Denis Mukwege Wins the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize

Congolese gynecologist Denis Mukwege was awarded the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize on October 5, 2018, sharing the honor with Yazidi human rights activist Nadia Murad. The Nobel Committee cited both “for their efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict,” recognition that came after two decades of Mukwege’s surgical and advocacy work in one of the world’s longest-running conflict zones.

Mukwege founded Panzi Hospital in Bukavu, in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, in 1999, initially as a maternity and general gynecological clinic in a region devastated by the Second Congo War and the armed conflicts that followed it. As the scale of wartime sexual violence in the eastern DRC became clear, much of it inflicted by armed militias as a deliberate tactic, Mukwege and his staff shifted the hospital’s focus toward surgical repair of the injuries such assaults caused, work that made him one of the world’s leading specialists in treating traumatic gynecological injury. Since 1999, Panzi Hospital has treated tens of thousands of women and girls, pairing surgical care with legal aid, psychological counseling and socioeconomic support meant to help survivors rebuild their lives rather than simply recover physically.

Mukwege’s advocacy extended well beyond the operating room. He repeatedly used international platforms, including addresses to the United Nations, to call out both the perpetrators of sexual violence in Congo’s conflicts and the governments and companies he argued profited from the country’s mineral wealth while ignoring the violence used to control it. That advocacy made him a target: on October 25, 2012, weeks after he denounced the conflict in a UN speech, armed men attacked him at his Bukavu home; Mukwege escaped unhurt, but his guard, Joseph Bizimana, was killed defending him. He and his family briefly took refuge abroad before he returned to Congo in January 2013 to resume his work at Panzi.

The 2018 prize placed Mukwege among a small group of African Nobel Peace laureates that includes Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu of South Africa, Albert Lutuli, also of South Africa, former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan of Ghana, Egypt’s Anwar Sadat, Kenyan environmentalist Wangari Maathai, and Liberia’s Leymah Gbowee and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. Mukwege has continued to run Panzi Hospital and its associated foundation since receiving the award, and remains an outspoken voice on the conflict in eastern Congo.