Peace without chains
A lesson by the most rebellious woman in history
Who cares if you are a woman in the worst place on earth to be a woman? Who cares if you are a woman who wants to be in politics where politics is for men only? Who cares if the only weapon you have is peace in a country where violence rules? If you are a dreamer like Tawakkol Karman, you probably don’t care about all this.
Tawakkol Karman thinks peace is the only way to get rid of violence. This may sound unreasonable, but the 1st Arab woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize has no doubt: “We chose peace and only peace”, she asserts in an interview.
Born in 1979 in Taiz, in Yemen, first she got an undergraduate degree in Commerce and then she completed a post-graduate degree in Political Science at the University of Sana’a. She is a journalist by profession and a political activist by nature, according to a family tradition: ideed, her father was a lawyer and activist who campaigned against the President Saleh’s almost never-ending regime.
Tawakkol grew up in a politically precarious country and in 1990 she witnessed the unification of North and South Yemen, which was followed by the tragedy of the civil war.
She knows that Yemen is not just “the worst place on earth to be a woman”, but the worst one to be a human being too.
Yet in her campaigns, she uses to focus on Yemeni women who have to bear with many difficulties as they are trapped in the domestic field by tradition and radical interpretations of religion. In 2004, she took a hard choice: she stopped wearing niqabs in favor of hijabs, which allow her to uncover her face. “Fully covering a woman is a cultural practice, not a rule of Islam”, she uses to reply to those who accuse her to be profane.
Since 2005, she has been the president of the organization “Women journalists without chains”, advocating for press freedom and human rights, that she personally founded.
Yemeni political establishment never liked her pro-human rights activism and determination, this is why she was jailed many times. Yet she never gave her nonviolent struggle up. This is one of the reasons why she was described by «Time Magazine» as one of the 16 most rebellious women in history.
As spokesperson of a deeply-rooted antifeminism, the President Ali Abdullah Saleh used to mock her activism, but in 2007 she was able to convince many other Yemeni women to join together with their husbands and children weekly demonstrations she had organized in Sana’a.
Mother of three children, she was nicknamed “mother of the revolution” for supporting personally the Yemeni youth peaceful revolution in 2011 aiming to overthrow the regime and establish democracy. She didn’t fight a losing battle: in 2012 President Saleh stepped down.
Her nonviolent belief system is summed up in few words: “Resistance against repression and violence is possible without relying on similar repression and violence.”
Tawakkol firmly believes peace is the only way to break the walls built by dictatorship, which made life impossible in Yemeni society afflicted by corruption, poverty, oppression and chronic violence.
In 2011, aged 32, she was awarded the Nobel peace prize “for her work in nonviolent struggle for the safety of women and for women’s rights to full participation in peace building work in Yemen”. She has been the youngest peace laureate until 2014, when the 17-year-old Pakistani girl Malala Yousafzai was awarded the prestigious prize too.
She will attend the 15th World Summit of Nobel Peace Laureates (November 13–15, Barcelona) to speak up about all the challenges her country has to face nowadays.
Destroyed by the clash between pro-government fighters and hauthi rebels, bombed by an international coalition led by Saudi Arabia and threatened by al-Quaeda and Isis terrorism, Yemen is a restless country. Yet hoping for a change is still possible: peace has no chains, as Tawakkol knows full well.
