Tawakkol Karman

Tawakkol Abdel-Salam Khalid Karman is a Yemeni journalist, politician and human rights activist, born on 7 February 1979 in Shara'b As Salam, Taiz Governorate. She co-founded Women Journalists Without Chains in 2005 and led weekly protests in Sana'a from 2007, then became the international face of Yemen's 2011 uprising. She received the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize together with Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Leymah Gbowee "for their non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women's rights to full participation in peace-building work" — the first Yemeni, the first Arab woman and the second Muslim woman to win a Nobel Prize, and at the time the youngest Peace Prize laureate. ^{1 2}

She grew up near Taiz, Yemen's second city, and studied there. Her father, Abdel Salam Karman, is a lawyer and politician who served as Minister of Legal Affairs in Ali Abdullah Saleh's government before resigning. Her brother Tariq is a poet; her sister Safa is a lawyer, the first Yemeni to graduate from Harvard Law School, and a journalist with Al Jazeera. ²

She holds an undergraduate degree in commerce from the University of Science and Technology, a graduate degree in political science from the University of Sana'a, and a master's degree in international security from the University of Massachusetts Lowell. In 2012 she received an honorary doctorate in international law from the University of Alberta in Canada. ²

In 2005 she co-founded Women Journalists Without Chains with seven other female journalists to defend freedom of opinion and expression and democratic rights; it was first named "Female Reporters Without Borders", and the present name was adopted to obtain a government licence. The Ministry of Information refused the group's application to create a newspaper and a radio station, and its SMS news service, Bilakoyood, was the only service not relicensed after a government review. In 2007 the group published a report documenting Yemeni abuses of press freedom since 2005, and in 2009 Karman criticised the ministry for establishing trials targeting journalists. From May 2007 she organised weekly protests and sit-ins in Sana'a, widening her demands from press freedom to broader reforms. ²

In early 2011 she aligned the protests with the wider Arab Spring and organised student rallies in Sana'a against Saleh's rule. On 22 January 2011 she was stopped by plain-clothed men while driving with her husband and taken to prison, where she was held for 36 hours until her release on parole on 24 January. She later wrote in The Guardian that her detention became a defining moment: media reported it and demonstrations erupted in most provinces. She led another protest on 29 January calling for a "Day of Rage" on 3 February, was re-arrested on 17 March, and camped for months at the protest site with her husband. ²

On 18 June 2011 she published "Yemen's Unfinished Revolution" in The New York Times, criticising United States and Saudi support for Saleh's government. After the Nobel announcement she lobbied the UN Security Council to hold Saleh accountable rather than grant him immunity; the Council voted on 21 October for Resolution 2014, which condemned the deadly force used against protesters but backed the Gulf Cooperation Council initiative. Karman, who was present for the vote, criticised the Council's support for the initiative and advocated trying Saleh at the International Criminal Court. She met US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on 28 October. ²

The prize was announced on 7 October 2011. 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." Reacting from the protest camp in Sana'a, Karman said she had not expected it, called it "a victory of our peaceful revolution", and dedicated it to the youth and women of the Arab world and to the martyrs and wounded of the Arab Spring. Foreign Policy placed her first in its 2011 list of the top 100 global thinkers. ^{2 1}

In 2014 she established the news channel Belqees TV with the help of the Doha Centre for Media Freedom, starting in Sana'a and moving it to Istanbul in 2015 after the Houthi takeover of Yemen. The English article reports that in late November the channel was shut down following a Moroccan legal complaint accusing Karman and Belqees TV of encouraging violence and supporting terrorism and of insulting Moroccan state institutions, and that Turkey treated the matter as a criminal case, stopped the broadcasts and closed the offices. On 6 May 2020 Facebook appointed her to its Oversight Board; she was then subjected to harassment in Saudi media and replied that she hoped she would not end up like Jamal Khashoggi. In 2019 it was revealed that she had been targeted by Project Raven, a UAE surveillance programme that gained access to her iPhone. In February 2023 her foundation, together with Turkey's disaster agency AFAD, built 50 temporary shelters for victims of the Turkey–Syria earthquake and sent relief convoys to both countries. ²

This section should be read as a report of different positions carried by the sources, not as the museum's verdict on them.

Her positions, as the sources report them: From a 2004 conference onwards she stopped wearing the traditional niqab in favour of colourful hijabs that showed her face, saying the full covering is cultural and not dictated by Islam. She advocated laws preventing the marriage of girls under 17, telling Human Rights Watch that Yemen's revolution was also about social problems, above all child marriage — although most members of her party took a different view. She was a senior member of the Al-Islah party until the party suspended her in 2018 after she accused the Saudi-led coalition of acting as occupiers in Yemen. She has repeatedly condemned the Saudi-led intervention and called for an immediate halt to air strikes, while also opposing the Houthis and Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and accusing the Houthis of receiving Iranian support. She called US drone strikes in Yemen "unacceptable" and demanded an immediate halt in 2013. On Egypt, she supported the 30 June 2013 protests but then denounced the 3 July coup against President Mohamed Morsi; the Egyptian military barred her from entering the country and deported her to Sana'a. In May 2024 she said the world was silent "in front of the genocide and the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people in Gaza". She has summed up her belief as: "I am a citizen of the world. The Earth is my country, and humanity is my nation." ²

Criticism and accusations directed at her: The lead of the Arabic article carries an allegation, attributed to leaked Saudi cables published by WikiLeaks, that she held secret meetings with Saudi officials; the museum records this as an attributed allegation, not an established fact. Her stance against the Saudi-UAE coalition also cost her the Al-Islah membership described above. ^{3 2}

She is married to Mohammed al-Nahmi and is the mother of three children according to the English article's text; its infobox says four, and the difference is recorded in the references below. The Turkish government offered her Turkish citizenship, which she received from the foreign minister on 11 October 2012; her family is said to originate from Karaman Province in Central Anatolia. Like many Yemenis she was forced to leave Yemen after the Houthi takeover of Sana'a, and from her new home in Istanbul she continues to speak out on the war; on 17 December 2020 she reported that Houthi rebels had raided and looted her home and office and taken control of both. ²

• The defined sources cited above, registered in data/source/.
• The English article's text calls her the mother of three children while its infobox says four; this article uses the text figure (3) and records the difference here.
• Later translations and edits of this article need periodic review with clear update dates.