When Narges Mohammadi was a child, her mother told her never to become a politician. The price of fighting the system in Iran would be too high.
That warning has proved prophetic. Mohammadi, 51, Iran’s most prominent human rights and women’s rights activist, is serving a 10-year prison sentence in Tehran for “spreading anti-state propaganda”.
For the past 30 years, the Iranian government has penalized her for her activism and writing, depriving her of most of what she holds most dear — her career as an engineer, her health, time with her parents, husband and children, and her freedom. .
The last time Mohammadi heard the voices of Ali and Kiana, her 16-year-old twins, was more than a year ago. Her husband, Taghi Rahmani, 63, also an activist who was imprisoned in Iran for 14 years, lives in exile in France with the twins.
His suffering has not dampened his resolve. A small window in his cell at Evin prison in northern Tehran opens out to a view of the surrounding mountains.
“I sit in front of the window every day, I look at the greenery and I dream of a free Iran,” Mohammadi said in a rare and unauthorized telephone interview from inside the prison in April. “The more they punish me, the more they take from me, the more determined I become.”
Last month, prison authorities revoked Mohammadi’s telephone and visitation rights because of statements he had issued condemning Iran’s human rights violations, which were posted on his Instagram page, his family said.
PEN America presented Mohammadi with the Barbey Freedom to Write Award at its annual gala in New York last month. She was one of three winners of the United Nations World Press Freedom Award this year.
Two childhood memories, she said, fueled her activism: her mother filling a red basket with fruit every week for prison visits with her arrested activist brother, and her mother sitting near the television screen to hear the names of the prisoners. executed every day.
One afternoon, the announcer announced the name of a cousin. His mother’s wailing became the driving force behind his opposition to the executions.
At university in Qazvin, she met her husband, a figure in Iran’s intellectual circles, when she attended an underground class he taught on civil society. When he proposed to her, her parents told him that a political marriage was doomed. Rahmani spent her first wedding anniversary in solitary confinement.
The couple lived in Tehran, where Mohammadi strengthened civil society organizations working for women’s rights, minority rights and defending death row prisoners.
She also wrote columns on women’s rights for newspapers and—in order to earn a reliable income—worked as an engineer for a building inspection company. The government forced the company to fire her in 2008.
The judiciary has convicted Mohammadi five times, arrested 13 times and sentenced a total of 31 years in prison and 154 lashes. His family hasn’t been together as a unit, when one parent wasn’t in jail or exile, since the twins were little.
Mohammadi’s research from prison resulted in a book on the emotional impact of solitary confinement. In December she published a report on the sexual assault and physical abuse of female prisoners.
Her friends marvel at her refusal to be a victim. A singer trained in Persian classical music, she holds events at her pavilion.
“You have to make sense of your life within confinement and keep love alive. I have to keep my eyes on the horizon and the future even though the prison walls are high and close,” Mohammadi said.
By: Farnaz Fassihi
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6750552, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-06-08 22:20:08
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