Nazanin Zaghari: Combing my daughter’s hair is a dream I’ve been waiting for for three years

Open letter from Nazanin Zaghari Ratcliffe “to all mothers of Iran”: “Throughout these three years, combing my daughter’s hair has been a dream that I still await”

Nazanin Zaghari Ratcliffe, an Iranian-British citizen detained in Evin Prison, has written an open letter addressed to “all mothers of Iran” on the occasion of the start of the new school year. In this letter, she describes the hardships of separation from her daughter Gabriella Gisou Ratcliffe and announces that Gisou will be sent to England to begin the school year:

“In the near future, those who have kept me away from my child will sit and watch as my daughter, after more than three and a half years, returns to England with her father to start school; a journey that will be fraught with anxiety and dread for both of us.”

Nazanin Zaghari traveled to Iran with her family during Nowruz in 2016, but on April 4, 2016, at Imam Khomeini Airport, when she was attempting to return to England with her 22-month-old daughter, she was detained by Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) officers and subsequently transferred to an undisclosed location in Kerman. Ms. Zaghari was moved several months later to Ward 2A of the IRGC in Evin Prison and in early December 2016 was transferred to the women’s ward of the prison. On September 7, 2016, she was sentenced to five years imprisonment by the Revolutionary Court, a verdict that was upheld in the appeals court. Her request for judicial review of the sentence was also rejected by the Supreme Court.

She writes in this letter: “Today I sit in this cell as the mother of a five-year-old daughter, a girl who was taken from me by my own country when she was 22 months old. Those early years and the sorrowful separation from my child, when she had just begun to speak, passed with an indescribable bitterness. You have to be a mother and experience separation from your child to understand the depth of this feeling.”

According to the letter, Ms. Zaghari’s visits with her daughter have been limited to weekly visits in the prison’s visitation room:

“Every Sunday morning, my heart races more than ever when I see my daughter Gabriella Gisou so excited in the visitation room of Evin Prison. When the visitation room opens and prisoners are allowed to enter, my little daughter first runs toward me, calls my name and rushes into my arms. These brief moments may be the shortest embraces, but they are undoubtedly the most beautiful and energizing embraces in the world. These embraces are my entire world. But then the anxieties begin. Sunday quickly slips from my hands and disappears into the fog of the cell.”

In this letter, she addresses Iranian mothers and describes the pain of being separated from her child:

“Perhaps combing your daughter’s hair is an ordinary part of your daily routine. For me, throughout these three and a half years, it has been a dream that I still await… Perhaps the thought of not being able to hold your newborn is unimaginable. It is an image from which I have tried to escape even after all these years. The deepest form of torture is this.”

Ms. Nazanin Zaghari Ratcliffe, an employee of the Thomas Reuters Foundation, was hospitalized in July of this year due to the severity of psychological and physical conditions resulting from her prison experience. She has been eligible for conditional release since autumn 2017 under Article 58 of Iran’s Islamic Penal Code, yet she remains in Evin Prison. According to this article, after serving one-third of the sentence, a court can issue an order for conditional release.

She also addresses this issue in the letter and expresses her dissatisfaction with the country’s judicial process: “The officials of my country accuse me without guilt and judge me for a crime I did not commit and punish me without forgiveness or clemency… Instead of supporting my rights and my child’s rights, my country has put my freedom up for auction in exchange for negotiations, and only I, my child and my husband pay the price.”

In July 2018, a judge told Ms. Zaghari Ratcliffe that she was being held by the Iranian government as a bargaining chip to convince the British government to pay its historical debts to Iran. In protest of this policy, she added:

“My child and I remain puppets in the hands of politicians who, inside and outside the borders of my homeland, have made us tools for achieving their political goals and policies, and have spared nothing within their power to exploit an innocent mother whose thoughts are consumed by nothing but her child. Even the last arrow in their quiver has been put up for auction—the anguish of a mother who can no longer bear the separation from her child.”

At the end, she wrote with reference to Gabriella Gisou’s trip to England and the end of their limited weekly visits: