The Nobel Prizes, especially those for peace and literature, have experienced failures over time which, sometimes, have come close to disqualifying them.
What do the names of Henry Kissinger, Barack Obama (barely elected in 2009) or more recently that of Abiy Ahmed (Ethiopian leader who became a ruthless warlord in Tigray), do in a list with diversified, most classic justifications? (diplomats and peace treaties) to the most original (the tree planter, the microcredit guru)… and sometimes even bizarre?
But we are not going to systematically spit in the soup, when the prize comes to reward – the tradition begins in 1935 with the German Carl von Ossietzky, winner in his Nazi prison where he died two and a half years later – courageous opponents to tyranny.
The Nobel Prizes sometimes express desperate causes or wishful thinking (Arafat-Rabin-Peres in 1994), but are not always a failure.
Thus José Ramos-Horta, Nobel Prize winner in 1996, Timorese resistance to the oppression of the Indonesian regime (long supported, incidentally, by a certain Henry Kissinger), told me himself: “Without the Nobel Prize, there would be no there would never have been an independent Timor. »
The 2023 laureate, the Iranian Narges Mohammadi, belongs to this category of Nobel Prizes in the best tradition. A physicist and engineer by training, she quickly embraced activism against the political regime of the ayatollahs.
Apprehended several times from 1998, imprisoned from 2016 to 2020 then continuously since 2021, rewarded by the Oslo Committee “for her fight against the oppression of women in Iran and her fight for the promotion of human rights and freedom for all”, she manages, despite the mistreatment, to get messages out – an article, a written interview… – from the small cell she shares with four other prisoners, in the infamous Evin prison, in north of Tehran.
A bit like the Russian Alexei Navalny did, before his disappearance last week, from his penal colony.
For Mohammadi, everything is linked: political despotism, religious extremism and sexism. His fight for democracy is also a fight for secularism and for peace.
“Tyranny is the other side of war,” she wrote in a column published on December 10 by The world. “I come from a region which, although heir to a rich civilization, is currently trapped in war and prey to the flames of terrorism and extremism. » The new aggressiveness of the Iranian regime internationally (Syria, Gaza, Lebanon) is closely linked, according to her, to “the oppression of a tyrannical and misogynistic religious regime”.
In an interview published Saturday by the Corriere della Sera from Milan, she returns to the popular movement launched in September 2022, after the violent death of Mahsa Amini after police mistreatment, because the young girl wore the veil “incorrectly”.
For those who are hesitant about the centrality of the veil question, she emphasizes: “The obligatory hijab is neither a religious duty, nor a cultural norm, nor, as the regime claims, a means of preserving the dignity and safety of women. It is a tool to enslave and dominate us, one of the foundations of authoritarian theocracy. I fight against the hijab with all my being. »
Then she throws a bottle into the sea: “I expect foreign governments and world public opinion to guarantee human rights and the democratic process in Iran. »
In a few words, everything is said. Despotism is linked to war. To prevent war, fight dictatorship.
The lesson applies well beyond Iran, a regional power and global standard-bearer of religious dictatorship. We could ask the Ukrainians who are fighting against the Russian empire, or the Taiwanese who fear a Chinese attack, to comment and expand on Narges Mohammadi’s words.
No doubt they would find a common thread in all these situations.
François Brousseau is an international affairs columnist at Ici Radio-Canada. [email protected]. This column will return on January 8.