Image copyright AFP 
 
 UPDATE 5 October 2018: Denis Mukwege has been jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work. This article was first published in 2013. 
 
 Denis Mukwege is a gynaecologist working in the Democratic Republic of Congo. He and his colleagues have treated about 30,000 rape victims, developing great expertise in the treatment of serious sexual injuries. His story includes disturbing accounts of rape as a weapon of war. 
 
 When war broke out, 35 patients in my hospital in Lemera in eastern DR Congo were killed in their beds. 
 
 I fled to Bukavu, 100km (60 miles) to the north, and started a hospital made from tents. I built a maternity ward with an operating theatre. In 1998, everything was destroyed again. So, I started all over again in 1999. 
 
 It was that year that our first rape victim was brought into the hospital. After being raped, bullets had been fired into her genitals and thighs. 
 
 I thought that was a barbaric act of war, but the real shock came three months later. Forty-five women came to us with the same story, they were all saying: "People came into my village and raped me, tortured me." 
 
 Denis Mukwege Image copyright Panzi Hospital Rape victims have sometimes filled most of the 350 beds in Denis Mukwege's hospital. Funded by Unicef and other donors, it also operates a mobile clinic and microfinance initiative. He has received many international prizes, including in 2008 the UN Human Rights Prize. He was named African of the Year in 2009. Listen to Denis Mukwege on Outlook Browse the Outlook podcast archive More from BBC World Service 
 
 Other women came to us with burns. They said that after they had been raped chemicals had been poured on their genitals. 
 
 I started to ask myself what was going on. These weren't just violent acts of war, but part of a strategy. You had situations where multiple people were raped at the same time, publicly - a whole village might be raped during the night. In doing this, they hurt not just the victims but the whole community, which they force to watch. 
 
 The result of this strategy is that people are forced to flee their villages, abandon their fields, their resources, everything. It's very effective. 
 
 We have a staged system of care for victims. Before I undertake a big operation we start with a psychological examination. I need to know if they have enough resilience to withstand surgery. 
 
 Then we move to the next stage, which might consist of an operation or just medical care. And the following stage is socio-economic care - most of these patients arrive with nothing, no clothes even. 
 
 We have to feed them, we have to take care of them. After we discharge them they will be vulnerable again if they're not able to sustain their own lives. So we have to assist them on socio-economical level - for example through helping women develop new skills and putting girls back in school. 
 
 The fourth stage is to assist them on a legal level. Often the patients know who their assailants were and we have lawyers who help them bring their cases to court. 
 
 In 2011, we witnessed a fall in the number of cases. We thought perhaps we were approaching the end of the terrible situation for women in the Congo. But since last year, when the war resumed, cases have increased again. It's a phenomenon which is linked entirely to the war situation. 
 
 The conflict in DR Congo is not between groups of religious fanatics. Nor is it a conflict between states. This is a conflict caused by economic interests - and it is being waged by destroying Congolese women. 
 
 When I was coming home after a trip outside the country I found five people waiting for me. Four of them had AK-47 guns, the fifth had a pistol. 
 
 Speech to the UN (Sept 2012) Image copyright AFP "I would have liked to also say, 'I have the honour of being part of the international community that you represent here,' but I cannot say that. How can I say this to you - representatives of the international community - when the international community has shown fear and a lack of courage during these 16 years in the Democratic Republic of the Congo?" Read an English transcript of the speech Watch the speech 
 
 They opened the gate and got in my car, pointing their weapons at me. They got me out of my car and as one of my guards tried to rescue me they shot him down. He was killed. 
 
 I fell down and the attackers continued firing bullets. I can't really tell you how I survived. 
 
 Then they left in my car without taking anything else. 
 
 I found out afterwards that my two daughters and their cousin were at home. They had been made to go into the living room where the attackers were sitting, waiting for me. During all that time they pointed their guns, their weapons at my daughters. It was terrible. 
 
 I only saw the attackers for just a few seconds and I couldn't tell who these people were. I also can't say why they attacked me - only they know. 
 
 After the attack, Dr Mukwege fled with his family to Sweden, then to Brussels, but he was persuaded to return to Congo last month. 
 
 I was inspired to return by the determination of Congolese women to fight these atrocities. 
 
 These women have taken the courage to protest about my attack to the authorities. They even grouped together to pay for my ticket home - these are women who do not have anything, they live on less than a dollar a day. 
 
 Image copyright Physicians for Human Rights Image caption The welcoming parade at Kavumu airport, Bukavu, in January 
 
 After that gesture, I couldn't really say no. And also, I am myself determined to help fight these atrocities, this violence. 
 
 My life has had to change, since returning. I now live at the hospital and I take a number of security precautions, so I have lost some of my freedom. 
 
 When I was welcomed back by the women, they told me they would ensure my security by taking turns to guard me, with groups of 20 women volunteering in shifts, day and night. 
 
 They don't have any weapons - they don't have anything. 
 
 But it is a form of security to feel so close to the people you are working with. Their enthusiasm gives me the confidence to continue my work as usual. 
 
 Denis Mukwege spoke to Outlook on the BBC World Service. Listen back to the interview via iplayer or browse the Outlook podcast archive. 
 
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 There’s no shortage of awards and prizes out there for diplomacy, peacemaking, and humanitarian achievement. But for whatever reason, the one that will be handed out this Friday, bestowed by a committee selected by the Norwegian parliament in honor of the man who invented dynamite, is considered the most important and most deserving of media attention. 
 
 Joshua Keating Joshua Keating is a staff writer at Slate focusing on international affairs and author of the forthcoming book, Invisible Countries. 
 
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 This year the prize committee could best serve its mission by giving the prize to the person who most deserves it: nobody. Such a move would highlight that this has been a particularly violent year around the world. More importantly, it would serve as an acknowledgment that the most notable eruptions of violence have been so grimly predictable, the result of years of individual and collective failures by governments and international institutions. 
 
 While the emergence of ISIS and the disintegration of Iraq and Syria have taken place at alarming speed, these were less sudden explosions than the climaxes of crises that have been worsening for years. There’s a lot of blame to go around here, to the governments involved and those that intervened from the outside. But it shouldn’t be surprising that an unchecked civil war in Syria and years of shortsighted sectarian governance in Iraq would lead to a situation like this. 
 
 The United States, and former Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama, will not win any awards for peace promotion this year. In 2009, Obama raised eyebrows in Oslo by using his Nobel acceptance speech to make the argument that there are times when the use of force by governments in the name of preserving overall peace and stability is “not only necessary but morally justified.” Five years later it’s harder to make the case that the world has become more peaceful as a result of the judicious deployment of American violence. A global drone war may have decimated al-Qaida, but its local franchises and splinter groups are as potent as ever. NATO airpower ousted a tyrant in Libya but left a chaotic power vacuum in his place. 
 
 The breakup of the Soviet Union is justifiably seen today as a major advance for the cause of peace and human freedom. Mikhail Gorbachev deservedly received the Peace Prize during the final days of the Soviet empire in 1990. But this year’s crisis in Ukraine showed that everything is not hunky-dory in the former USSR. For the first time in decades, a European border was redrawn by force, and the international community was exposed as utterly unable to stop it from happening. Ukraine has been invaded by Russia without Moscow admitting anything of the sort, though Ukraine’s own government doesn’t have entirely clean hands either. 
 
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 More than 2,000 people, most of them civilians, died in Gaza and Israel over the summer, the latest in a recurring cycle of violence in which both sides seem increasingly indifferent to casualties and fail to recognize their own long-term interests. (Nobel Prizes have been awarded for that peace process, too.) 
 
 This was the year that the international media finally, if briefly, started paying attention to Boko Haram’s campaign of terror in northern Nigeria. (Nigeria actually led the world in terrorism fatalities in the first half of 2014.) But that conflict’s been developing for a long while as well. The world’s newest country, South Sudan—a darling of the international aid community, not to mention George Clooney—also collapsed into a civil war that seemed inevitable since its founding. 
 
 This was the year that three countries in West Africa were devastated by a disease that would probably have been containable if decades of civil war and kleptocratic rule hadn’t left those countries with threadbare public health systems and populations understandably suspicious of those in power. 
 
 And this was the year that we learned that the side with tear gas, truncheons, and pepper spray gets to decide what “one country, two systems” really means. 
 
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 I don’t think the world is a hopeless maelstrom of violence. Good things have happened in the past 12 months as well. Three of the world’s five largest countries—India, Indonesia, and this week, Brazil—are holding democratic elections, and there’s been major progress on containing AIDS and tuberculosis, which are among the world’s deadliest diseases. 
 
 Even so, it’s hard to find anyone deserving of a Peace Prize in 2014. The original purpose of the Nobel Peace Prize was to reward the person who “shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.” And on that score, there was not much to report this year. 
 
 The committee should follow the example of the Mo Ibrahim Prize for Achievement in African Leadership, the world’s most generous prize given to individuals, with an outlay of $5 million over 10 years plus $200,000 per annum after that. The prize has simply not been granted in three of the six years it has existed because no suitable candidates were found. This has served the prize’s goal—highlighting and compensating former African heads of state who governed well while in office and stepped down when they were supposed to—better than watering down the criteria. 
 
 The Nobel Peace Prize was not awarded on 19 occasions, including for most of the duration of the two world wars. The most recent year in which the prize wasn’t granted was 1972. If the prize doesn’t get handed out, the monetary award (about $1.1 million) “shall be reserved until the following year,” according to the Nobel website. 
 
 Some of the names up for discussion this year are quite deserving. Malala Yousafzai, who has promoted the education of girls in rural Pakistan in the face of Taliban violence, and Denis Mukwege, who has advocated on behalf of victims of sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo, are both doing remarkable work. And I certainly don’t mean to denigrate the efforts of the many activists, aid workers, and officials working for peace in difficult circumstances around the world.
– The culmination of Nobel week comes on Friday, when the Nobel Prize for Peace is handed to ... no one, hopes Joshua Keating. In a column for Slate, Keating writes that in the past, and "at its best," the award has shone a spotlight on important issues—like climate change in 2007, and women's right four years later. But it's not just that 2014 has been a pretty deadly year around our planet (think: ISIS, Boko Haram, Ukraine, etc.). There's an issue at hand: "The most notable eruptions of violence have been so grimly predictable, the result of years of individual and collective failures by governments and international institutions," he writes. Giving the award to nobody would be an "acknowledgment" of that. No handing out the award also wouldn't be a first. It most recently happened in 1972, marking the 19th time it wasn't bestowed on anyone (WWI and WWII years didn't see a lot of Peace prizes being doled out). Keating does acknowledge that some of the names being floated are by no means unworthy: There's Malala Yousafzai, along with Congolese doctor Denis Mukwege, who has done much for his country's many gang-rape victims. "But if the committee really wants to send a powerful message to world leaders after a not-so-peaceful year, there's only one way to do that," concludes Keating. "Give one of the world’s most famous awards to absolutely no one." Read his full column at Slate.