Three women who displayed rare courage in the face of oppression took the stage in Norway Saturday, to collect their Nobel Peace Prize for their continuing their campaigns for women's rights in Liberia and Yemen.
"My sisters, my daughters, my friends -- find your voice," Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf said after collecting her Nobel diploma and medal.
Johnson Sirleaf, Africa's first democratically elected female president, shared the award with fellow Liberian Leymah Gbowee, who has confronted her country's armed forces over the use of rape as a weapon, and Tawakkul Karman, who began pushing for change in Yemen long before the Arab Spring. They share a 10-million kronor ($1.5-million) prize.
Karman, who is not only the first Arab woman to win the prize, but at 32 is also the youngest peace laureate ever, paid tribute to Arab women "without whose hard struggles and quest to win their right in a society dominated by the supremacy of men I wouldn't be here."
While the journalist and founder of the human rights group Women Journalists without Chains criticized the "repressive, militarized, corrupt" regime of outgoing President Ali Abdullah Saleh, her acceptance speech bemoaned the fact the Yemeni revolution has garnered less attention than other Arab Spring revolts.
"This should haunt the world's conscience because it challenges the very idea of fairness and justice," she said.
While praising Karman's struggle against Yemen's dictatorship, Nobel committee chairman Thorbjoern Jagland sent a message to Syria's leader Bashar Assad, whose crackdown on a months-long rebellion has killed more than 4,000 people according to UN estimates.
"President Assad in Syria will not be able to resist the people's demand for freedom of human rights," Jagland said.
The Nobel committee said it honoured Gbowee, 39, for mobilizing women "across ethnic and religious dividing lines to bring an end to the long war in Liberia, and to ensure women's participation in elections."
In 2003, she led hundreds of female protesters -- the "women in white" -- through the capital Monrovia to demand the disarmament of fighters who continued to prey on women even though a peace deal ending 14 years of near-constant civil war had been reached months earlier.
"We used our pains, broken bodies and scarred emotions to confront the injustices and terror of our nation," she told the Nobel audience gathered in Oslo's City
The peace prize, she said, is a recognition of the value of fighting for women's rights.
"We must continue to unite in sisterhood to turn our tears into triumph," Gbowee said. "There is no time to rest until our world achieves wholeness and balance, where all men and women are considered equal and free."
The Harvard-educated Sirleaf, now 72, took a roundabout route to the presidency in Liberia, a country created to settle freed American slaves in 1847.
She worked her way through college in the United States by mopping floors and waiting tables. Jailed at home and exiled abroad, she lost the 1997 election to warlord Charles Taylor, but earned the nickname "Iron Lady" in the process. After a rebellion forced Taylor from power in 2003, Sirleaf emerged victorious in a landslide vote two years later.
While Liberia is more peaceful today, Sirleaf has critics at home who say she hasn't done enough to restore roads, electricity and other infrastructure devastated during the civil strife. Her opponents have accused her of buying votes and using government funds to campaign for re-election, charges that her camp denies.
But African and international luminaries welcomed Sirleaf's honour. Nobel peace laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu reacted with pleasure when the award was announced last month.
"Who? Johnson Sirleaf? The president of Liberia? Oooh," said Tutu, who won the peace prize in 1984 for his nonviolent campaign against white racist rule in South Africa. "She deserves it many times over. She's brought stability to a place that was going to hell."
Last year's peace prize went to imprisoned Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo.
The other Nobel Prizes -- in medicine, chemistry, physics and literature, and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences -- were presented by Swedish King Carl XVI Gustaf at a separate ceremony Saturday in Stockholm.
In an emotional moment, Claudia Steinman accepted the Nobel diploma and medal on behalf of her husband, Canadian-born Ralph Steinman, who died of cancer just days before the medicine prize was announced in October. Before sitting down, she blew a kiss toward the ceiling of Stockholm's Concert Hall.
An exception was made to Nobel rules against posthumous awards because the jury wasn't aware of Steinman's death when it tapped him to share the award with American Bruce Beutler and French scientist Jules Hoffman for discoveries about the immune system.
The typically stiff white-tie crowd erupted in cheers when wheelchair-bound Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer, partially paralyzed by a stroke two decades ago, received the Nobel Prize in literature. The 80-year-old had figured in Nobel speculation for so many years that even his countrymen had started to doubt whether he would ever win.
U.S.-born scientists Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt and Adam Riess collected the physics prize for discovering that the universe is expanding at an accelerating pace.
The chemistry award went to Israel's Dan Shechtman for his discovery of quasicrystals, a mosaic-like chemical structure that researchers previously thought was impossible.
Americans Christopher Sims and Thomas Sargent won the economics prize for describing the cause-and-effect relationship between the economy and government policy.
With files from The Associated Press
