Iranian activist Narges Mohammadi, imprisoned in Iran, this Sunday called for international support to end the Iranian regime by receiving the Nobel Peace Prize through her children at Oslo City Hall.
“Young Iranians today have transformed the streets and public spaces into a scene of widespread civil resistance,” Mohammadi said in a speech read by his children, quoted by Spanish agency EFE.
The activist wrote the speech from Evin prison in Tehran, which was read out in Oslo by Kiana and Ali Rahmani, her 17-year-old twin sons, who have been living in exile in France since 2015.
Dressed in black, they read in French the speech that their mother managed to broadcast on her mobile phone, according to the French agency AFP.
“I am a woman from the Middle East, from a region that, despite being the heir to a rich civilization, is currently caught in war and in the flames of terrorism and extremism.” he claimed.
In her absence, a chair was symbolically empty, with a portrait of the winner.
“I am an Iranian woman who is proud and honored to contribute to this civilization, a woman who today is the victim of oppression by a tyrannical and misogynistic religious regime,” she said.
Mohammadi has been arrested and convicted several times in recent decades and is one of the main faces of the ‘Women, Life, Freedom’ uprising in Iran.
The movement, in which women took off their veils, cut their hair and demonstrated in the streets, was sparked by the death in 2022 of the young Iranian Kurd Mahsa Amini.
The 22-year-old died after being arrested in Tehran for not adhering to strict Islamic dress codes.
Mahsa Amini’s family was prevented from traveling to France this weekend to receive the Sakharov Prize, for which she was awarded by the European Parliament.
“The compulsory ‘hijab’ imposed by the government is neither a religious obligation nor a cultural model, but rather a means to control and subjugate the entire society,” Mohammadi said in the speech read out by his children.
The activist described the requirement for Iranian women to wear a veil covering the head and neck as a “disgrace to the government.”
In the message written and read “behind the high, cold walls of a prison” to the Norwegian royal family, he opined that the Iranian regime is currently “at the lowest level of legitimacy and popular support.”
He argued that “the resistance is alive and the struggle continues,” and therefore expressed confidence that “the light of freedom and justice will shine brightly in the country of Iran.”
Mohammadi, an opponent of the mandatory use of the ‘hijab’ and the death penalty in Iran, has been in prison since 2021 and was unable to receive the prestigious award in person.
Mohammadi announced that he would start a new hunger strike to show solidarity with the persecution of Iran’s Baha’i religious minority.
Narges Mohammadi, 51, was awarded the 2023 Nobel Peace Prize in October for her decades of activism, despite numerous arrests by Iranian authorities and years behind bars.
In the more than hundred-year history of the Nobel Prize, Mohammadi is the fifth winner to receive the peace prize while in prison, after the German Carl von Ossietzky, the Burmese Aung San Suu Kyi, the Chinese Liu Xiaobo and the Belarusian Ales Beliatski.
“The struggle of Narges Mohammadi can be compared (…) with that of Albert Lutuli, Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela (all of whom also received the Nobel Prize), which lasted more than thirty years until the end of the ‘apartheid regime’ in South Africa ”, said the chairman of the Nobel Committee, Berit Reiss-Andersen.
Source: DN
