What are you willing to risk to dress the way you want, or speak your mind? This year’s Nobel Prize asks us all such questions. Hundreds of thousands of Iranians have done so in large demonstrations. Girls and women experience it every time they leave the house in Iran, without being covered as the authorities require. They can punish them with law, religion and whip in hand. Narges Mohammadi has answered for them all, perhaps for all of us. She is willing to do whatever it takes to give others the opportunities she doesn’t have or hasn’t had. The Nobel Prize this year does not go to a fully negotiated peace agreement or a hard-working international politician. It goes to an activist who is imprisoned, living at the mercy of a very violent regime. Bare walls, cramped prison cells for a fight she believes in. She herself writes about it in her book, White Torture. How she feels this on her body for the first time, how the doors close behind her and how the uncertainty of what might happen to her is like a deadly poison. We can only speculate how she is doing now, sitting in the terrible Evin prison in the north of Tehran. In a short statement, Mohammadi herself says that this is recognition for the fight she is leading. Her family and other activists hope the award can protect her. Even so, I still feel a sense of uneasiness about what will happen to her in prison, but then I’m not made of the same material as her either. I have seen the courage of Mohammadi and her fellow sisters up close. Shirin Ebadi received the Nobel Prize in 2003 for the same commitment, the same struggle. When she received the award, she was in Paris, but flew back to Iran soon after. I was on the same plane and remember how she and the other women put on the hijab before we landed and how she put it on before I interviewed her on the plane. What was waiting for her at the airport? Police? The Revolutionary Guard? It was neither, but instead a sea of white-clad women just outside the airport. It was getting late at night, it was still quite warm and a yellowish light was around the airport. Ebadi was hailed as a homecoming hero. The contrast was nevertheless great to her everyday life, the work she led and the home she had in a small cul-de-sac in the capital. It was a long way off, even 20 years ago, although she had more leeway than today’s activists. In 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini flew this same route that Ebadi did, from Paris to Tehran and took over power in the country after a bloody revolution against the Shah. What began as a joint revolt against an authoritarian leader ended with all power being concentrated in the hands of the religious leaders who established a Shia Islamic government. The left-wing activists and the other democracy activists either ended up in prison, were killed or driven into exile. Since then, the religious leaders have ruled the country with all their might and brutal violence, but they have oscillated between different phases of openness and closedness. In 2003, when Ebadi returned to, the country was in a period of reform. It was possible both for Ebadi to work there, and a visa was given to a journalist like me. Then Mohammed Khatami was president of the country and it was believed that it was possible to change the regime from within. Iranians I spoke to also had the violence and chaos that followed the 1979 revolution quite fresh in their minds and shrank from chaos. The reform-friendly forces are now politically weakened, the commitment to change the regime takes place mostly at street level, the level of violence is higher and it is even more difficult for journalists to report on what is happening in the country. Mohammadi is deputy leader of Ebadi’s organization and has continued the fight on her behalf inside the country. In this sense, there is also a connection in the history of the Nobel Prize, although the struggle has so far not led, on the contrary, it has become tougher. It has flared up on various occasions. In 2009 there was a big protest wave, then the reactions after Jina Mahsa Amini last year. The regime has so far survived both and cracked down hard on all opposition. Mohammadi is one of many activists who are now in prison. The brutal treatment 16-year-old Armita was subjected to by the moral police recently shows what they are risking and how far they have to go. But with the Nobel Prize, they now receive international support and attention in what for most of them is a lonely and dangerous struggle. Their slogan rang out today all over the world: Women, life, freedom, said Nobel Committee leader Berit Reiss-Andersen in Farsi when she was going to tell the world about this year’s prize. Behind the slogans are blood, sweat, pain and an indomitable courage.
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A clear Nobel Prize for a brave woman – Speech
