May 20, 2022
before going back to a cell in Qarchak prison. When not in prison, she lives
alone as her husband and two children have moved to Switzerland for safety
Narges Mohammadi has given up her refusal to return to prison as ordered by the regime and voluntarily returned to her cell April 13, seven weeks overdue.
She told Radio Farda she changed her course because the Judiciary threatened to seize her bail, which was her family home.
On March 5, Mohammadi, who turned 50 on April 21, was ordered back to Qarchak Prison, generally considered a hell-hole much worse than Evin Prison, where most political prisoners are confined.
On March 23, she posted on Instagram that she was still refusing to go to Qarchak and would continue to do so as long as the authorities did not try to seize the bail posted for her. The bail was reported to be the family home to meet the court-set bail of 5 billion rials (about $20,000).
The regime, not surprisingly, then began procedures to seize the bail.
In a January trial that her husband, Taghi Rahmani, said lasted five minutes, she was sentenced to eight years and 70 lashes by a Revolutionary Court. Rahmani said the judge specifically mentioned as her crimes her recent nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize by two Norwegian parliamentarians meaning she was being punished for what someone else did and her efforts to expose Iran’s use of prolonged solitary confinement.
But within a few weeks, she was given a medical furlough to undergo open-heart surgery.
Before her return to prison, Mohammadi gave telephone interviews to The Washington Post and Iran International in which she criticized US sanctions for hurting the Iranian middle class because sanctions are not targeted on the regime.
Mohammadi said Western sanctions have failed to weaken Iran’s oppressive regime but led to a “disastrous weakening of the Iranian middle class as the driving force of democracy.”
The sanctions failed, she argued, because they were not “targeted” and Western politicians did not have adequate knowledge of the Islamic Republic’s system.
“It appears that the West lacks a proper understanding of the hypocrisy of the Islamic Republic and that it is a dictatorial government with systemic financial corruption that can use various tools [of repression],” she told Iran International.
Mohammadi also said she believes the international community has the duty to target “any person or group” in the Islamic Republic that violates human rights to support the Iranian people and civil society and one of the ways to target the violators is using sanctions.
She told The Washington Post, “The West must respect Iran’s civil society, commit itself to the issue of democracy in my country and help us work toward achieving it. Make human rights a priority in negotiations.”
“Economic sanctions, because they weren’t targeted or based on adequate knowledge of the state, weakened Iranians economically more than they weakened the Iranian regime,” she said. “In fact, they strengthened the Iranian regime, and hardline individuals and groups in the country, including the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. This did not benefit democracy in Iran.”
Mounting sanctions decimated Iran’s middle class, which is the cradle of civil society in any country, she argued, while President Trump’s blanket travel ban, now canceled by the Biden Administration, cut off the United States’ ability to engage directly with Iranian civil society, creating ever more gaps in American understanding of Iranians’ everyday struggles.
US sanctions are basically of two kinds. The first hits individuals and entities specifically named by the US. They deny visas to the named individuals and freeze any assets in the United States of the individuals or entities named. These are just token sanctions since regime agents aren’t likely to want to travel to the US or have assets there. In fact, the US government has not indicated that any assets have been frozen as a result of these sanctions.
The other category of sanctions is very broad. These sanctions apply to Iran as a whole most significantly the ban on using the US dollar in international transactions. Iran is also suspended from membership in SWIFT, the international clearing house for financial transactions in any currency. They impact all Iranians by making imports more expensive on average, about 30 percent more costly than before sanctions.
Mohammadi was first arrested in 1998 and has been in-and-out of prison multiple times since then. Most of her prison time was brief but she was held continuously from 2015 to 2020.
Her principal offense appears to be that she was one of the officers of the Human Rights Defenders Office, which was founded by Shirin Ebadi with the funds she was awarded along with her Nobel Prize in 2003.
