Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s husband Richard writes for Big Issue: ‘Ours is a story about people’

In Spring 2016, British-Iranian author Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe took her daughter Gabriella to Iran to visit family.

Zaghari-Ratcliffe was arrested at the airport as she was about to board her return flight. She was found guilty on charges of ‘membership of an illegal group’ – apparently in relation to her work for the Thomson Reuters Foundation, a UK-based media charity – and given a five-year prison sentence. She was falsely accused of accused of attempting to overthrow the Iranian regime, of working for MI6, “empowering women” and earning money illegally. Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s husband campaigned tirelessly for her release and spoke out about the UK government’s lack of action, related to their relations with Iran, while Gabriella was looked after by her grandparents.

In March 2022, then-foreign secretary Liz Truss announced that the UK would repay their debt to Iran – nearly £400 million, dating back to a 1971 arms deal. Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was allowed to fly home the same day.

The BBC drama Prisoner 951 tells her and her family’s story, as husband Richard Ratcliffe explains for Big Issue.

This week the final episode of Prisoner 951, a drama on Nazanin’s story and our family campaign to get her home, is broadcast.

There has been a vulnerability in our house, an unsureness over how people will understand. We have been out of the public eye a while, but still have the memories of how it felt to be so exposed and yet unnoticed, dark moments where we were living in a goldfish bowl yet shouting at a glass wall.

It might seem a strange decision to invite those memories back. We are glad no longer to be in battle mode, and to have life in a more normal place. There is real harshness to that first episode, with the abuses in Iran and the dismissiveness of the UK. Why revisit bad times and all they might trigger?

The drama is a lot easier to watch knowing there is a happy ending, but it is still hard to revisit the early days, the fear and the lies. Fact-checking the scripts brought back nightmares for each of us. Trauma keeps long claws. Some memories are not a safe thing.

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The final episode includes the depiction of my hunger strike in November 2021, where I slept on the doorstep of the foreign secretary. It was a long, cold three weeks. It gave me a glimpse of the strain of rough sleeping, and its precariousness. I wasn’t moved on because I was protesting and had my cameras, but I learned to respect footsteps in the middle of the night, and noted how people now treated me when I tried to use the toilet in the park. It was no more than a glimpse, but for a long time, I shuddered every time I walked near the Foreign Office where I had camped.

So what was the motive?

During our campaign, we went on the media because I wanted to get people to care. If enough people care, the right people will care enough, was always our refrain.

It is different now Nazanin is home. We don’t court the cameras; we try to recover a new normality.

Telling our story now serves something different.

We told it partly to make sense. The beginning of our story was crazy: Why was a mum on holiday suddenly detained in Iran, all these strange stories made up around her?

It didn’t make much sense on the news. Iran has its machine of disinformation, but I always resented the UK’s deflection techniques. I used to find various parts of our story repeatedly got lost on the cutting floor for two-minute news clips, learned to hear the echoes of government briefings steering away from government skeletons.

It always seemed odd we had to justify in the media what Nazanin was ‘really’ doing to deserve this. The question came to feel like sustained victim blaming, as though her actions (“which she denied” always added as a caveat) or our campaigning were somehow the cause of her fate. Few seemed to probe properly what was going on between two governments.

It was only much later we learned it had a logic suppressed: her abuse choreographed around a secret debt case in court in London. It was a long battle to tell that truth, and a front row seat on the dark arts of governments.

It felt important to do justice to what we saw. Prisoner 951 has the space to draw much of that out. It draws out the deep cruelty of the Iranian government, but also the dismissiveness of the UK. Injustices unseen – or half seen but then distorted – have a way of being tolerated. It draws out our search for the sunlight.

Oscar Wilde once wrote, “Children begin by loving their parents. After a time they judge them. Rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.” The same is true for governments and its citizens. I had a naive trust of government in episode one. You can see the journey to episode four. We came to judge the choices our government made, and the lies it told.

The kindness of strangers

Yet the drama does more than document how rough the experience was.

It also helped us realise how we survived it. There are some things you recognise only when you play them back in the eyes of others.

When I first started campaigning for Nazanin, I thought of it as a soapbox, I just needed to shout loud and clear. The drama depicts all these early battles, with the government trying to suppress us, and make us feel guilty for speaking out.

You can see our campaigning journey: at the beginning, a reluctant campaigner terrified and confused, trusting the adults were in charge. Then an awakening across the episodes, from bewildered to angry, and then finally, to mobilised, learning how to push the government.

As the years passed, I felt our injustice become normalised, as though people half stopped noticing. There was sympathy in passing, and half-promises from the government, but everyone got on with their lives.

Away from the headlines, an injustice like ours can make you feel very alone. It is hard in trauma not to become isolated.

It took time to realise that it wasn’t shouting that got Nazanin home. Injustice thrives in isolation. To survive we needed other people.

The later episodes draw out the solidarity in the women’s ward in Evin Prison, how the other women helped Nazanin survive. There is a scene in the third episode where Nazanin is moved to the women’s ward, and suddenly has friends. So much can depend on a plate of eggs, and having someone to eat them with. You don’t realise how important human connection is until you have been starved of it.

Alongside all the cruelty, we got to see the best of people. We got to see the kindness of strangers.

You can see the kindnesses, particularly the episode which covers the hunger strike. I took my daughter, Gabriella, on set, along with others from the UK family who had helped me run the strike to watch the filming of that scene. For us all, it represented something profound.

During the hunger strike, we met so many people, from all walks of British life, some let down by the government, some angry, some intense, some professional soldiers, some deeply religious. So many came down to say hello. Many had suffered themselves. Perhaps it gave them a radar for other ordeals.

They signed our visitors book and shared our story; they brought presents and cards. One Amnesty group knitted us a multi-coloured chain of care, a link for every day Nazanin was held. It decorated the site, along with the pumpkins Gabriella and her friends had carved.

We tend to think grand politics are needed to change government policy. By the Foreign Office porch, it started with small steps, all these tangible kindnesses and acts of care. I still remember the guy who would bring me hot water in the morning, after a cold night on the streets, the places that let me have a shower and feel human again.

The important thing in darkness is that someone keeps the light on. 

Freedom is always something shared

Prisoner 951 is a kind of witnessing – of what we went through, but also of what saved us.

Ours is not ultimately a story about governments and their secrets, nor politicians and their flaws. It is a story about people, and the power of people’s care. Love is a verb, I once wrote on a sign standing in front of the PM’s door. That care is a doing word.

I said at our press conference following Nazanin’s release, it took a village to get her home.  

Freedom is not an island. Our story taught me that. Nor is it a fortress, despite the politicians claims. You cannot be free on your own, which is why abusers like solitary confinement. Freedom is always something shared.

We weren’t a happy ending because of the generosity of governments, but because of the kindness of strangers. It was that which helped us cut through that pretending. They shone a light on all sorts of cover ups, they refused to accept our injustice. Their honest view of the government’s decision making made it unsustainable. Once exposed, the choices became too stark.

Earlier this year I ran the London marathon with Anoosheh Ashoori, who came back on the plane with Nazanin. Footage of us features in the Prisoner 951 documentary on surviving hostage taking.

We ran it carrying the chain of care from the hunger strike, as a reminder of that chain of care people up and down the country had given us, an acknowledgement others need those connections still.

We still take it to events for other families. It is nice to be a reminder for others that dawn does come. Our story is not unique. Iran’s hostage taking continues, so do many other injustices.

How did we become a happy ending, other families often ask? Because people cared is the simple, but also incredibly complex answer. It was because of all those who saw our injustice, and didn’t pass on by. The unsung heroes in every story of injustice are the people who refuse to accept it.

It was not our campaigning that got Nazanin home, but the people who listened. It was the connections to people. Our story is also the story of the many millions who watched us, and willed us to a happy ending, all those ordinary people who changed our world.

It is easy to feel overwhelmed by all the injustice in the world today, and the various fears triggered in us all. Governments still pretend on all sorts of issues.

But the lesson of our story, once you get beyond the horrors, is that in a cruel and crazy world, ordinary people’s kindness and honesty matters. Even with the extreme abuses of an Iranian prison, injustice and government gaslighting can be defeated by honest eyes, by people seeing with the heart.

As you watch Prisoner 951 – from the terrors of the first episode to the joys of the last – we remain thankful for honest eyes. May the power of your honest eyes help many others.

Prisoner 951 is available in full on BBC iPlayer now and continues tonight (30 November) at 9pm on BBC One. The accompanying documentary Prisoner 951: The Hostages’ Story is available on BBC iPlayer and airs 9pm on 3 December on BBC Two. 

Do you have a story to tell or opinions to share about this? Get in touch and tell us more. 

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