Nobel Prize 2011: Speech Excerpts By Leymah Gbowee, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Tawakkul Karman

www.DemocracyNow.org - On Saturday, the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize was presented to three female activists and political leaders for "their nonviolent struggle for the safety of women and for women's rights." The trio of laureates follow only a dozen other women among 85 men, as well as a number of organizations, to have won the peace prize over its 110-year history. We play excerpts from their acceptance speeches. "The Nobel Committee cannot license us, our three laureates, to speak for women, but it has provided us a platform from which to speak to women," notes Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, who was awarded the prize for her human rights work and the progress her country has made since she took office in 2006 as the first democratically elected female head of state on the African continent. "There is no time to rest until our world achieves wholeness and balance, where men and women are considered equal and free," notes Leymah Gbowee. Her "Women for Peace" movement is credited by some for bringing an end to the civil war in 2003. The movement started humbly in 2002 when Gbowee organized a group of women to sing and pray for an end to fighting in a fish market. "The Nobel Prize did not come only as a personal prize for Tawakkul Abdul Salaam Karman, but as a declaration in recognition of the whole world for the triumph of the peaceful revolution of Yemen and as an appreciation of the sacrifices of its great, peaceful people," says Tawakkul Karman, the first Arab woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize and the youngest winner of the peace prize to date, slightly edging out the Irish activist Mairead Corrigan, who won in 1976. Both were 32. [

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