Nobody’s Nobel, Everybody’s Peace
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Medium (Personal)
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/11/12
There’s a sense in which human rights advocacy can be graded by degrees. Some can be informative. Others, advocacy from afar in articles, interviews, donations, professional work. Still more, they can be people in collectives working for dignity and equality. Even more, others can be awardees and/or lightning rods of edges of human rights advocacy. One of those people is Narges Mohammadi.
Mohammadi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2023 by the Norwegian Nobel Committee. She has fought for equality and dignity of women in Iran. She has been convicted 5 times, arrested 13 times, sentenced to 31 years in prison plus 154 lashes. Currently, she is in prison.
Since the Isalamic regime took power in Iran in 1979, people have protested against the brutality and oppression fo the Iranian morality police and the theocratic system. There can be inflection points. One was the murder of Mahsa Jina Amini in September, 2022.
Amini’s murder unleashed the largest political demonstrations since 1979.
20,000 protestors were arrested, thousands were injured, and 500 protestors were killed. Demonstrators created the slogan “Zan — Zendegi — Azadi” meaning “Woman — Life — Freedom.”
Mohammadi has a history in work for gender equality. As a physics student in the 1990s, she wrote for reformation oriented publications as a columnist. She has been involved with the Defenders of Human Rights Center in Tehran, which was founded by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi.
Mohammadi’s arrests started in 2011 for helping activists who had been jailed. She then fought against the death penalty. She was re-arrested in 2015 for fighting against the death penalty.
Once in prison, she began fighting against the sexualized violence and use of torture against political prisoners in Iranian prisons. In protests in Evin prison, in Tehran, Mohammadi assumed leadership of protests, expressing solidarity with inmates.
Even with strict impositions on communications, she got an article out, which went to the New York Times. It was published on the 1-year anniversary of Amini. The central theme has been, while in prison; if more of these political prisoners are inmates, then the more powerful they become.
More recently, she has engaged in a hunger strike. The reason: The prison guards would not take her to the hospital; unless, she wore a headscarf. She and seven other prisoners — those other prisoners out of solidarity — refused to wear the headscarf.
The concern is Mohammadi has a heart condition; the reason for the need to visit the medical professionals. Even still, her fight continues. As with most of these people, the fights would continue with or without the awards.
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In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on a work at www.in-sightpublishing.com.
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