FAITH “saved” Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe through the bleakest period of her imprisonment in her homeland of Iran — experiences which have since led her to “park” the thought of religion, a public audience in Salisbury Cathedral heard on Saturday evening.
Shortly after her arrest at Tehran airport on 3 April 2016, the British-Iranian mother spent nine months in solitary confinement, first in Kerman province, then in Evin prison in Tehran — an ordeal she describes as “agonising . . . a form of silent violence” during which the intention was “to interrupt you and to dehumanise you”.
She wouldn’t return to her home in West Hampstead, London, for six years.
During a night to mark International Women’s Day, Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe gave a strong testimony of her arrest, subsequent confinement, imprisonment, detention and eventual release in 2022. More than 900 people turned out to hearken to the free event, billed as a “conversation” between Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe and the Bishop of Sherborne, the Rt Revd Karen Gorham, who asked considered questions on her lived experience, injustice, faith, and hope.
Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe had been visiting her parents in Tehran together with her 22-month-old daughter, Gabriella, through the Persian New Year in 2016. She was arrested before boarding a flight back to the UK, on charges of plotting to overthrow Iran’s government, which she has at all times denied.
She described being each “confused” and “confident that they’d arrested the flawed person”. Told that “they need me to reply some questions. . . they took the kid away and gave her to my family. . . They took me away, they usually told my Mum that I can be coming back next morning.
“That next morning was about five years later.”
Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe had, until then, only spent one night away from her daughter and was still breastfeeding. “I felt this is that this could be very cruel. Nobody will try this to young mother.”
In Kerman, a city she didn’t know, she was interrogated for hours. “I used to be accused of attempting to overthrow the Iran regime, which I at all times denied, they usually convicted me and sentenced me to 5 years in prison.”
On 18 May 2016, she was transferred to Evin prison in Tehran. A month later, the state news agency in Iran said that: “Through membership in foreign corporations and institutions, she has participated in designing and executing media and cyber plots with the aim of the peaceful overthrow of the Islamic Republic establishment.”
At the time of her arrest, Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe was working for the Thomson Reuters Foundation, which provides journalism training and promotes human rights. It doesn’t work in Iran, and he or she had no dealings with the country in an expert capability.
In 2017, an Iranian judge overseeing Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s case told her that she remained in prison owing to “a dispute over the rates of interest to be paid on historic debts owed to Iran by the UK”. The money was paid by Tehran to Britain to purchase 1500 Chieftain tanks that weren’t delivered after Iran’s Islamic Revolution in 1979.
“To be a political prisoner in Iran is different from being a political hostage,” she said. As a political hostage, keeping your head down and never getting involved in campaigning was not going to assist her case.
“What was frustrating was, no matter how good or how bad I used to be in prison, that was not going to affect my freedom. They were very, very clear that there was something they’d want of the British government, and until [they got it], they’re not going to let me go.”
IN SOLITARY confinement, separated from her daughter, confused as to why she had been detained, believing this to be a mistake, having no idea what was happening or when she could be released, Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe clung to the one personal item allowed in her confinement: the Bible.
“I used to be lonely and scared and unsure of what was going to occur. I had to seek out something to carry on to and faith was the closest thing I could find. . . Trying to read and to confer with God, it did help me rather a lot.” She felt protected, she says.
On her eventual release to the UK, nevertheless, emerging right into a very different world to the one which she had known before her detention, this relationship modified, she says. “We live in a really form of tousled world, with the world being, for my part, a foul place. Let’s put it that way.
“I’m questioning, and I believe all of us undergo a journey of . . . questioning the things which are happening. And I actually have parked the thought of my faith. I still imagine in love and humanity and helping other people, but from a unique perspective than . . . after I was in prison. But I believe it was my faith that really saved me.”
She was “scared for days and days and days” and the sound of her own heartbeat kept her awake at night. When she was in Kerman, one among the prisoners had given her an old rosary, which she kept together with her. Now, it’s “put away” somewhere secure, “since it was bringing back too many sad memories.”
Her relationship with faith was further complicated by the prison guards, who would, she says, tell her that they were praying for her release, while also continuing to carry her captive. This elicited “strange” and “contradictory” feelings.
On Christmas Day 2016, she was moved from confinement to a general ward, where, she says, “I felt like I used to be free again because I used to be allowed to confer with people. And there have been shelves and shelves of books . . . a kitchen, we could cook. . . I used to be like, OK, so I can survive this. Because there are people, there may be interaction.”
In Kerman, she had been “misplaced” with women on harmful drugs charges, she says. In Evin prison, after confinement, she was detained with about 40 other political prisoners — a various group of professions, and of all faiths and none, but “everyone was equal” of their imprisonment, their each day work and rations, she says.
The routine, eating quickly and cleansing the kitchen after meals, became so ingrained, Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe says, that it took her a “very long time” to understand that this was a cause for anxiety, after her release, when hosting family and friends for lunch or dinner.
“It took me an extended time to know that my mind is in prison, whereas my body is free, or like in my dreams — I often speak about it — after I was in prison, I might have quite a lot of nightmares, and I used to be being attacked, chased by someone, but then within the moment I couldn’t escape from something, I might have wings and I might just fly and rise above it. . .
“In my freedom, I actually have nightmares that I’m stuck in a really small place and I can’t find my way out. I’m stuck, whereas I’m actually free. So there’s quite a lot of confusion that my body and my mind cannot really differentiate where I used to be or where I’m.”
Home stays the safest place, she says, but “freedom has been a bumpy road, and I didn’t know that; I believed after I got here back, I might pick up where I left. I used to be flawed.”
Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe was released in March 2022 after the UK settled the historic debt to Iran. The moment was, she says, “bittersweet” and “surreal”. Her passport had expired during her imprisonment, renewing it was complex, and he or she was kept waiting, with one other British-Iranian national, Anoosheh Ashoori, for several hours.
Months after her release, she says, her body “shut down” and he or she spent quite a lot of time in hospital trying to know her symptoms. “My body was telling me that you may have put me in a lot stress and agony for such an extended time, I’m not going to cope with it anymore. . . Psychologically, I didn’t realise that there may be a lot trauma, PTSD, form of stress going into my body.”
HOPE, she told Bishop Gorham, has at all times come from her daughter, who had been living together with her grandparents in Tehran and, after her confinement, visited her mother in prison. “I might make pancakes for her. I might take them to the visit room. Then, she was very tiny, little. They allowed me to have crayons and colouring pencils and things like that, which is generally not allowed.”
In 2019, Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe and her husband Richard Ratcliffe made the choice to send Gabriella, then five, home to live together with her father and go to high school in London.
“That was a really tough decision. . . It was probably one among the toughest decisions that I actually have ever made in my life. . . This is something that no parent should ever undergo, that you just resolve that you just’re going to send your child away since it’s best for her. . . I remember when she left, I realised that, up until then, she was the one and only source of power and force that kept me going.”
In solitary confinement, she says, the narrative that you just are disconnected from the surface world is powerful: “They can let you know all varieties of lies: that you just’re forgotten, no person cares about you, no person even knows where you might be. . . That is traumatizing, but additionally that devastates you. But then, on the opposite side, when you know that there are some people who find themselves fighting to your freedom, it just gives you quite a lot of hope and power, and it gives you quite a lot of energy to maintain going.”
Mr Ratcliffe joined forces with charities including Amnesty International to campaign tirelessly for her release, including lobbying the British Government to intervene. He staged two hunger strikes during her detention. Vigils were held at St Mary’s, Greenham, where friends worshipped, and where a lighted candle burned each day in front of an image of Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe and her family.
Mr Ratcliffe joined his wife for a Q&A from the audience at the top of the talk, which probed the political context of her detainment. In these six years, there have been five Foreign Secretaries. Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe was complimentary of Jeremy Hunt, who provided her with diplomatic protection and who, later, was critical of the Government’s lack of motion over her case.
When Boris Johnson was Foreign Secretary in 2017, nevertheless, speaking within the House of Commons, he erroneously said that Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe had been training journalists in Iran.
In May 2022, she met with Mr Johnson, then Prime Minister. She didn’t, she says, receive an apology from him for his handling of her detention or his erroneous comments in parliament. “He didn’t apologise, but I wasn’t after an apology. I mean, having an apology from Boris Johnson at the moment wasn’t going to unravel an issue; it wasn’t even going to make me feel higher about it.
“I wanted him to hearken to what happened to me when he made that comment, and the way I lived under the shadow of his mistake for 4 years. . . Every time I used to be taken to satisfy the interrogators, they told me that, all those months, you lied to us, your Foreign Secretary said the reality, and I felt paralysed for a really very long time attempting to defend myself, saying that this is just not true.”
Mr Ratcliffe said: “The Government’s approach to hostage taking and arbitrary detention . . . is just not to recognise the issue, to attempt to discover a secure solution. That’s the democratic instinct. It’s not a human rights instinct. So it does mean that they struggle to maintain families other than one another they usually attempt to suppress cases. And I definitely find that personally quite tricky. . .
“I’ve at all times hoped that lessons would have been learned from Nazanin’s case. I’m undecided, systemically, many have.”
During the pandemic, Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe was among the many 85,000 prisoners who had tested negative for the virus who had posted bail. She was required to wear an ankle tag and remain inside 300 metres of her parents’ home in Tehran, where she remained until her sentence had been served. In 2021, nevertheless, she was sentenced to an extra 12 months in prison, accused of participating in a protest in London 12 years before, and of chatting with the BBC Persian service.
The Bishop of Chelmsford, Dr Guli Francis-Dehqani, herself Iranian, spoke out strongly on behalf of Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe within the House of Lords on the time, describing her as “a pawn in a political struggle between Britain and Iran”, and calling her detention “a terrible flawed” that should be put right.
The Bishop, Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe says, is an “amazing person” who, like her, has been unable to return to her homeland. Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe would, she says, “at all times be drawn to Tehran because the place that I used to be born, with the mountains and the gorgeous scenery.
“But it’s very sad that for something that had nothing to do with me, this whole story that predates my birth — I used to be born in 1979, the debt was 1974 . . . I wasn’t even born when that discussion was happening. Why do I actually have to pay the value for something has nothing to do with me? I’m forced to live in exile.”
BISHOP Gorham concluded the discussion by asking the couple what their message can be to Christians looking for hope initially of Lent.
Mr Ratcliffe referred to the Amnesty symbol of the lighted candle, representing the witness of all those that campaigned, prayed, and hoped with the family through their ordeal, including strangers — a kindness, he says, that they may never begin to repay, but which he hoped to “pay forward” by supporting other families in similar situations.
The free event raised money for the charity Hostage International, which facilitates this support.
Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe referred to the Prisoners of Conscience Window within the Trinity Chapel on the eastern end of Salisbury Cathedral, and the importance of raising awareness by speaking about modern prisoners of conscience. While she was generally “against” social media, it had shone a lightweight on political hostages and helped her case. “If someone who has been to prison, just mention their names and tell their story and check out to shine a lightweight on their ordeal.”
