Nobel Peace Prize: Iranian Narges Mohammadi ends hunger strike against compulsory hijab

Narges Mohammadi, the Iranian activist jailed in Tehran and winner of the 2023 Nobel Peace Prize, has ended her hunger strike, her family said Friday. The 50-year-old woman, who has been fighting against the death penalty and the Islamic Republic’s mandatory hijab for women for more than two decades, went on a hunger strike on November 6 because she refused to wear a hijab during her transfer. in hospital. Due to heart problems, she required urgent hospitalization.

She was finally able to be transferred there “without the mandatory headscarf,” she wrote in an Instagram message sent to her loved ones. “After I was hospitalized without cover and returned to prison, I stopped my hunger strike,” she said.

“The government was afraid that they would see me without a veil”

Friends and relatives waiting for him outside the hospital were briefly arrested and questioned, and their cameras were confiscated. “The government was afraid that I would be seen without my veil,” says Narges Mohammadi. “Until the obligation to wear the hijab is lifted, I will continue to go uncovered, and you will tremble at the sight of women without a veil,” she insisted.

Narges Mohammadi, repeatedly arrested and sentenced over decades and detained in Tehran’s Evin Prison since 2021, was awarded the Nobel Prize for her “struggle against the oppression of women in Iran and her struggle to promote human rights and freedom for all.” . She managed to secretly send a message of gratitude from her cell in Tehran, in which she expressed her “most sincere gratitude”: “The victory is not easy, but it is obvious. » Read in French by his daughter Kiana Rahmani, it was published on the official website of the Nobel Prize.

The 51-year-old journalist and activist is one of the main faces of the Women, Life, Freedom uprising in Iran. The movement, which saw women remove their veils, cut their hair and demonstrate in the streets, was sparked by the death last year of 22-year-old Iranian Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini after she was arrested in Tehran for failing to comply with the law. strict Islamic dress code. The protest was harshly suppressed.