2023-12-10 17:47:11
“Woman, life, freedom”, it is with this now emblematic slogan, pronounced in English then in Farsi, that Kiana and Ali Mohammadi closed a vibrant speech on Sunday at Oslo City Hall, on the occasion of the awarding of the Nobel Prize for peace to Iranian human rights activist Narges Mohammadi. These words that the 17-year-old twins read in turn on stage were not theirs, but those of their mother: the 51-year-old activist had managed to convey to them from her cell in Evin prison in Tehran , where she is held “behind the high cold walls” since 2021.
To highlight his cruel absence, an armchair placed between the two teenagers, exiled with their father in France since 2015, remained empty, topped with his portrait. Throughout the ceremony, the sweetness of Kiana and Ali’s still childish features contrasted with the firmness and determination of their mother’s words, read in French. “I am an Iranian woman who is proud and honored to contribute to this civilization, she who is today a victim of the oppression of a tyrannical and misogynistic religious regime”we heard.
“I don’t think I’ll ever see her again but that doesn’t matter”
A staunch opponent of the compulsory wearing of the hijab, Narges Mohammadi described it as “government shame” the obligation imposed on Iranian women to wear it. It’s not “neither a religious obligation nor a cultural model, but rather a means of control and submission of the whole society”added the children, under the emotional gaze of the previous Iranian recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, Shirin Ebadi.
Proud, Kiana and Ali are no less worried about their mother whom they have not seen for almost nine years. At the time of this ceremony in the absence of, the winner was to begin a new hunger strike, in solidarity with the persecuted Bahai religious minority. In failing health, she had already stopped eating for a few days at the beginning of November to obtain the right to be transferred to the hospital without covering her head.
The two teenagers, who say they no longer remember the sound of his voice, did not take advantage of this platform to demand his release from the Tehran regime, which sees this international award as an affront. Kiana knows she may never see her mother again. “As for seeing her alive again one day, personally, I am quite pessimisticthe young girl declared the day before, during a press conference. Maybe I will see her again in thirty or forty years but otherwise, I don’t think I will ever see her again but that doesn’t matter because my mother will always be with me in my heart and with my family. »
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In the 2000s, Narges Mohammadi joined the Center for Human Rights Defenders (of which she is vice-president), founded by lawyer Shirin Ebadi, Nobel Peace Prize winner in 2003.
She was imprisoned from May 2015 to October 2020 to get “formed and led an illegal group”, calling for the abolition of capital punishment.
She devoted a book to it entitled White Torture in which she denounces the conditions of detention of the prisoners, their placement in solitary confinement, abuse of which she says she was a victim.
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