Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, the taste of freedom after the hell of an Iranian prison

Detained for six years in Iran where she experienced the hell of being imprisoned, British-Iranian Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe is preparing to reunite with her husband and young daughter in London after a tireless fight for her release.

The 43-year-old project manager who worked for the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the philanthropic branch of the news agency of the same name, was “handed over” to the British authorities on Wednesday after years of nightmare.

Her life took a turn on April 3, 2016, when she was arrested with her daughter Gabriella, who was then two years old, at Tehran airport, where she had gone to visit her family.

Accused of conspiring to overthrow the Islamic regime, a position she always denied, she was separated from her daughter, whose British passport was confiscated. In September of that same year, this woman with dual nationality was sentenced to five years in prison.

It was the beginning of a long ordeal, marked by hard periods of isolation in windowless cells, with hunger strikes and deprivation of medical care. For more than a month she slept in the same clothes and thought about suicide.

“Prison was a very hard thing” for her, who “has always had a keen sense of loyalty and justice,” her husband, Richard Ratcliffe, an accountant based in North London, told AFP.

The visits of Gabriella, of whom she had a photograph in her cell in Evin prison in Tehran, allowed this once cheerful woman to cling to life despite being plunged into depression.

In March 2019, the British government granted him diplomatic protection. But before Boris Johnson, who was then foreign minister, made a grave diplomatic error when he claimed in late 2017 that Zaghari-Ratcliffe trained journalists in Iran - which she denied - giving Tehran arguments to retain her.

- "Dolor inconmensurable" -

In October 2019, Zaghari-Ratcliffe suffered a new drama: Gabriella, who since her mother's arrest lived in the house of her maternal grandparents in Iran, returns to London with her father to be schooled. “My pain is immeasurable,” the woman wrote then.

Nazanin tries to fill the gap by calling the little girl every day via videoconference from her parents' home, where she is placed under house arrest in March 2020 due to the covid-19 pandemic.

But the release is followed by a new disappointment: unlike other prisoners she is not amnestied.

Quite the contrary, in April 2021, after having served her sentence, she was again sentenced to one year's imprisonment for having participated in a demonstration in front of the Iranian embassy in London in 2009.

In her husband's view, Nazanin is clearly a “hostage” of the political game around an old debt of 400 million pounds (520 million dollars, 475 million euros) outstanding in the United Kingdom for an old arms contract.

Ratcliffe never left the fight for the release of his wife, whom he met in 2007 in London where she had traveled to continue her studies. To warn of his fate, he went on hunger strike twice.

The British-Iranian studied English literature at the University of Tehran and worked in Iran for Oeneges, such as the Red Cross, and for the World Health Organization (WHO).

Once in the UK, she collaborated with BBC Media Action, an association linked to the audiovisual group, before starting work for Thomson Reuters.

In a letter to her husband published a year after her arrest, she had expressed her disappointment about Iran, of which she was so “proud” but which deprived them of the “possibility of living the golden years” of their daughter.

mpa/acc/me