The long tentacle of terror
Freed at last from captivity in Tehran, Nazanin still has reason to fear
At her press conference in Britain following her release from Iran where she had been jailed for six years on trumped-up spying charges, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe startled observers by criticising the British government for her incarceration. She said:
I was told many, many times that, ‘oh, we're going to get you home'. But that never happened. I mean, how many Foreign Secretaries is it going to take for someone to get out? Five? It should have been one of them eventually. So now, here we are. What happened now should have happened six years ago.
Her remarks provoked a media storm. Commentators accused her of displaying ingratitude to the British government over her release. That provoked in turn accusations that such criticism of a deeply traumatised victim was vile and disgusting.
But in all this sound and fury over her remarks, hasn’t everyone missed the glaringly obvious point?
When Nazanin was released, her husband, Richard Ratcliffe, disclosed a telling detail. As The Times (£) reported:
Ratcliffe revealed that on Sunday his wife had been summoned to Iran’s intelligence ministry and given her British and Iranian passports. Officials from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps “put the fear of God in her” and said: “You need to tread very carefully and your husband needs to tread carefully.” Ratcliffe said: “They said, ‘If you co-operate you’re going to be on a plane tomorrow,’ and so she co-operated.”
From this final display of Iranian menace, it doesn’t take much thought to realise the weapon the regime can still use against her. For her parents remain in Tehran.
It’s reasonable to assume that, when the Revolutionary Guards “put the fear of God into her,” they told her what she could and could not say when she returned to Britain.
They would have wanted her to shift the focus away from the way they had ill-treated her as their hostage — her solitary confinement, her torture, the mental cruelty of releasing her only to re-incarcerate her and charge her with new crimes after the sentence had been completed. They would have wanted her to present her experience instead as something that could have been solved years ago if only Britain had paid the £400 million debt that it owed for an unfulfilled weapons deal in the 1970s (and which has now apparently been paid).
Now look at what Nazanin actually said and didn’t say at that press conference.
Discussion of the debt, she said, had come up early in her detention.
“So I didn’t know the details at the time,” she said. “But I think it was the week two or week three that I was arrested, like six years ago, that they told me, ‘We want something off the Brits. We will not let you go until such time that we get it.’ And they did keep their promise.”
She declined to speak about the months she had spent in solitary confinement or about the psychological and physical torture to which she had been subjected.
“Over the past six years, it has been cruel, what happened to me,” she said. “It’s always going to haunt me. There is no other way round it. It will always be with me.”
That was it. Not a word of condemnation of the Iranians.
In other words, she framed her story as a cruel and dreadful experience to which she had been subjected for six years because Britain hadn’t paid the debt it owed Iran.
We don’t know the full story behind the non-payment of that debt. But the actual reason that she and the other dual nationals were incarcerated for so long (and one of them, Morad Tahbaz, an Iranian, US and British citizen who was briefly let out of prison when Nazanin was freed but was then cruelly re-imprisoned) was because the Iranian regime intended to use them in the lethal game of three-dimensional chess it has been playing for decades in its war against the west.
The people responsible for her ordeal were those running the revolutionary Islamic regime in Tehran. Their absence from the story she has chosen to tell strongly suggests that while Nazanin is at last free, her parents are now Iran’s hostages — and so in a sense she still is, too.
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