“Victory is not easy, but it is certain,” imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize winner and women’s rights activist Narges Mohammadi, said in a message smuggled out of her Tehran cell published late Tuesday.
In the message, read out in French by her daughter, Kiana Rahmani, and posted on the official Nobel website, the 51-year-old activist and journalist expressed “sincere gratitude” to the Norwegian Nobel committee.
Mohammadi, who was approved in early October “for her fight against the oppression of women in Iran,” criticized Iranian officials and criticized the country’s laws requiring women to cover their heads.
“The compulsory hijab is a means of control and repression imposed on the society and on which the continuation and survival of this authoritarian religious regime depends,” she declared through her 17-year-old daughter, who has taken refuge in France along with her family.
She condemned “a regime that has institutionalized deprivation and poverty in society for forty-five years”, adding that it was “built on lies, deception, cunning, and intimidation”.
Narges Mohammadi, a woman leading the “Woman, Life, Freedom” rebellion in Iran, has been arrested thirteen times, condemned five times to a total of thirty-one years in jail and 154 lashes, and imprisoned one more since 2021.
