Nobel peace prizes

THE Arab Spring was recognised in the Nobel Peace Prize awards announced yesterday, but in an unexpected way. In Looking Around earlier this week I wrote about the difficulty of identifying a single person to represent the huge numbers of demonstrators in Egypt and Tunisia during March and April.

The Nobel Peace Prize chairman Tharbjorn Jagland spoke about this problem at his press conference yesterday but said it had been solved by choosing Tawakul Karman, a woman journalist in Yemen who has been a key figure among the youth activists there and had been calling for the end of the long-established Saleh regime before the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings took place; she had also provided regular reporting to Arabic TV from Yemen throughout this year's mass demonstrations. Speaking about her award yesterday Tawakul Karman called it “A victory for the Arab Spring in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria and Yemen.” Two other women shared the Peace Prize with Karman -- President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Leymah Gbowee, both of Liberia, who have played very important roles in restoring their country to peace and stability after the ghastly civil wars of the 1990s and early 2000s. Praising their achievements, Tharbjorn Jagland said: “We cannot achieve democracy and lasting peace in the world unless women obtain the same opportunities as men to influence developments at all levels of society.”