Nobel laureate Narges Mohammadi risks years in prison – for this interview

Narges Mohammadi: “All women – believe in your powers”

PARIS. It could cost her caning and years of extra prison time.

Nevertheless, the 2023 Nobel Peace Prize winner, the Iranian Narges Mohammadi, 52, chooses to speak to Aftonbladet:

– The regime has failed. They have never succeeded in stifling the women’s struggle in Iran, she says.

In a few hours or days, she risks being thrown back into the dreaded Evin prison in Tehran.

– I have had nine trials. Four of them because I have been out protesting. Five times have been because I gave interviews to various media, including from inside the prison, says the peace prize winner via link from Tehran.

– So I am aware of the risks and that the Islamic Republic will count this as a crime. I know about this.

She adds that it’s worth it.

Don’t want to wear a veil – refused care

Actually, she was only granted a short leave of three weeks to receive medical attention. She explains that the doctors have found complicated tumors in one leg and one breast. In prison, she has often been refused care because she does not accept wearing a veil in front of the doctors.

For the Iranian who has dedicated her life to the fight for women’s and all people’s human rights, the veil is no small thing.

The small piece of fabric stands for so much more, she believes. It is the one on which the entire dictatorship and system rests in Iran, she explains.

– Ever since the start of the regime, it has been intended that those with the hijab can oppress half of the citizens in the country, she says and continues:

– If they give up the law on the mandatory veil, they lose the very basis of their rule.

“Iran’s leaders have failed”

In his apartment in Tehran, the Nobel laureate has carefully placed a portrait of the young Mahsa Jina Amini in the camera’s eye. It was the young woman’s death – after being beaten by the morality police – that caused the “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising to flare up across Iran in 2022.

Those protests have never completely died down.

Despite the fact that the regime has cracked down hard on the population, despite the fact that 800 people have been sentenced to death last year, and that others have been killed in the streets and squares, Narges Mohammadi sees the regime as a sure loser.

Especially now with everything that is happening in the rest of the Middle East.

– The leadership has been hit hard when the regime’s various proxy groups have lost their strongholds in different parts of the Middle East. The Iranian leaders’ strategy has failed. Inside the country, the legitimacy of the regime has been destroyed. And with it their authority, she says.

Their power now only hangs on a fragile thread of oppression, she reasons.

– People have realized that we have to get rid of them and move on. I cannot say how long it will take, but I am convinced that the people will reach freedom and democracy, says Narges Mohammadi.

The children made her hesitate

Few are as aware as the human rights defender of the value and price of time. Ever since her children, the now 18-year-old twins Ali and Kiana, were small, she has sacrificed everything for her fight. Today, the boy and girl live in exile with their father Taghi in central Paris.

When Narges Mohammadi got out for her brief supervised release in December, she hadn’t seen her children in a decade. The last time they were seen, the children were eight years old.

The children were also the only thing that once made her hesitate about the high price of the fight.

– I remember when Kiana was three years old. She was in the hospital for surgery and I couldn’t see her because I was serving a one-month prison sentence, she recalls:

Then I began to doubt. Should I continue the fight for human rights or should I spend my time raising my children? It was difficult, she says.

Received mother’s Nobel Prize

Her children have now grown up to be two politically interested, eighteen-year-old youths who daily follow everything that happens in what is still called their homeland Iran. They were the ones who accepted my mother’s Nobel Prize in Oslo and gave a speech in front of the assembled world press.

– They think a lot about human rights. I am so proud of them, says Narges Mohammadi.

In total, the peace laureate has been sentenced to 36 years in prison and 145 probation.

The prison years have sometimes offered moments of joy. Especially in the women’s section of the dreaded Evin Prison in Tehran, there seems to be a marked solidarity and courage among the prisoners. Protests, hunger and veil strikes and sing-alongs are organized to support each other in different situations. When someone who has been incarcerated for a really long time, maybe ten years, is released, everyone lines up, says Narges Mohammadi:

– Then everyone sings and shouts when she goes out towards freedom. We sing freedom songs as they walk down the stairs. Those times have been some of my happiest moments in prison, she says.

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Subjected to the “white torture”

At other times it has been darker.

Evin prison is the same prison where the Swedish hostages Johan Floderus and Saeed Azizi were held until June last year. They were then exchanged for the criminal Hamid Noury, sentenced to life in Sweden. According to his conviction, Noury ​​participated in mass executions in the Iranian prison of Gohardasht. Today, the Swedish KI researcher Ahmadreza Djalali remains alone as the only known Swedish hostage in Evin Prison.

Like the Swedes, Narges Mohammadi testifies to cruel conditions. Especially when it comes to the so-called “white torture”: captivity in a brightly lit and cramped isolation cell. There, some prisoners are forced to sit for months without contact with the outside world.

She says that she heard how fellow prisoners screamed in pain during torture. Or just cried in a neighboring cell.

– I felt that I was starting to suffocate. I was alone and powerless. It was hopeless. There was nothing I could do, she recalls.

Believe in the young women

When her father died, she was not allowed to attend the funeral or be in any way involved in the mourning process. Narges Mohammadi says it without the slightest sentimentality in his voice. Rather, she nails it down, like another nail in a coffin.

The doctors who have examined her have said that she is in need of care outside the prison. But the prosecutor has not yet made a statement. At any second, the police could come and take the Nobel laureate back to prison.

Narges Mohammadi doesn’t know if she will make it out alive next time. But she says she has a firm belief in the young generation of women, both inside and outside Iran.

– I want to say to all these women to believe in the powers that you have. Never give up! Fight for the whole society and for democracy, freedom and justice, she says.