Women accept Nobel peace prize in Oslo

Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, her compatriot Leymah Gbowee and Tawakkul Karman of Yemen collected their Nobel diplomas and medals at Oslo's City Hall.

The laureates, receiving the prize on the 115th anniversary of the death of benefactor Alfred Nobel, will share a total award worth $1.5 million.

The Nobel Peace Prize 2011 was awarded jointly to Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Leymah Gbowee and Tawakkol Karman "for their non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women’s rights to full participation in peace-building work,"said the Nobel Prize organization.

No woman or sub-Saharan African had won the prize since 2004, when the committee honored Wangari Maathai of Kenya, who mobilized poor women to fight deforestation by planting trees.

The other Nobel Prizes – in medicine, chemistry, physics and literature, and the Nobel Memorial Prize in economic sciences – were to be handed out at a separate ceremony Saturday in Stockholm.

For Yemen - Accepting the 2011 award, Yemeni activist Tawakul Karman called on the western world to support the revolutions that swept through the Arab world this year and keep faith with democratic change that was both difficult and inevitable.

"The democratic world, which has told us a lot about the virtues of democracy and good governance, should not be indifferent to what is happening in Yemen and Syria," said Karman. "These (Arab leaders) should be brought to justice before the International Criminal Court; there should be no immunity for killers who rob the food of the people," she said.

The world failed to understand and support Yemen's own revolution -- where violence between supporters and opponents of outgoing president Ali Abdullah Saleh continues.

"This should haunt the world's conscience because it challenges the very idea of fairness and justice," she added.