FAITH “saved” Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe during the bleakest period of her imprisonment in her homeland of Iran — experiences which have since led her to “park” the idea of faith, 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 kind of silent violence” during which the intention was “to break you and to dehumanise you”.
She would not return to her home in West Hampstead, London, for six years.
During an evening to mark International Women’s Day, Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe gave a powerful testimony of her arrest, subsequent confinement, imprisonment, detention and eventual release in 2022. More than 900 people turned out to listen 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 about her lived experience, injustice, faith, and hope.
Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe had been visiting her parents in Tehran with her 22-month-old daughter, Gabriella, during 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 always denied.
She described being both “confused” and “confident that they had arrested the wrong person”. Told that “they want me to answer some questions. . . they took the child away and gave her to my family. . . They took me away, and they told my Mum that I would 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 this is very cruel. Nobody will do that to young mother.”
In Kerman, a city she did not know, she was interrogated for hours. “I was accused of trying to overthrow the Iran regime, which I always denied, and they convicted me and sentenced me to five 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 companies 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 does not work in Iran, and she had no dealings with the country in a professional capacity.
In 2017, an Iranian judge overseeing Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s case told her that she remained in prison owing to “a dispute over the interest rates to be paid on historic debts owed to Iran by the UK”. The money was paid by Tehran to Britain to buy 1500 Chieftain tanks that were not 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 not getting involved in campaigning was not going to help her case.
“What was frustrating was, regardless of how good or how bad I was in prison, that was not going to impact my freedom. They were very, very clear that there was something they would 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 might be released, Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe clung to the only personal item allowed in her confinement: the Bible.
“I was lonely and scared and uncertain of what was going to happen. I had to find something to hold on to and faith was the nearest thing I could find. . . Trying to read and to talk to God, it did help me a lot.” She felt protected, she says.
On her eventual release to the UK, however, emerging into a very different world to the one which she had known before her detention, this relationship changed, she says. “We live in a very kind of messed up world, with the world being, in my opinion, a bad place. Let’s put it that way.
“I am questioning, and I think we all go through a journey of . . . questioning the things that are happening. And I have parked the idea of my faith. I still believe in love and humanity and helping other people, but from a different perspective than . . . when I was in prison. But I think it was my faith that actually 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 of the prisoners had given her an old rosary, which she kept with her. Now, it is “put away” somewhere safe, “because 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 hold 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 was free again because I was allowed to talk to people. And there were shelves and shelves of books . . . a kitchen, we could cook. . . I was like, OK, so I can survive this. Because there are people, there is 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 diverse group of professions, and of all faiths and none, but “everyone was equal” in their imprisonment, their daily work and rations, she says.
The routine, eating quickly and cleaning the kitchen after meals, became so ingrained, Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe says, that it took her a “long time” to realise that this was a cause for anxiety, after her release, when hosting friends and family for lunch or dinner.
“It took me a long time to understand that my mind is in prison, whereas my body is free, or like in my dreams — I often talk about it — when I was in prison, I would have a lot of nightmares, and I was being attacked, chased by someone, but then in the moment I couldn’t escape from something, I would have wings and I would just fly and rise above it. . .
“In my freedom, I have nightmares that I am stuck in a very small place and I can’t find my way out. I am stuck, whereas I am actually free. So there’s a lot of confusion that my body and my mind cannot really differentiate where I was or where I am.”
Home remains the safest place, she says, but “freedom has been a bumpy road, and I didn’t know that; I thought when I came back, I would pick up where I left. I was wrong.”
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 she was kept waiting, with another British-Iranian national, Anoosheh Ashoori, for several hours.
Months after her release, she says, her body “shut down” and she spent a lot of time in hospital trying to understand her symptoms. “My body was telling me that you have put me in so much stress and agony for such a long time, I’m not going to deal with it anymore. . . Psychologically, I didn’t realise that there is so much trauma, PTSD, kind of stress going into my body.”
HOPE, she told Bishop Gorham, has always come from her daughter, who had been living with her grandparents in Tehran and, after her confinement, visited her mother in prison. “I would make pancakes for her. I would 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 usually not allowed.”
In 2019, Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe and her husband Richard Ratcliffe made the decision to send Gabriella, then five, home to live with her father and go to school in London.
“That was a very tough decision. . . It was probably one of the hardest decisions that I have ever made in my life. . . This is something that no parent should ever go through, that you decide that you’re going to send your child away because 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 are disconnected from the outside world is strong: “They can tell you all sorts of lies: that you’re forgotten, nobody cares about you, nobody even knows where you are. . . That is traumatizing, but also that devastates you. But then, on the other side, if you know that there are some people who are fighting for your freedom, it just gives you a lot of hope and power, and it gives you a lot of energy to keep 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 daily in front of a picture of Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe and her family.
Mr Ratcliffe joined his wife for a Q&A from the audience at the end of the talk, which probed the political context of her detainment. In these six years, there were 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 action over her case.
When Boris Johnson was Foreign Secretary in 2017, however, speaking in 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 did not, 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 that time wasn’t going to solve a problem; it wasn’t even going to make me feel better about it.
“I wanted him to listen to what happened to me when he made that comment, and how I lived under the shadow of his mistake for four years. . . Every time I was taken to meet the interrogators, they told me that, all those months, you lied to us, your Foreign Secretary said the truth, and I felt paralysed for a very long time trying to defend myself, saying that this is not true.”
Mr Ratcliffe said: “The Government’s approach to hostage taking and arbitrary detention . . . is not to recognise the problem, to try and find a safe solution. That’s the democratic instinct. It’s not a human rights instinct. So it does mean that they try to keep families apart from each other and they try to suppress cases. And I certainly find that personally quite tricky. . .
“I’ve always hoped that lessons would have been learned from Nazanin’s case. I’m not sure, systemically, many have.”
During the pandemic, Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe was among the 85,000 prisoners who had tested negative for the virus who had posted bail. She was required to wear an ankle tag and remain within 300 metres of her parents’ home in Tehran, where she remained until her sentence had been served. In 2021, however, she was sentenced to a further year in prison, accused of taking part in a protest in London 12 years before, and of speaking to the BBC Persian service.
The Bishop of Chelmsford, Dr Guli Francis-Dehqani, herself Iranian, spoke out strongly on behalf of Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe in the House of Lords at the time, describing her as “a pawn in a political struggle between Britain and Iran”, and calling her detention “a terrible wrong” that must 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, “always be drawn to Tehran as the place that I was born, with the mountains and the beautiful scenery.
“But it’s very sad that for something that had nothing to do with me, this whole story that predates my birth — I was born in 1979, the debt was 1974 . . . I wasn’t even born when that discussion was happening. Why do I have to pay the price for something has nothing to do with me? I am forced to live in exile.”
BISHOP Gorham concluded the discussion by asking the couple what their message would be to Christians searching for hope at the start of Lent.
Mr Ratcliffe referred to the Amnesty symbol of the lighted candle, representing the witness of all those who campaigned, prayed, and hoped with the family through their ordeal, including strangers — a kindness, he says, that they could 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 in the Trinity Chapel at 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 light on political hostages and helped her case. “If you know someone who has been to prison, just mention their names and tell their story and try to shine a light on their ordeal.”
