The teenage children of jailed Iranian Nobel Peace Prize winner Narges Mohammadi are scared they will never see their mother again, but said they were extremely happy to her struggle for women’s rights as they prepared to recieve the award on her behalf on Sunday. Mohammadi, 51, who is serving many sentences in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison on charges involving spreading propaganda, got the award on Oct. 6 in a rebuke to Tehran’s theocratic leaders, prompting the Islamic Republic’s condemnation.
Her twin 17-year-old children, Ali and Kiana Rahman, who reside in exile in Paris, are due to recieve the award at Oslo’s City Hall and give the Nobel Peace Prize lecture on her behalf. In a letter smuggled out of prison and printed by Swedish broadcaster SVT this week, Mohammadi said she would go on to fight for human rights even if it’s consequences were her demise. But she said she missed her children the most. Kiana Rahman, who last got to view her mother eight years ago, revealed: “When it comes to meeting her again, personally I am surely negative.”
“Might be I see her in 30 or 40 years, but I feel that I won’t get to have a view of her again,” she revealed to a press conference via a translator. “But that doesn’t matter because my mother will always live on in my heart and with my family.” Mohammadi was awarded the Peace Prize just over a year after 22-year-old Mahsa Amini died in the custody of Iranian morality police after being detained for deliberately disturbing the rules of wearing a hijab, an Islamic head scarf. Amini’s death provoked months of nationwide protests that posed the hugest obstacle to Shi’ite clerical rule in years, and was encountered with a deadly security crackdown costing many hundred lives.