Why Iran Is Going After Its Best |
On Friday, Iranian security forces dragged Nobel Peace Prize laureate Narges Mohammadi by her hair into a waiting vehicle. Her crime? Attending a memorial service for a human rights lawyer who was recently found dead in murky circumstances in Mashhad, a city in northeast Iran. Witnesses described a scene of chaos and violence: tear gas, batons, mourners beaten as they fled.
Mohammadi, who has spent much of the past two decades in and out of Tehran’s notorious Evin prison, was hauled away along with at least nine other activists. She has been on medical furlough from prison for the past year, and was consistently advocating for greater freedoms for Iranian people and a peaceful transition to democracy. “Violence, whether imposed from outside or from within, is not the answer,” Mohammadi wrote in a recent essay for Time.
She wasn’t the only target. In early December, a court in Tehran sentenced Jafar Panahi, the acclaimed Iranian filmmaker, to one year in prison and a two-year travel ban in absentia, and banned him from membership of political and social groups for “propaganda activities” against the regime. Hours after news came of his sentencing, Panahi, who won the Palme d’Or at Cannes Film Festival in May, won the best director, best original screenplay, and best international feature at Gotham Awards for his film, “It was Just an Accident.” Panahi, who was has been arrested twice and faced bans on making films, plans to return to Iran after his campaign for the Academy Awards in the United States for the his most recent film.
The arrest of Mohammadi and the sentencing of Panahi are not random acts of authoritarian spite but symptoms of a theocracy in existential crisis, the desperate flailing of a regime that is aware it is losing its grip. The Islamic Republic has always been brutal toward its critics but the current wave of repression in Iran has the unmistakable scent of panic.
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Since the 12-day war with Israel in June, Iranian authorities arrested thousands of people they suspected to be spies—including numerous activists, journalists, and ordinary citizens. Tehran has executed