Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe studies the thick menu, flipping through its pages in search of the different tastes she craves. There’s an eggplant dish he’s had before and wants to try again, a squid tempura, a spinach salad, and the black cod with miso, which he tells me is a must-try.
Although it’s just the two of us at Roka, an elegant Japanese restaurant in London’s Mayfair, we add to our feast sashimi, a spicy yellowfin tuna roll, yellowtail carpaccio with truffle and crab, and black cod balls. “I have been deprived of food,” says the British Iranian citizen who endured a grueling six-year ordeal as a prisoner in Iran, as if to justify her hunger.
For Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who was only brought back to life in March, food was, for a long time, a matter of survival, and having enough is freedom.
During seven months in solitary confinement after she was first arrested on espionage charges in 2016, she ate very little. “The food was horrible. So I ended up having bread, cheese and jam for quite some time, for breakfast, lunch, dinner. They gave us the very small jams you get in hotels, the small ones. The same amount of cheese. Some bread.”
When she was moved to the women’s general ward in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison, food took on a meaning beyond subsistence: it filled time—which she had in abundance—and cemented a sense of community among women prisoners.
Very soon, about two weeks, they told me that we want something from the British government
Rations were still meager, mostly grains and beans and frozen meat, but the prisoners had a kitchen and a store where they bought fresh fruit and vegetables. “We didn’t have anything like an oven to start with, but someone gave money and bought an oven, which was good, so we could make bread and sometimes pizza and little by little we had this recipe book that we could follow and we started making sweets for Nowruz [Iranian new year].”
We are on his 101st day of freedom. It was on March 16 that Zaghari-Ratcliffe, 43, was finally allowed to board a plane from Tehran to be reunited with her now eight-year-old daughter Gabriella and her husband Richard had campaigned tirelessly for his release. , going on hunger strike for 15 days in 2019 and 21 in 2021.
Taken from Tehran airport as she and her 22-month-old daughter tried to board a flight back to London after visiting family, Zaghari-Ratcliffe became a pawn in a geopolitical standoff between the Islamic Republic and the west In recent years, dozens of dual nationals have been arrested in Iran and used as bargaining chips, to be exchanged for Iranians imprisoned abroad or, where appropriate, to secure their release of the £400m debt Britain owed to Iran.
When Zaghari-Ratcliffe was released, her family’s anger was directed not only at Iran but also at successive British governments, which they believed had not done enough to secure her freedom. “I think it should have happened sooner,” he says. “Six years is a long time.”
It’s a sunny day in London and Roka’s terrace is full. I find Zaghari-Ratcliffe sitting at a table by the window inside, in the dining room with an open kitchen. It’s noisy and we have to raise our voices to be heard. He doesn’t seem to care. She is often thoughtful and takes her time to consider her answers. At times, it seems detached, as if describing an experience lived by someone else.
It is when she talks about her daughter’s separation, first at the airport when she was arrested and again three years later, when she and her husband decided that Gabriella should return to London to live with him, that that lets the emotion pass. at one point to cry. “What I could never accept was the separation from my daughter. I could never accept it. I could never understand that we live in a world that allows a mother to be away from her child for six years.”
Born into a religious family and brought up in Tehran, Zaghari-Ratcliffe had studied English literature and worked in Iran for international bodies including the World Health Organization before traveling to the UK on a scholarship in 2007 to study communication with the media. It was then that she met and married her husband Richard, an accountant, and settled in London. After graduating, he worked at an international development charity affiliated with the BBC and then the Thomson Reuters Foundation—jobs that Iran would falsely claim involved training Iranian journalists and, in their twisted logic, conspiring to overthrow the regime
When, as Foreign Secretary in 2017, Boris Johnson mistakenly commented that Zaghari-Ratcliffe was “simply teaching journalism to people”, he inadvertently reinforced the regime’s accusations, potentially adding more years to her prison term. It was the message she gave Johnson when she met him after his release. “I wanted him to know that I actually lived under this shadow of his mistake for four and a half years. Each time they told me, ‘You lied to us, he [Johnson] he told the truth.”
In her first months of imprisonment, locked in a tiny 2m by 2m cell in the southeastern Iranian city of Kerman, with no access to a lawyer or family visits, she was convinced that they caught her in case of mistaken identity. “I was just saying to myself . . . This is wrong. They arrested the wrong person.”
Roka30 North Audley Street, London W1K
Kampachi Salad £18.80 Pirpiri Maki £13.60 Sashimi Sake £10.20 Spinach Salad £7.20 Black Cod Crab Gyoza £16.20 Eggplant Salad £9.20 Fried Squid 15, £50 Black Cod £41.80
Cranberry Juice £3.90 Kombu Spritz £5.60 Eira Still Water x2 £10.80
Savitri Trust £1
Total (including service) £175.96
His captors soon hinted at the likely motive for his detention: to pressure the UK into paying Iran £400 million for an order for Chieftain tanks that was not delivered after the 1979 Islamic revolution.” I never could tell if they arrested me and then made it up or they already knew and then arrested me to feed the wrong agenda. I don’t know. But very, very soon, about two weeks, they told me we want something of the British Government”.
British Foreign Secretaries came and went, and all tried to win her freedom. Parts of the government resisted returning funds to Iran that could be used to finance radical groups in the Middle East. Others were concerned about finding a channel to send the money that would not break the international sanctions regime on Iran. When Liz Truss became Foreign Secretary in September 2021, she seemed more determined than most to secure his release. In the end, along with Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s release, the debt was settled, although the official version remains that the two events were unrelated.
We nibble on the many appetizers spread out on our table, each one deliciously prepared and well presented. While I like raw fish, Zaghari-Ratcliffe is more interested in squid and salads, which I lean closer to.
Sipping his matcha green tea mixed with passion fruit, he recounts the many stunning women he met at Evin. She was arrested with Narges Mohammadi, a human rights activist who fought for the rights of women prisoners, “a lovely, stoic person”, and a group of wildlife conservationists who staged a sit-in in 2019 to protest the ‘murder of demonstrators in 2019. the streets. “The political room was very strong at one point,” he says. “There was power in . . . mobilizing women in prison to defend their rights, to speak out . . . women learned from each other.”
This solidarity helped her survive. But so did his faith. When he was in solitary confinement for the first few months of his prison, he read the Koran, the only book his guards allowed him. “I don’t know how I survived. I’m sure my faith helped me. I had to hold on to something.”
Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s first whiff of freedom was due to the Covid pandemic, which hit Iran hard in its first wave. Fearing that the prisoners would die in their custody, or perhaps that their value would diminish, the authorities placed those with short sentences under house arrest. With a year to go, Zaghari-Ratcliffe received an ankle tag and was sent to her parents’ home in Tehran. “I was the first political prisoner to get the tag on his ankle, to the point where the guards were, oh, what do you think it looks like?” she remembers “I could talk to my daughter every day, see her [on video] every day but I also had to call the prosecutor’s office every week to say, do I have to go back to prison or not? And they said, oh, call us next Saturday. Every Saturday for a year.”
When freedom occurs, especially when you are away for a long time, then the whole battle of adjusting to the new life, and then depression happens.
The tag was removed when he finished his five-year sentence. He could meet friends, visit bookstores, and dine at restaurants, although none served the kind of Japanese cuisine he craved. But with £400m of debt still unpaid, a new chapter of trauma was unfolding.
In April 2021, an Iranian court sentenced her to a year in prison on a new charge of spreading anti-regime propaganda, with another year of travel ban added to it, a decision upheld on appeal a few months later. She wasn’t imprisoned, but she wasn’t free either. “The new sentence was hanging over my head to scare me. They wanted the money,” he suspected. By then, the Trump administration, whose reluctance to engage with Iran could have been an additional obstacle to Britain’s attempts to reach a release deal, was out of office. And in London, Johnson was now prime minister and was keen to bring Zaghari-Ratcliffe…