Dr. Denis Mukwege’s Nobel Peace Prize Brought No Peace to the Congolese
TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 20 Oct 2025
Ann Garrison | Black Agenda Report – TRANSCEND Media Service
Dr. Denis Mukwege accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo in 2018.
Awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to “the man who heals women” made Euro-Americans feel good without interrupting their catastrophic proxy war for Congo’s resources.
15 Oct 2025 – The Nobel Prize Committee shocked much of the world by awarding this year’s prize to imperialist Zionist regime-change collaborator María Corina Machado, a woman who has called on the US to invade her own country, Venezuela, to overthrow its president Nicolás Maduro. In a 2018 letter, she also called on Israel and Argentina to “apply their force and influence” to dismantle Maduro’s government.
One can ask why this year’s prize rewarded a call to war, but how many other Nobel Peace Prizes have had anything to do with peace?
One of its earliest recipients was Teddy Roosevelt. As Assistant Secretary of the US Navy, he helped plan the 1898 Spanish American War to expand the US empire, then left his position to form the Rough Riders, a unit that fought in Cuba. Three years later, as president, he was given the prize for the diplomatic effort to end a distant war between Russia and Japan.
Worthy winners include Dr. Martin Luther King, who was given the prize in 1964, the year after he gave his “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington. That was three years before the 1967 Riverside Church speech in which he decried the war in Vietnam, said that the US had probably killed millions of Vietnamese, and declared, “I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government.” He was of course told to stay in his lane, then assassinated a year later to the day.
The prize has since gone to Henry Kissinger, Menachem Begin, and Barack Obama.
Other worthy Peace Prize winners include Malala Yousafzai, whom the Pakistani Taliban shot in the head after she advocated educating girls. No one could be more deserving or courageous than Malala, but her prize speaks to the rights of women and girls, not to war and peace.
It in no way conflicts with the “liberal international order,” also known as the “rules based order” which the imperial powers, led by the United States, established at the end of World War II. The rules based order was based on multilateral institutions like the United Nations, World Trade Organization, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund, and open markets, all of which have delivered gross inequalities, neocolonialism, endless wars, and the ever increasing concentration of wealth.
The liberal international order was fraudulently premised on human equality and rights, values consistent with both Malala’s heroism and that of Dr. King in 1964.
Another worthy winner is Dr. Denis Mukwege, the Congolese obstetrician/gynecologist who founded Panzi Hospital in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s South Kivu Provincel to treat women victims of sexual violence.
How could anyone help but admire the doctor who treats victims of the most horrific, unspeakable sexual violence and even helps them go on to lead productive, independent lives?
However, what has Dr. Mukwege’s Peace Prize done for the Congolese? What did it ever have to do with peace in Congo?
Absolutely nothing.
In his acceptance speech in Oslo, the doctor called for justice based on the UN Mapping Report on Human Rights Violations in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, 1993 to 2003.
The report details atrocities committed by multiple state and non-state actors, the most egregious of which were committed by Rwandan forces. It concluded that its findings could be used to support criminal charges of genocide against Rwanda for its massacres of civilian Hutu refugees and civilian Congolese.
Dr. Mukwege has called again and again for an international court to prosecute these crimes, but the UN Security Council, the body capable of establishing such a court, has never even entertained the idea.
Dr. Mukwege did not name Rwanda as the aggressor in Congo in his Oslo speech, but he has since in these contexts:
Reuters interview in Paris in 2022, in which he called on the UN to sanction Rwanda for its support of the M23 militia.
2023 meeting with Church of Christ in Congo leaders, leading to a statement released via the Mukwege Foundation, in which he spoke of “the security situation that currently prevails in our country since the umpteenth aggression of Rwanda through the M23 group.”
2024 UK Parliament address, in which he said, “During the last decades of continued war and instability, our country has been subject to repeated wars of aggression by neighboring countries, including Rwanda and Uganda.”
2024 statement on the failure of the Luanda Process released by the Panzi Foundation, in which he said, “It is imperative that the USA, the EU, France, the UK and other partners adopt political and economic sanctions, and suspend their military assistance to Rwanda for as long as it supports the M23 militia and commits crimes of aggression against the DRC.
2025 Stockholm seminar, where he said, “In the last 30 years, Rwanda and Uganda have been instrumentalized as proxies for the great powers and certain multinationals to step up a war economy aimed at controlling the extraction and trade of Congolese mineral resources.”
February 2025 op-ed in the New York Times titled, “Congo Is Bleeding. Where Is the Outrage?”, in which he wrote, “Experts assembled by the United Nations have detailed Rwanda’s illegal exploitation of Congo’s rare minerals. And now, with global attention focused elsewhere, Rwanda has escalated its aggression — seemingly knowing that no meaningful consequences are likely to follow.
Nevertheless, Rwanda continues to tighten its grip on Congo’s Kivu Provinces, seizing the capitals of both, and causing mass displacement, atrocities, and casualties.
The international system of resource exploitation, with Congolese minerals smuggled out of Congo into the hands of powerful states and multinational corporations, continues, even as the list of European and North American awards given to Dr. Mukwege grows.
In one of the cruelest ironies, billionaire Bill Gates, a longstanding ally and collaborator of Rwandan President Paul Kagame, has burnished his reputation by lauding and associating himself with Dr. Mukwege, calling him one of his ‘heroes in the field.Gates is also one of the principle tech titans behind Kobold Metals, the corporation most benefiting from Trump’s so-called peace deal, which, like Dr. Mukwege’s Nobel Peace Prize, delivered no peace to the Congolese.
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Ann Garrison is an independent journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She attended Stanford University and is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment. In 2014 she received the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize for her reporting on conflict in the African Great Lakes region. She can be reached at ann@anngarrison.com
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Tags: Africa, D.R. Congo, Nobel Peace Prize, Nobel's Will, Peace
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