Personal life
Tawakel Karman was born on 7 February 1979 in Taiz, Yemen. She is the daughter of Abdel Salam Karman, a lawyer and politician, who once served and later resigned as Legal Affairs Minister in Ali Abdullah Saleh's government. She is the sister of Tariq Karman, who is a poet. Karman is a writer and civil rights advocate. She is married to Mohammed al-Nahmi and is the mother of three children.
Saleh is the only President that Kaman has ever known, in that he took power a half year before she was born.
At a protest in 2010, a woman attempted to stab her with a jambiya but Karman's supporters managed to stop the assault.
Political positions
Karman is a member of Al-Islah, which sits in the opposition. She started protests as an advocate for press freedoms. She has also led protests against government corruption. She has advocated for laws that would prevent females younger than 17 from being married. She has also stopped wearing the traditional niqab, which is a full covering, in favour of more colourful scarves, often pink, that show her face. She first appeared without the niqab at a conference in 2004. Karman replaced the niqab for the scarf in public on national television to make her point that the full covering is cultural and not dictated by Islam. She told the Yemen Times in 2010:
"Women should stop being or feeling that they are part of the problem and become part of the solution. We have been marginalized for a long time, and now is the time for women to stand up and become active without needing to ask for permission or acceptance. This is the only way we will give back to our society and allow for Yemen to reach the great potentials it has."
She has also charged that many Yemeni girls suffered from malnutrition so that boys could be fed and called attention to high illiteracy rates, which includes two-thirds of Yemeni women.
Women Journalists Without Chains
Tawakel Karman co-founded the human rights group Women Journalists Without Chains (WJWC) with 7 other female journalists in 2005 in order to promote human rights, "particularly freedom of opinion and expression, and democratic rights." The organisation was originally called "Female Reporters Without Borders." She has said she has received "threats and temptations" and was the target of harrassment from the Yemeni authorities by telephone and letter because of her refusal to accept the Ministry of Information rejection of WJWC's application to legally create a newspaper and a radio station. The group advocated freedom for SMS news services, which had been tightly controlled by the government despite not falling under the purview of the Press Law of 1990. After a governmental review of the text services, the only service that was not granted a license to continue was Bilakoyood, which belonged to WJWC and had operated for a year. In 2007, WJWC released a report that documented Yemeni abuses of press freedom since 2005. In 2009, she criticized the Ministry of Information for establishing trials that targeted journalists.From 2007 to 2010, Karman regularly led demonstrations and sit-ins in Change Square, in Sana'a.
Tawakel Karman was affiliated with the Al-Thawrah newspaper at the time she founded WJWC in March 2005.
She is a member of the Yemeni Journalists' Syndicate.
2011 protests
During the ongoing 2011 Yemeni protests Karman organised student rallies in Sana'a to protest against Saleh and his government. She was arrested once, amid complaints her husband did not know her whereabouts. On January 22, she was stopped while driving by plain-clothed men without identification and taken to prison, where she was held for 36 hours until she was released on parole on 24 January. In a 9 April editorial that appeared in The Guardian, she wrote:
After a week of protests I was detained by the security forces in the middle of the night. This was to become a defining moment in the Yemeni revolution: media outlets reported my detention and demonstrations erupted in most provinces of the country; they were organised by students, civil society activists and politicians. The pressure on the government was intense, and I was released after 36 hours in a women's prison, where I was kept in chains.
She then led another protest on 29 January where she called for a "Day of Rage" on 3 February similar to that of the 2011 Egyptian revolution that were in turn inspired by the 2010–2011 Tunisian revolution. On 17 March, she was re-arrested amidst ongoing protests. Speaking of the uprising she had said that: "We will continue until the fall of Ali Abdullah Saleh's regime... We have the Southern Movement in the south, the (Shia) Huthi rebels in the north, and parliamentary opposition... But what's most important now is the jasmine revolution." She has set at the protest camp for months along with her husband.
On 18 June she wrote an article entitled "Yemen's Unfinished Revolution" in the New York Times in which she assailed the United States and Saudi Arabia for their support for the "corrupt" Saleh regime in Yemen because they "used their influence to ensure that members of the old regime remain in power and the status quo is maintained." She argued that American intervention in Yemen was motivated by the war on terror and was not responsive to either the human rights abuses in Yemen or the calls from Yemen’s democracy movement. She affirmed that the protesters in Yemen also wanted stability in the country and region.
2011 Nobel Peace Prize
At 32, Tawakel Karman is one of the youngest winners of a Nobel Peace Prize as she is slightly younger than Mairead Maguire, who was a co-recipient of the award in 1976. Before the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded, only 12 other women had ever been recipients in over 110 years, and Karman became the first Arab woman and the youngest person ever to become a Nobel Peace Laureate.
Karman, along with Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Leymah Gbowee, were the co-recipients of the the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize "for their non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women’s rights to full participation in peace-building work." Of Karman, the Nobel Committee said: "In the most trying circumstances, both before and during the 'Arab spring', Tawakkul Karman has played a leading part in the struggle for women’s rights and for democracy and peace in Yemen." The Nobel Committee cited the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325, which was adopted in 2000, and it states that women and children suffer great harm from war and political stability and that women must have a larger influence and role in peacemaking activities, and it further calls for future negotiations of peace to adopt a "gender perspective".
Upon announcing the award, former Norwegian Prime Minister and chairman of the committee to decide the award Thorbjorn 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." He later added that the prize was "a very important signal to women all over the world" and that, despite the events of the Arab Spring, "there are many other positive developments in the world that we have looked at. I think it is a little strange that researchers and others have not seen them." He had earlier said the prize for the year would be "very powerful ... but at the same time very unifying and would not create as strong reactions from a single country as it did last year." Geir Lundestad, director of the Norwegian Nobel Institute, said it had been a conscious decision to award the prize this year to women: "We want to point to the role of women and the inferior role of women and how this role can be improved"; "I mean, women suffer in wars and if we are to have peace, we have to have democracy with full rights for women and we also have to have women as peace builders. So this year, it was the year of the women." The prize is to be divided equally among the three recipients, from a total of 10 million Swedish kronor. (approximately US$1.5 million)
In reaction to the award Karman, while camped out in Sana'a during ongoing anti-government protests, said: "I didn’t expect it. It came as a total surprise. This is a victory for Arabs around the world and a victory for Arab women" and that the award was a "victory of our peaceful revolution. I am so happy, and I give this award to all of the youth and all of the women across the Arab world, in Egypt, in Tunisia. We cannot build our country or any country in the world without peace," adding that it was also for "Libya, Syria and Yemen and all the youth and women, this is a victory for our demand for citizenship and human rights," that "all Yemenis are happy over the prize. The fight for democratic Yemen will continue,"30 that she "dedicates it to all the martyrs and wounded of the Arab Spring… in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Libya and Syria and to all the free people who are fighting for their rights and freedoms"26 and "I dedicate it to all Yemenis who preferred to make their revolution peaceful by facing the snipers with flowers. It is for the Yemeni women, for the peaceful protesters in Tunisia, Egypt, and all the Arab world." She also said she had not known about the nomination and had found out about the award via television.
Other reactions included Shadi Hamid, the director of research at the Brookings Doha Centre, who said the award was "surprising. People were very excited and thought this year would be the year of the Arab Spring. I am not sure what the rationale was exactly, but I think this might be interpreted as a slight to the Arab world.
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