AILSA CHANG, HOST:
The situation for Iranian people is more dangerous now than before the war. That's a quote from Nobel Laureate Narges Mohammadi, writing to Wall Street Journal reporter Sune Engel Rasmussen. The war that Mohammadi is referring to is the 12-day war between Israel and Iran. Narges Mohammadi said she was deeply concerned for activists in Iran and about government repression in the coming days. And Sune Engel Rasmussen joins us now to talk about his interview. Welcome.
SUNE ENGEL RASMUSSEN: Thanks so much. Thanks for having me.
CHANG: Well, thank you for being with us. Can you just tell us more about Narges Mohammadi? She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2023, right? Can you tell us more about her activism?
RASMUSSEN: Yeah. Narges Mohammadi has been one of the most prominent human rights defenders in Iran of the past three decades. She has been kind of a tireless defender not just of women's rights, but of human rights and democracy in general. She has been arrested a number of times. She's been tried nine times. She's received over 36 years in total in prison sentences and has served about 10 years so far. But she's stayed in the country. And that has endeared her to a lot of Iranians, as well, who can see the courage from this person sort of staying in the country even while the regime has threatened her for decades.
CHANG: Yeah. Well, now she's expressing concern that repression in Iran will intensify even more in the coming days. Why does she feel that way?
RASMUSSEN: She's worried that the Iranian state will do what it's done in the past, which is respond to both pressure from external enemies, but also pressure from within, with repression, basically - with throwing activists in jail and stifling any signs of dissent in the country.
The reaction from the Iranian state following the war has been to arrest a lot of people on accusations of spying for Israel. Six people at least have already been executed after swift trials. And the crimes that the state is accusing these people of having committed is either spying for Israel or smuggling drones into the country that were used during the first wave of attacks. But we've seen in the past that allegations of espionage on behalf of foreign powers has also been used against political dissidents inside Iran.
CHANG: Well, I saw that your interview was conducted in writing because of poor internet connections. And during the war, there was this near-total communication blackout that was imposed on people in Iran. What did Mohammadi have to say about that blackout?
RASMUSSEN: Yeah, it actually took several days just to get this interview. There was especially a period of three or four days where it was very difficult to get in touch with anyone inside the country. That meant that it was difficult for outsiders, for journalists like myself, to accurately report the toll of the war in Iran, both the civilian toll but also the damage done to Iranian military or nuclear facilities. But then it also meant for Narges Mohammadi and her fellow activists, or just Iranians in general, that it was difficult for them to communicate internally. It was difficult to guess whether you should be evacuating from the area where you lived in. And it was also nearly impossible for activists to organize if they had wanted to mount any kind of opposition or any kind of activism against the state or even protests against the Israeli war.
So I think it's important also to understand that a lot of Iranians, like Narges Mohammadi - even though she's spent decades fighting the Islamic Republic of Iran, she doesn't want a foreign power to topple the regime because she thinks that any kind of regime change in Iran that is orchestrated by a foreign power would be illegitimate. And in that sense, she says that Iranians were sort of caught between both fighting their own government but then also having a foreign power fighting a war against themselves.
CHANG: Well, with respect to the fight for democratic change in Iran, how much does Mohammadi think that this war has impacted that progress?
RASMUSSEN: So she says it's impacted Iran's fight for democracy in two ways. One impact that it's had is the one we just discussed, where the Iranian state is likely to intensify its repression of dissent inside the country. But she also says that the war itself - like the Israeli war and, at the end, also the American war against Iran - damaged the struggle for democracy in the sense that it destroyed pillars of society that any potential future democracy would build on. So the Israeli attacks - yes, they targeted military installations and nuclear facilities, but they also hit residential areas in Tehran. They also hit areas of the capital and other big cities that are important for the civilian economy. And it weakened a population that would otherwise sort of be the driving force in any kind of push for democracy.
CHANG: Sune Engel Rasmussen, Wall Street Journal reporter, telling us about his interview with Iranian Nobel Laureate Narges Mohammadi. Thank you very much.
RASMUSSEN: You're very welcome. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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