OSLO, Norway Three women who fought injustice, dictatorship and sexual violence in Liberia and Yemen accepted the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize on Saturday, calling on repressed women worldwide to rise up against male supremacy.
"My sisters, my daughters, my friends find your voice," Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf said after collecting her Nobel diploma and medal at a ceremony in Oslo.
Sirleaf, Africa's first democratically elected female president, shared the award with women's rights campaigner Leymah Gbowee, also from Liberia, and Tawakkul Karman, a female icon of the protest movement in Yemen.
The peace prize was announced in October, along with the Nobel awards for medicine, physics, chemistry, literature and economics. Worth $1.5 million each, the Nobel prizes are always handed out on the anniversary of award founder Alfred Nobel's death, Dec. 10.
By selecting Karman, the prize committee recognized the Arab Spring movement that has toppled autocratic leaders in north Africa and the Middle East. Praising Karman's struggle against Yemen's regime, Nobel committee chairman Thorbjoern Jagland also sent a message to Syria's leader, Bashar Assad, whose crackdown on rebels has killed more than 4,000 people, according to United Nations estimates.
"President Assad in Syria will not be able to resist the people's demand for freedom of human rights," Jagland said.
Karman,a journalist, is the first Arab woman to win the prize, and at 32, the youngest peace laureate ever.
Sirleaf, 73, was elected president of Liberia in 2005 and won re-election in October. She is widely credited with helping her country emerge from civil war.
Gbowee, 39, challenged Liberia's warlords as she campaigned for women's rights and against rape. In 2003, she led hundreds of female protesters through Monrovia to demand swift disarmament of fighters, who continued to prey on women despite a peace deal.
"We used our pains, broken bodies and scarred emotions to confront the injustices and terror of our nation," she told the audience in Oslo's City Hall.
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