Editor’s note: Video by Muhammad Darwish and Alessia Tinti
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CNN –
16-year-old Ali still remembers the last time he saw his mother at home. She made him and his twin sister Kiana eggs for breakfast, told them to study hard, said goodbye and sent them to school. When they returned she was gone. They were eight.
Her mother is Narges Mohammadi, a woman whose name has become synonymous with the fight for human rights in Iran – a fight that has cost this activist almost everything.
On Friday she won the Nobel Peace Prize for “her fight against the oppression of women in Iran and her fight to promote human rights and freedom for all,” the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced in Oslo.
Mohammadi has been imprisoned for most of the past two decades. She was repeatedly condemned for representing the voice of the voiceless and for her tireless advocacy against the death penalty and the solitary confinement that she endured for weeks.
She is currently serving a prison sentence of 10 years and 9 months. She is accused of acts against national security and propaganda against the state. She was also sentenced to 154 lashes, a punishment human rights groups say has not been imposed before, as well as travel and other bans.
But not even the darkest cells of Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison could suppress her powerful voice.
In an audio recording from inside Evin shared with CNN ahead of the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony, Mohammadi can be heard leading the chant of “Woman, Life, Freedom” – the slogan of the uprising that was sparked by the death of the 22nd woman last year -year-old was triggered. the old Mahsa Jhina Amini in the care of the country’s moral police. She was arrested for allegedly not wearing her headscarf properly.
The recording is interrupted by a short automated message – “This is a call from Evin Prison” – as the women are heard singing a Farsi version of “Bella Ciao,” the 19th-century Italian folk song that became one Anthem of resistance against fascists was and was adopted by the Iranian freedom movement.
“This period has been and is the era of greatest protest in this prison,” Mohammadi previously told CNN in written answers to questions asked through intermediaries.
Outside the prison walls, the movement sparked by Amini’s death was largely brought to a halt by a brutal crackdown on protests by Iranian authorities, and morality police resumed headscarf patrols in July. Iranian activists accused her this week of attacking a young girl in a Tehran subway station for not wearing a headscarf, leading to her being hospitalized with serious injuries. Iranian authorities said low blood pressure was the cause.
Mohammadi said in comments received by CNN on Thursday that the government’s behavior had “renewed our concerns” and was “a sign of its concerted efforts to prevent the truth about Armita Geravand from coming to light.”
Majid Asgaripour/WANA/Portal
Narges Mohammadi is held in the notorious Evin Prison in Tehran, Iran, pictured last October.
Mohammadi knows all too well how expensive it is to speak in public. In August, she was sentenced to another year in prison for her ongoing activism in prison after giving a media interview and statement about sexual assault in prison.
She was already in prison last year for publishing a book about Iran’s brutal prison methods, “White Torture: Interviews with Iranian Female Prisoners,” as well as a documentary film telling the stories of prisoners held in solitary confinement – endured a punishment that Mohammadi himself received.
But she remains undeterred. Mohammadi recently sent CNN a lengthy letter in which she railed against four decades of compulsory hijab in the Islamic Republic and denounced the hypocrisy of a religious state that uses sexual violence against female prisoners.
When it came to power four decades ago, the religious regime used the mandatory hijab to “demonstrate the image of domination, subjugation and control over women” as a means of controlling society, she writes.
“They could not put an abaya and a turban on half of the population, i.e. the men of society,” her letter said. “However, they easily adorned half of Iran’s population with ‘compulsory hijab’, veil, chador, manteau and dark trousers to present to the world the hideous face of the despotic religious system.”
“Imagine Iranian women forced for 44 years to wear a head covering, long coats and dark trousers, and in some places a black chador, in the summer heat.
“Worse still, they were under psychological pressure to strictly adhere to the hijab requirement in order to preserve the image of religious Islamic men and to ensure the safety and purity of women. Now these same women are experiencing sexual assault and harassment against themselves.”
In her letter and responses to CNN, Mohammadi details incidents of sexual violence against her and other female detainees at various facilities dating back to 1999.
Political prisoners and women held for crimes have been attacked by security forces, prison authorities and medical staff, she says.
According to Mohammadi, sexual violence against female detainees has “increased significantly” since the protests that swept Iran last year, leading her to now describe the abuse as “systematic.”
Courtesy of Narges Mohammadi
Narges Mohammadi with her children Kiana and Ali in a previously taken photo.
“The victims had told their stories during the meetings with the officials who came to Qarchak Prison for inspection,” Mohammadi writes. “In prison, I heard the stories of three protesting women who were sexually abused. One of them was a well-known student activist who, upon entering the prison, filed a report with the authorities, saying that after she was arrested on the street, her hand and leg were tied and tied to two rings at the top of the car door. And in that position she was sexually abused.”
Mohammadi says she and another prisoner went to the prison’s “quarantine area” under the pretext of bringing food to another prisoner and saw the young woman with bruises on her stomach, arms, legs and thighs.
The Iranian government has denied widespread allegations of sexual assault against detainees, including in an in-depth CNN investigation last year, calling them “false” and “baseless.”
Mohammadi has been vocal about sexual violence against prisoners for years, breaking taboos in her conservative country. In 2021, she hosted a discussion on the social media app Clubhouse in which women, including Mohammadi, shared their stories of abuses by government “agents” from the 1980s to 2021. According to Mohammadi and human rights groups, she was punished for this.
“Women who experience sexual harassment will be filled with anger, fear and insecurity, but if their femininity is hidden and suppressed by ideological and religious assertions, not only will they be angry and afraid, but they will also feel deceived and deceived by the government “feel manipulated,” which is even more disturbing,” she writes. Such sexual abuse “leaves such deep scars on their soul and spirit that it is difficult to recover from it and they may never fully recover,” she added.
Because Mohammadi refused to be silenced behind bars, she has not been allowed to speak directly to her husband and children for the past 18 months.
“When your wife and the person closest to you is in prison, you wake up every day and are afraid to hear bad news,” her husband Taghi Rahmani said in a recent interview with CNN in France, where he is imprisoned Exile had been living with her children since shortly after Mohammadi’s imprisonment in 2015.
Rahmani and human rights groups have raised concerns about Mohammadi’s health and access to medical care after she suffered a heart attack and underwent surgery last year.
He proudly presents prestigious international awards he has received on her behalf. She has an “infinite energy for freedom and human rights,” he said.
Mark Esplin/CNN
Taghi Rahmani, pictured in Paris, says he met Mohammadi in 1995 when she attended his underground contemporary history classes.
Rahmani, who was imprisoned as a political prisoner for a total of 14 years, met Mohammadi in 1995 when she attended his underground contemporary history courses, he says.
For the past eight years he has had to act as father and mother to their now teenage twins.
“Kiana always said that when mom is there, dad isn’t there. It’s not good,” he said. “But if someone chooses a path, he must endure all hardships.”
Like his father, Ali is determined and says his mother must keep going “for Iran, for our future.”
“I’m really proud of my mom,” Ali told CNN. “She wasn’t always with us, but whenever she was, she took good care of us…she was a good mother and still is…I’ve accepted that kind of life now. The suffering I endure doesn’t matter.”
He said he was so excited to find out if his mother won that he continued scrolling on his phone in class without his teacher noticing.
“At exactly 11 o’clock my heart stopped because I saw that my mother had won,” he said. “I exploded with joy.”
Kiana, who chose not to speak to CNN, wants her mother by her side. Her father says Kiana believes that when you bring a child into the world, you have to take responsibility and raise it.
The pain of being separated from her family is something Mohammadi lives with every day. It is the price of a sacrifice she made for the dream of future freedom that has defined her life.
Mark Esplin/CNN
Ali and Taghi Rahmani, seen in their apartment in Paris, say they are proud of Mohammadi’s commitment to Iranians.
“The moment I said goodbye to Ali and Kiana was not unlike the moment I almost died in the tree-lined garden of Evin,” she wrote to CNN, without specifying when that event took place. “I picked the dandelions in Evin’s garden. “I stood barefoot on the hot asphalt on July 14,” she said, referring to the day — just weeks after that last breakfast — when she said goodbye to her children in prison before they went into exile in France. “My feet burned, but my heart burned. I sent the dandelions into the sky and my children’s hands, feet and faces flew past my eyes and tears fell like spring rain.
“When I look at prison from the window of my heart, I was more of a stranger to my daughter and son than any other stranger, and I missed the best years of my life and what has passed will never come back.” But I am I am sure that the world is neither worth living in nor looking at without freedom, equality and peace.
“I have chosen not to see my children or hear their voices and to be the voice of the oppressed people, women and children, of my country,” she says.