ABC NEWS coverage (posted online Dec. 10, 2011 evening):
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 10 million kronor ($1.5 million) each, the Nobel Prizes are always handed out on the anniversary of award founder Alfred Nobel's death on Dec. 10, 1896.
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 U.N. estimates.
"President Assad in Syria will not be able to resist the people's demand for freedom of human rights," Jagland said.
Karman is the first Arab woman to win the prize and at 32 the youngest peace laureate ever. A journalist and founder of the human rights group Women Journalists without Chains, she also is a member of the Islamic party Islah.
Wearing headphones over her Islamic headscarf, she clapped and smiled as she listened to a translation of Jagland's introductory remarks.
In her acceptance speech, Karman paid tribute to Arab women and their struggles "in a society dominated by the supremacy of men."
According to an English translation of her speech, delivered in Arabic, she criticized the "repressive, militarized, corrupt" regime of outgoing President Ali Abdullah Saleh. She also lamented that the revolution in Yemen hasn't gained as much international attention as the revolts in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Syria.
"This should haunt the world's conscience because it challenges the very idea of fairness and justice," Karman said.
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