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Nika was just 17 years old when she was killed for joining a protest against the murder of Mahsa Amini, burning her hijab. She disappeared on September the 20th, and after 10 long days her corp was found.
She was massacred by the police and buried 40 km away from her home, against her parent's will.
Peace Museum Paris supports the protests in Iran and strongly condemns the repression and the perpetuated violence against women and the protesters.
By Magda Cristina Butucea
Abiy Ahmed Ali was awarded the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize for his work in ending the 20-year post-war territorial stalemate between Ethiopia and Eritrea. Prize motivation: “for his efforts to achieve peace and international cooperation, and in particular for his decisive initiative to resolve the border conflict with neighboring Eritrea.”
Abiy Ahmed Ali is an Ethiopian politician serving as 4th Prime Minister of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia since 2 April 2018. A former army intelligence officer, since becoming prime minister Abiy has launched a wide programme of political and economic reforms and worked to broker peace deals in Eritrea, South Sudan, and a transition agreement in the Republic of Sudan.
Abiy is a devout Protestant, born of a Muslim father and an Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church Christian mother. He was raised in a family of religious plurality.
Abiy completed his Ph.D. in 2017 at the Institute for Peace and Security Studies, Addis Ababa University. He did his Ph.D. work on the Agaro constituency with the Ph.D. thesis entitled “Social Capital and its Role in Traditional Conflict Resolution in Ethiopia: The Case of Inter-Religious Conflict In Jimma Zone State”. As a follow-up to his Ph.D. thesis, he published a research article on de-escalation strategies in the Horn of Africa in a special journal issue dedicated to countering violent extremism.
By Magda Cristina Butucea
Nicolae Titulescu (1882 – 1941) was a Romanian diplomat. Starting from 1921, Titulescu functioned as the permanent representative of Romania to the League of Nations in Geneva. He was chosen twice (in 1930 and 1931) to be the president of this organization. In this capacity, he fought for the preservation of stable borders through the maintenance of peace, good relations between both large and small neighboring states, the respect of the sovereignty and equality of all nations in the international community, collective security, and the prevention of aggression.
In 1935, Titulescu was elected a titular member of the Romanian Academy. In 1936, King Carol II removed Titulescu from all official positions, asking him to leave the country. Settling first in Switzerland, he later moved to France. In exile, he continued in conferences and newspaper articles to propagate the idea of the preservation of peace, as he perceived the danger of the approaching war.
He returned to Romania in November 1937, partly by the efforts of Iuliu Maniu. In 1937, Titulescu again left Romania and took refuge in France. At Cannes, he denounced the Romanian fascist regime. In 1941, Titulescu died in Cannes following a long illness.
By Magda Cristina Butucea
Nadia Murad Basee Taha is a human rights activist and the founder of Nadia's Initiative, an organization dedicated to "helping women and children victimized by genocide, mass atrocities, and human trafficking to heal and rebuild their lives and communities".
She was born in Kocho - Northern Iraq in 1993. In 2014, Murad was kidnapped and held by the Islamic State for three months. At the age of 19, Murad was a student living in the village of Kocho in Sinjar, northern Iraq when Islamic State fighters rounded up the Yazidi community in the village, killing 600 people and taking the younger women and girls into slavery. That year, Murad was one of more than 6,700 Yazidi women and girls enslaved by Islamic State in Iraq. She was held as a slave in the city of Mosul, where she was beaten, burned with cigarettes, and raped repeatedly. She successfully escaped after her captor left the house unlocked. Murad was taken in by a neighbouring family, who were able to smuggle her out of the Islamic State-controlled area, allowing her to make her way to a refugee camp in Duhok, northern Iraq.
In February 2015, she gave her first testimony to reporters of the Belgian daily newspaper La Libre Belgique while she was staying in the Rwanga camp, living in a converted shipping container. In 2015, she was one of 1,000 women and children to benefit from a refugee programme of the Government of Baden-Württemberg, Germany, which became her new home.
In late 2015, she went to Switzerland to speak about massacre of Yazidi minority group, slavery and human trafficking. She continued her campaign to raise awareness on human trafficking. In 2016, she founded Nadia’s Initiative, to provide help and advocacy to the victims of massacre and human trafficking.
She has received several awards and honors including ‘Goodwill Ambassador for the Dignity of Survivors of Human Trafficking of the United Nations’, ‘Council of Europe Vaclay Havel Award of for Human Rights, Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, and the 2018 Peace Nobel Prize for her efforts against sexual violence in war.
By Magda Cristina Butucea
Dr. Denis Mukwege is a Congolese gynecologist who in 2018 won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work to highlight and eliminate the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war. Known as 'Dr. Miracle', he has treated tens of thousands of women, victims of sexual violence, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for most of his adult life.
In 1999 he founded the Panzi Hospital, which supports survivors of sexual assault. Actually, the hospital's original mission was to curb maternal mortality rates. "But our first patient did not come to deliver a baby," he said in a 2016 speech. "She had been raped with extreme violence." The hospital soon became a refuge for tens of thousands of victims of sexual violence. Panzi Hospital provided psychological support, legal assistance, and medical facilities. After so many years of work, Dr. Mukwege become the world’s leading expert on treating the wounds of sexual violence.
Dr. Denis Mukwege practices medicine in eastern Congo, which has been called the UN officials the "rape capital of the world". According to experts, nearly 50 women are raped there every hour. This is a huge number compared with other parts of the world. His campaigns to end the use of “rape as a weapon of war,” and years of medical services for victims attracted the attention of the United Nations and human rights organizations across the world, and he became a prominent human rights activist. He advocates for a change in international policy to make rape as a weapon of war a crime against humanity.
He has received several honorary doctorate degrees from prestigious universities in Sweden, Belgium, the US, Scotland and France. He has also received 28 international awards including the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize with Nadia Murad for his “efforts to end the use of sexual violence as weapon of war and armed conflict”.
Ferdinand Buisson was a French Nobel Peace Prize winner (1927), academic, pacifist and socialist politician. He was born in 1841 in Paris and died in 1932 in Thieuloy-Saint-Antoine, France. He has completed his secondary education at the Lycee Condorcet and then studied philosophy.
From 1866 to 1870, he went into exile in Switzerland as he refused to oath to the Empire. He served as a Professor at the University of Neuchatel. In 1867, he participated in three conferences of the League of Peace and Freedom. He returned to France, when the third republic was established and became the head of an orphanage in Paris in 1870.
In 1879, Ferdinand Buisson was appointed as the Director of Primary Education, and brought significant improvements in rules and regulation of teaching. In 1890, he was appointed as the professor of education at Sorbonne and in 1896, he was called the chair of Education at the Sorbonne.
Mr. Buisson supervised the writing and design of the rules of secularism in France, and in 1905 he served as the chairman of the parliamentary committee for writing the text of the law of separation of church and state. He led the League of Education from 1902 to 1906 and created a secular education. Also, he took part in the establishment of the French League for Human Rights and directed it from 1913 to 1926.
Buisson spent efforts for reconciliation between France and Germany. He traveled to Berlin and invited German pacifist to Paris in order to normalize the relationship between the two nations. In 1927, he was awarded the Noble Peace Prize along with a German professor, Ludwig Quidde.
Dovile Bogusyte
"Forgiveness made me free from hatred. I still have many scars on my body and severe pain most days, but my heart is cleansed. Napalm is very powerful, but faith, forgiveness, and love are much more powerful."
— Kim Phuc Phan Thi
Kim Phuc Phan Thi, informally referred to as the Napalm girl, is best known as the nine-year-old child running away from a napalm attack, depicted in the Pulitzer Prize winning photograph “The Terror of War” taken by photographer Nick Ut during the Vietnam War in June 1972.
Phan Thi Kim Phuc was born and raised in the village of Trang Bang, 30 minutes north of Saigon. During the Vietnam War, the strategic Route 1 that runs through the village became the main supply road between Saigon and Phnom Penh. On June 8, 1972, an American military advisor coordinated the napalm bombing of Kim's village. Nine-year-old Kim fled from a pagoda, where she and her family had been hiding. Two of her infant cousins did not survive the attack, and Kim was badly burned.
Kim was photographed running down the road, screaming from the burns to her skin. Nick Ut, the Associated Press photographer who was there to cover the siege, took the photograph of young Kim. Moved by her pain, he rushed her to a South Vietnamese hospital. She then spent 14 months recovering in a hospital in Saigon.
Most people who sustained such injuries over 10 percent of their bodies would have died at that time. But Kim survived to become a literal poster child, first for the American antiwar movement, and, later, as the living embodiment of American imperial atrocities and evidence of the Vietnam communist regime’s enlightenment.
Recognising her usefulness as a “national symbol of war”, the Vietnamese Government had subjected her to endless interviews, communist officials had used her in propaganda films, and Kim had been forced to leave school and move back to her province where she was supervised daily.
Due to constant pain she considered suicide but in 1982 she found a New Testament in a library that led her to become a Christian. Her faith enabled her to forgive.
In 1986, Kim seized the opportunity to study in Cuba, but once again her studies were cut short due to the physical problems. While in Cuba, she fell in love with Huy Toan, another Vietnamese student who had relocated to Cuba to pursue his studies. When the couple married in 1992, they were given a trip to Moscow for their honeymoon. On their return flight, however, their plane stopped in Canada to refuel. At that time, Kim Phuc and her husband quietly left the plane and requested political "asylum".
Kim Phuc became a symbol of reconciliation when in 1996 she laid a wreath at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in memory of the U.S. soldiers who died in the war. Today, through the Kim Foundation, she supports children who are victims of war by providing medical and psychological support in order that they overcome their traumatic experiences. Kim Phuc Phan Thi was designated as UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador for culture of peace in November 1997, in recognition of her courage and generosity in promoting a culture of peace through reconciliation and tolerance. In recognition of her life dedicated to the promotion of peace, Kim Phuc Phan Thi received the Dresden Peace Prize 2019, which honors individuals for their work to promote peace.
Ayşe Gökdemir
If one person dreams alone, it is only a dream. When many people dream together, it is the beginning of a new reality.
- Friedensreich Hundertwasser
Friedensreich Hundertwasser was an Austrian-born New Zealand pacifist, environmental activist, artist, and architect. He was born on December 15, 1928, in Vienna. His father died when he was only three months old. His art education began after World War II when he enrolled in the Fine Arts Academy of Vienna in 1948.
Hundertwasser used the new names of Regenstag and Dunkelbunt. After 1949, he used ‘Friedensreich Reganstag Dunkelbunt Hundertwasser,’ which meant ‘kingdom of peace, rainy day, dark colorful hundred waters’ in his works. His first profitable success was an exhibition in Vienna during 1952 and 1953, hosted by the Art Club of Vienna. He also organized exhibitions in different parts of the world.
The manifesto of Mouldiness (Verchimelugsmanifest gegen den Rationalismus in der Architektur) was presented by Hundertwasser in Styria on July 4, 1958. It was then recited later in the Galerie Van de Loo in Munich on July 11th and in the gallery of Parnass on July 26th of the same year. The manifesto has since been published in various European languages. He also designed the ‘Peace Flag’ in 1978 and published his ‘Peace Manifesto’. He spoke about designing architecture in harmony with nature. He also spoke against nuclear weapons in the US Senate, the Corcoran Museum, the Philipp's Collection, Berlin, and in the Technical Universities of Vienna and Oslo.
Hundredwasser founded the technique of ‘Transautomatism,’ a style of painting which is focusing on the viewer's fantasy rather than an objective interpretation. All of his buildings in Austria, Germany, New Zealand, the Netherlands, and America have irregular shapes and different colors close to nature. He is considered to be one of the most famous architects in the world. He used different design styles for buildings, and he rejected straight lines and other standardizations in design. The Hundertwasserhaus in Vienna is one of his best-known works.
He has left behind dozens of works of art and architecture including: the Hundertwasserhaus, KunstHaus Wien, District Heating Plant, and Spittelau in Vienna; Motorway Restaurant, Bad Fischau-Brunn, Hot Springs Village, Bad Blumau, Hundertwasserkirche, and Bärnbach in Styria; Hundertwasserhaus Waldspirale in Darmstadt; Kindergarten Heddernheim in Frankfurt; Wohnen unterm Regenturm in Plochingen; Hundertwasser "environmental railway station" in Uelzen; die Grüne Zitadelle von Magdeburg in Magdeburg; Kuchlbauer-Turm in Abensberg; McDonal Kinder Vallei and Valkenburg aan de Geul in the Neatherlands; and Quixote Winery, Napa Valley in America, Maishima Incneration Plant, in Osaka in Japan; and Hundertwasser toilet and Kawakawa in New Zealand.
There have been three books written and three documentaries were made about him and his valuable works. Furthermore, he received many awards including Sanbra in Brazil (1959), Mainichi in Japan (1961), Grand Austrian State Prize (1980), Austrian Nature Protection Award (1981), Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (1985), Gold Medal of the City of Vienna and Styria (1988), and Grand Decoration of Honour for Services to the Republic of Austria (1997). There are also many galleries established and exhibitions held under his name in different parts of the world.
Friedensreich Hundertwasser died in 2000.
Selin Visne
You will never know the potential of any child unless that person is given an opportunity; and there is no bigger opportunity than the gift of education and self-development.
— EMMANUEL JAL
Emmanuel Jal is an artist and political activist campaigning against, among other things, the issue of child soldiers.
Born in 1980 in now South Sudan, soon his life was violently affected by the war around him: His father joined the SPLA (Sudan People’s Liberation Army), his mother was killed and Emmanuel Jal himself was recruited by the SPLA as a seven-year-old, were he fought for four years.
Eventually, wanting to flee from the atrocities they were facing, Jal along with about 400 other child soldiers, ran away, resulting in only about sixteen of them surviving the escape. Being left to his own fate at only eleven years old, he was adopted by an aid-worker, who brought him to school to Kenya. She died in an accident soon after, which resulted in Jal having to live in the slums.
Then Jal discovered hip-hop. The genre turned out to be a source of incredible power and passion to him, as something that helped him in coping with all the hardships and violence he faced at such a young age. Later, in one of his songs, he wrote:
“I'm a war child
I believe I've survived for a reason
To tell my story, to touch lives."
He became more and more involved in music, eventually producing his first hit in Kenya; he created his very own and unique style of hip-hop, for which he gained international attention. In hip-hop, he could express his belief in the importance of leaving behind old conflicts rooted in ethnic and religious discrimination, while also talking about human trafficking, the necessity of peace in the Sudanese war, and campaigning against children fighting in wars. Jal says: “Children’s place should be school. Children should be taught to love. Should be taught to explore their imagination. Not to be taught to kill people.”
While being a spokesperson for many peace organisations, he founded the charity Gua Africa, which he named after one of his songs. Its website states that their mission is to provide “educational programs for those affected by war and displacement in East Africa. We primarily work in Kenya offering education to refugees who have survived war and genocide.” Jal’s most recent project is the campaign We Want Peace 2012.
So far, he received accolades such as the Gospel Music Award and the Dresden Peace Price 2014, was named Young Global Leader for the World Economic Forum and Hero in the global campaign against violent extremism – UNESCO 2016.
Dovile Bogusyte
Girls must get an education. It’s the best protection for girls. If a mother is not educated, how can she help her children? If young people are not educated, who will rebuild our country?
— MUZOON ALMELLEHAN
Muzoon Almellehan is a Syrian activist and refugee who is known for her work to keep Syrian girls in school.
Born on April 8, 1999, Muzoon grew up in the southwest Syrian city of Daraa. The civil war that ravaged the country forced thousands to flee and in 2013, the Almellehan family crossed the border into Jordan in the middle of the night and settled in a refugee camp in Zaatari. Although her father has asked her to pack only the bare necessities, Muzoon, carried a suitcase full of books with her because education was the most important thing to her.
It was during her 18 months in the Zaatari camp that she began advocating for children’s access to education, especially for girls. She witnessed many refugee girls — some as young as 13 and 14 —dropping out of school and getting married. Despite her age, Muzoon began walking through the camps, from tent to tent, to speak with parents about the value of education and the risks of early marriage. At every turn, she urged them to send their daughters back to school.
Her hard work to advocate for girls’ education allowed some to compare her to the Pakistani teenage activist Malala Yousafzai, calling her the “Malala of Syria.” In fact, Muzoon and Malala met in person and became fast friends when Malala toured refugee camps in Jordan. In 2014, Malala invited Muzoon to be her guest at the ceremony in Oslo when she became the youngest person ever to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Since fleeing her homeland, Muzoon Almellehan lived in Jordan for three years, before being resettled in the United Kingdom.
Muzoon's activism received recognition in numerous countries. In 2015, she was listed as one of BBC's 100 Women. In 2017 Muzoon was appointed UNICEF goodwill ambassador — the youngest ever, at 19, and the first with official refugee status. Time magazine also named her one of the 30 most influential teenagers in the world in 2017.