INTERNATIONAL: Political power that comes from the bottom up

Date: 
Friday, October 21, 2011
Source: 
Chicago Tribune
PeaceWomen Consolidated Themes: 
Participation

When three women were named recently to share this year's Nobel Peace Prize, well-wishers said: Isn't it wonderful that women are being honored? And the news stories all led with their gender. I heard an NPR reporter say giddily that it marked a "celebration of women!"

The Nobel Peace Prize Committee itself emphasized the gender of the awardees, so the reportorial enthusiasm is understandable. But, to me, there is a second, equally important message — that these three leaders sought to end tyranny and relied on the political power that comes from the bottom up to do so. In the two countries they come from, Liberia and Yemen, authoritarian government has long been the rule. In Yemen it still is.

Consider Tawakkul Karman. A Yemeni journalist, she first protested publicly when a corrupt tribal chief with close ties to the Saleh regime evicted a group of villagers from their land. Soon she was leading weekly protests through the organization she co-founded, Women Journalists Without Chains, and her efforts against injustice broadened to include women's rights. And when the Arab Spring came, Karman was there, ready to be a leader in the nonviolent wing of the Yemeni fight to end Saleh's tyrannical rule, a role she continues to fill at great risk to her life.

Or consider Leymah Gbowee. A social worker by training, she witnessed women's suffering from the horrors of Liberia's civil war — kidnappings to make child soldiers, rape, death — and in 2002 pleaded with women to organize across the ethnic and religious divisions that the war was exacerbating and to call for the fighting to stop. Naming their group The Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace, the women rallied daily in nonviolent demonstrations at the fish market in Monrovia; then they petitioned the corrupt and tyrannical leader Charles Taylor to begin peace negotiations. When those talks stalled, the women's response, captured in the unforgettable documentary, "Pray the Devil Back to Hell," was to peacefully surround the building where the men were meeting and refuse to allow them to leave until they reached an agreement, which they finally did. Gbowee is now executive director of the Women Peace and Security Network Africa, based in Accra, Ghana.

The third winner, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, became president of Liberia after Taylor was forced from office and democratic elections became possible. A longtime political leader, she stood up repeatedly against various corrupt and authoritarian regimes, and was repeatedly imprisoned or forced to flee the country. Maintaining her faith in the people and in democracy, Sirleaf became the nation's first woman president in 2006 with the fierce support of fish-market activists, and she has spent the years since then rebuilding the war-torn country, although the economy remains in bad shape. Her re-election depends on the results of a runoff election on Nov. 8.

To be sure, Sirleaf is an elected official, not a community organizer like Gbowee and Karman. But her reliance on the people to give her power — albeit through the vote — is the same, and so is her commitment to justice and her courage in defying tyranny.

Often in recent years the Nobel Peace Prize Committee has given the prize to a person or people who, because they faced immediately daunting odds in their grass-roots efforts to correct the abuses of power, could benefit from having their hands strengthened as they wrestled with history. One senses that intention here. We think of opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi in Myanmar, who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991, and Kenyan conservationist Wangari Maathai, who received it in 2004. And, yes, they are women, but that was not why they received the prize.

In awarding the prize this year, the Nobel Peace Prize Committee once again celebrates leaders who understand that the people themselves — the 99 percent, you might say — can use nonviolent methods to challenge those whose abuse of power leads to injustice. Every nation needs such leaders, whether they are women or men, and whether the tyrants they challenge are heads of state or, perhaps, economic tyrants. Such leaders often come to the public's attention during sit-in demonstrations. We Americans should keep our eyes open as we watch, or join, various grass-roots expressions of the popular will. There may be a Nobel Peace Prize winner in the making.