe. Freshly out of high school and planning to study medicine, her whole world was turned upside down. Gbowee grew up in Bong County, in central Liberia, and left for the capital when she was 17, just before the war started in 1990. She trained as a trauma counsellor and started working with ex-child soldiers who had fought for Taylor.
That first terrifying summer of the war, Charles Taylor’s rebel band was closing in on Gbowee’s hometown, the capital city of Monrovia. (The sitting president, Samuel K. Doe, was ultimately captured and tortured to death by a rival rebel leader, who filmed Doe’s execution and sold videos of it on the streets of the city.) Gbowee and her family fled their home for shelter in a compound that belonged to their church, getting by in a world where rice, a staple, was so scarce, people began referring to it as “gold dust.”
She describes her first time of seeing a person killed. “I couldn’t even scream. I had never seen someone killed before. The dead boy’s bloody body lay where it fell, and I was frozen.” This searing moment, in the summer of 1990, would come to symbolize for young Leymah Gbowee the end of all she knew and the beginning of Liberia’s brutal, 14-year-long civil war. Soon, the plucky and ambitious teenager with dreams of becoming a doctor would learn that one of her professors had been killed, along with his entire family; that a girl she knew had been raped; that another boy in her circle had been shot to death while passing through an Army checkpoint because a soldier coveted his brand-new sneakers.
This brought fear to her life. “Fear was the first feeling when I opened my eyes every morning,” she writes. “Then gratitude: I’m still living. Then fear again. While you’re thankful for being alive, you worry about being alive. People said the rebels were merciless. But all around me, the government forces were killing, too.” She says, “At 17, you’re not used to thinking about death, especially your own,”
After Taylor became president in 1997 and the brutal conflict dragged on, Gbowee realised it would be up to the country's women to press for peace. She brought Christian and Muslim women together to pray for peace, braving the sun, the rain and the deafening sounds of bombs and fighting. "Nothing happened overnight. In fact it took three years of community awareness, sit-ins, and non-violent demonstrations staged by ordinary "market women". "I started to cry and to pray. The women kept coming. Market women. Displaced women from the camps. Some of them had been walking for hours". Then they launched the sex strike. In 2002, Liberia's Christian and Muslim women banded together to refuse sex with their husbands until the violence and civil strife ended.
Leymah Gbowee's rise in the women's movement began on a dusty football field opposite the fish market in Monrovia. In 2002, this is where she sat every day dressed in white, with thousands of women praying and fasting for peace. Liberia had already endured 14 years of war and the women were tired of fighting and of being raped and watching their men die while their children were stolen to be used as soldiers.
In 2003 she led hundreds of women to Monrovia's City Hall, demanding an end to the war. "We the women of Liberia will no more allow ourselves to be raped, abused, misused, maimed and killed," she shouted. "Our children and grandchildren will not be used as killing machines and sex slaves!"
Thousands of women were involved in the peace movement but Gbowee became its face. Today she has won this prize and it is not Leymah alone. All the Liberian women suffered for it,'' she said. ''If you look here, these women here. Some of them, their husbands were killed. Their entire families were killed. They were raped by more than five, 10 men.''
Her campaign called for an immediate ceasefire, dialogue between government and rebels and the deployment of an intervention force at a time when a handful of peace agreements had failed. But Charles Taylor, was against all three. In 2003, under Gbowee's leadership, the women group managed to force a meeting with Taylor, getting him to promise he would attend peace talks in Ghana.
Leymah Roberta Gbowee is an African peace activist responsible for organising a peace movement that brought an end to the Second Liberian Civil War in 2003. This led to the election of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf in Liberia, the first African nation with a female president
A Social Worker by Profession, Leymah has over ten years been a Case Worker and Peacebuilding Practitioner. During her tenure as coordinator for WIPNET/WANEP, Ms. Gbowee organized collaborative peace-building initiatives for a network of women peace builders from 9 of Liberia's 15 counties. She also served as the commissioner-designate for the Liberia Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
She obtained Master of Arts in Conflict Transformation from Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. She also received Training on Conflict Prevention and Peacebuilding at the United Nations Institute for Training, the Healing Victims of War Trauma Center in Cameroon, and Non-Violent Peace Education in Liberia. In recognition of her role in the Liberian Peace Process, the Women's Leadership Board of the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University gave its 2007 Blue Ribbon Award to her.
But how this whole activity started?.
Gbowee was 17 when war first broke out in 1989 as warlord Charles Taylor led an uprising to topple president Samuel Doe. Freshly out of high school and planning to study medicine, her whole world was turned upside down. Gbowee grew up in Bong County, in central Liberia, and left for the capital when she was 17, just before the war started in 1990. She trained as a trauma counsellor and started working with ex-child soldiers who had fought for Taylor.
That first terrifying summer of the war, Charles Taylor’s rebel band was closing in on Gbowee’s hometown, the capital city of Monrovia. (The sitting president, Samuel K. Doe, was ultimately captured and tortured to death by a rival rebel leader, who filmed Doe’s execution and sold videos of it on the streets of the city.) Gbowee and her family fled their home for shelter in a compound that belonged to their church, getting by in a world where rice, a staple, was so scarce, people began referring to it as “gold dust.”
She describes her first time of seeing a person killed. “I couldn’t even scream. I had never seen someone killed before. The dead boy’s bloody body lay where it fell, and I was frozen.” This searing moment, in the summer of 1990, would come to symbolize for young Leymah Gbowee the end of all she knew and the beginning of Liberia’s brutal, 14-year-long civil war. Soon, the plucky and ambitious teenager with dreams of becoming a doctor would learn that one of her professors had been killed, along with his entire family; that a girl she knew had been raped; that another boy in her circle had been shot to death while passing through an Army checkpoint because a soldier coveted his brand-new sneakers.
This brought fear to her life. “Fear was the first feeling when I opened my eyes every morning,” she writes. “Then gratitude: I’m still living. Then fear again. While you’re thankful for being alive, you worry about being alive. People said the rebels were merciless. But all around me, the government forces were killing, too.” She says, “At 17, you’re not used to thinking about death, especially your own,”
After Taylor became president in 1997 and the brutal conflict dragged on, Gbowee realised it would be up to the country's women to press for peace. She brought Christian and Muslim women together to pray for peace, braving the sun, the rain and the deafening sounds of bombs and fighting. "Nothing happened overnight. In fact it took three years of community awareness, sit-ins, and non-violent demonstrations staged by ordinary "market women". "I started to cry and to pray. The women kept coming. Market women. Displaced women from the camps. Some of them had been walking for hours". Then they launched the sex strike. In 2002, Liberia's Christian and Muslim women banded together to refuse sex with their husbands until the violence and civil strife ended.
Leymah Gbowee's rise in the women's movement began on a dusty football field opposite the fish market in Monrovia. In 2002, this is where she sat every day dressed in white, with thousands of women praying and fasting for peace. Liberia had already endured 14 years of war and the women were tired of fighting and of being raped and watching their men die while their children were stolen to be used as soldiers.
In 2003 she led hundreds of women to Monrovia's City Hall, demanding an end to the war. "We the women of Liberia will no more allow ourselves to be raped, abused, misused, maimed and killed," she shouted. "Our children and grandchildren will not be used as killing machines and sex slaves!"
Thousands of women were involved in the peace movement but Gbowee became its face. Today she has won this prize and it is not Leymah alone. All the Liberian women suffered for it,'' she said. ''If you look here, these women here. Some of them, their husbands were killed. Their entire families were killed. They were raped by more than five, 10 men.''
Her campaign called for an immediate ceasefire, dialogue between government and rebels and the deployment of an intervention force at a time when a handful of peace agreements had failed. But Charles Taylor, was against all three. In 2003, under Gbowee's leadership, the women group managed to force a meeting with Taylor, getting him to promise he would attend peace talks in Ghana.
Some 200 women blocked the warring factions from leaving the room where the peace talks were taking place. Security forces attempted to arrest her for obstructing justice, one warlord tried to push and kick the women away, and Gbowee threatened to strip naked in public, seen as a powerful curse in West Africa. The men got back to the talks and two weeks later, the terms of the Accra peace treaty were announced.
Later she mobilized women to vote in an election which saw Sirleaf become Africa's first elected female president.
Sources:
en.wikipedia
huntalternativ..
Founders
guardian.co.uk
BBCNews
emu.edu
The Daily Beast
Telegraph
NYTimes.com
Later she mobilized women to vote in an election which saw Sirleaf become Africa's first elected female president.
Sources:
en.wikipedia
huntalternativ..
Founders
guardian.co.uk
BBCNews
emu.edu
The Daily Beast
Telegraph
NYTimes.com
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