Narges Mohammadi’s Nobel Peace Prize is for Iran

Narges Mohammadi, an Iranian girls’s rights and anti-death penalty advocate at the moment incarcerated in one in every of Iran’s most infamous prisons, has been awarded the 2023 Nobel Peace Prize.

Mohammadi’s win comes after a yr of protest within the nation following the homicide of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian girl who died in police custody after being detained for improperly sporting her headband. Though Mohammadi was behind bars throughout these protests and couldn’t take part straight, she has labored as an advocate for associated causes for many years, and continues to doc human rights abuses inside jail.

Mohammadi’s win, although a major symbolic and political transfer on the a part of the Nobel committee, is unlikely to vary Iran’s stance on the protests or its human rights violations. Nor is it prone to free Mohammadi or materially change her situation, although the chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee Berit Reiss-Andersen mentioned in her speech asserting the prize that she hoped the Iranian authorities would launch Mohammadi so she may attend the awards ceremony in December, the Associated Press reported.

The award is an specific recognition of Mohammadi’s a long time of labor and of the continuing battle of ladies in Iran.

“This year’s Peace Prize also recognises the hundreds of thousands of people who, in the preceding year, have demonstrated against the theocratic regime’s policies of discrimination and oppression targeting women,” the committee wrote in a press launch Friday. Iranian girls who spoke with the Associated Press, like 22-year-old chemistry pupil Arezou Mohebi, echoed that assertion, calling the prize “an award for all Iranian girls and women” and Mohammadi herself “the bravest I have ever seen.”

Mohammadi has been preventing for human rights for many years

Mohammadi, an engineer by coaching, has lengthy been an lively and vital a part of the Iranian battle for human rights, working specifically on behalf of ladies and incarcerated individuals and in opposition to the loss of life penalty. In 2003, she started working with the now-banned group Defenders of Human Rights Center, based by Iran’s different Nobel Peace Prize winner, lawyer Shirin Ebadi.

Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, a historian of the fashionable Middle East on the University of Pennsylvania, advised Vox that inside Iran, Mohammadi “is very highly respected and admired for her unflinching commitment to freedom, women’s rights, and human rights, as well as for her personal sacrifices in realizing these ideals. People in Iran are rejoicing over this prize.”

Mohammadi was first arrested in 2011 for her work advocating for incarcerated human rights activists and their households; whereas out on bail in 2015, she was once more arrested and imprisoned for her campaigning in opposition to Iran’s use of the loss of life penalty. In Iran, the loss of life penalty is usually used for drug-related offenses or crimes like blasphemy or sowing “corruption on earth” — a cost that may be utilized to a wide range of actions, reminiscent of protesting the federal government or being LGBTQ.

Last yr there have been round 580 executions in Iran, in keeping with UN Human Rights Chief Volker Türk. Executions have continued apace in 2023; lots of these have been for drug-related offenses, and lots of of these executed got here from minority populations, in keeping with UN information. “In Iran, authorities use the death penalty and execution as a tool of political repression against protesters, dissidents and minorities” after subjecting the accused to indicate trials, in keeping with a report this yr by a UN physique of consultants.

This is true, too, for the Iranians protesting during the last yr. After Amini’s loss of life in September 2022, Iranians of all ages, ethnic teams, and sectors of society engaged in mass demonstrations throughout the nation in opposition to the federal government. Thousands of individuals flooded the streets evening after evening — usually peacefully, with girls whipping off their hijabs and lighting them on fireplace, or reducing their hair in not only a present of solidarity with Amini, but in addition an expression of broader financial frustrations and outrage with political repression.

This was a woman-led motion — notably significant in a society that particularly restricts girls’s entry to fundamental rights like schooling, jobs, and participation in public life based mostly on whether or not they adjust to obligatory hijab legal guidelines, as a June Human Rights Watch report explains.

“It’s really touching and kind of unprecedented even, perhaps, globally, this kind of feminist angle, and it is real,” Borzou Daragahi, an Iranian-American journalist, advised Vox in November on the top of the protests. “The men supporting the women, the schoolgirls going out and protesting by day, the schoolboys going out and rioting against the police at night, people backing each other up, people cheering on the women as they take off their hijabs and so on. This whole feminist angle of it is quite singular, for a political revolution in any country.”

That motion got here to be recognized by its chants of “Woman-Life-Freedom,” and, although Amini’s loss of life ignited it, it constructed on years — and even a long time — of protest and feminist activism by individuals like Mohammadi. And after years of protest actions, together with in 2009 and 2019, Woman-Life-Freedom was one of the severe challenges to regime energy for the reason that 1979 revolution.

Iran’s Basij, a paramilitary police power beneath the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), cracked down on the rebellion, injuring the eyes of a whole lot of protesters with rubber bullets and metallic pellets and killing or injuring others after they fired on crowds with deadly power. Ultimately, Iran’s authorities detained about 20,000 protesters and sentenced many to loss of life. At least 209 individuals had been executed by May of this yr, according to UN reviews.

Though Mohammadi has been out and in of jail since 2015, she has continued to arrange whereas incarcerated, preventing in opposition to inhumane situations, together with allegations of systematic torture and sexual violence. Mohammadi additionally participated within the Woman-Life-Freedom mass protests in her personal manner, in keeping with the Norwegian Nobel Committee, expressing her help for activists on the road and organizing solidarity actions amongst her fellow prisoners.

That, nevertheless, led to extra brutal crackdowns from jail authorities; Mohammadi was barred from receiving telephone calls or guests. She has not seen her husband, Taghi Rahmani, who lives in exile in Paris with their 16-year-old twins, in 11 years.

“The global support and recognition of my human rights advocacy makes me more resolved, more responsible, more passionate and more hopeful,” Mohammadi wrote in a press release to the New York Times. “I also hope this recognition makes Iranians protesting for change stronger and more organized. Victory is near.”

However, it’s potential that Mohammadi’s win and the worldwide recognition for her work will convey extra strife and extra crackdowns for her and for Iranian society at giant. Regime-linked information companies dismissed the prize; The Islamic Republic News Agency said it had grow to be a device “to satisfy the political desires of the Western countries,” and Fars claimed it honored somebody who “persisted in creating tension and unrest and falsely claimed that she was beaten in prison.”

Over the previous yr, the protests have garnered much less media consideration, and the regime has cracked down on society by purging teachers from universities and arresting activists and journalists. Although the protests didn’t topple the federal government, it does appear to have precipitated an everlasting fracture between the regime and society. That’s partly a results of the a number of crises — financial, political, and social — that Iran is at the moment dealing with, however it additionally speaks to the energy of the protest motion.

Now, Kashani-Sabet mentioned, “Mohammadi’s Nobel Prize will keep the embers of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement burning and alert the world that Iranian women and the Iranian people have not abandoned their resolve to usher in a free and tolerant Iran.”