The return to Britain of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe is a happy occasion for her, her family and the cause of humanity. She has endured the cruellest tortures, used as a pawn in the cynical attempts by Iran to manipulate western opinion, imprisoned in the notoriously harsh Evin prison in Tehran, released in 2020 but kept under house arrest and then again sentenced last year to a new term in jail on the spurious charge of propaganda against the state. Freedom is equally joyous for Anoosheh Ashoori, another dual-national Briton, who has also been held for almost five years. Though his case received less publicity, he has also been a victim of Iran’s unscrupulous hostage-taking, using innocent civilians to force the settlement of debts.
Huge credit must go to Nazanin’s husband, Richard, who has kept her case in the headlines, defied squalid attempts by the Foreign Office to cover up its lamentable record and even gone on hunger strike in his frustration. Little credit goes to the British government, which inadvertently put the lives of the hostages in jeopardy by refusing to pay a debt of some £400 million dating back to a deal made by the Shah of Iran in 1979 for the purchase of 1,750 Chieftain tanks. The money was paid but the Shah was overthrown shortly afterwards, and Britain, horrified by the accession of a radical Islamist government intent on exporting revolution, refused to deliver the tanks. It also refused to pay back the money.
America, too, owed the Iranians a much bigger sum: some $1.7 billion from an abortive arms deal signed just before the Shah’s fall. President Obama secretly organised an airlift of $400 million in cash to Iran to obtain the release of four Americans, also seized on spurious grounds and held hostage. A precedent was set.
That deal, when it came to light, was roundly denounced in the US as a capitulation to Iranian blackmail. Indeed it was. And, like the British government, the Obama administration denied any link between the payment and the prisoner exchange. It is all the more vexing therefore that it was largely due to US pressure that Britain was persuaded not to pay its own debt to Iran. It is equally disingenuous to claim that the release of the two British hostages, after Britain’s agreement to settle its debt, was coincidental. Indeed Iranian officials said last year that Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe would not be freed until the debt was paid.
Compounding the inept British response was the gaffe by Boris Johnson, when, as foreign secretary, he wrongly suggested in 2017 that Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe had been training journalists in Iran at the time of her arrest, lending credence to Iran’s claims that she was a spy. By subsequently suggesting she should have diplomatic status, the Foreign Office fed Iranian suspicions she was of importance and probably was indeed a spy.
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The case has inevitably become entangled in fraught negotiations on reviving the nuclear deal with Iran, with both America and Britain insisting on having their hostages released. Washington, however, has hardly shown solidarity: the Biden administration did not want the two Britons to be released without a third hostage, Morad Tahbaz, who holds Iranian, British and US citizenship. He has now been freed but not yet allowed to go home. Recriminations will follow.
Liz Truss, the foreign secretary, deserves credit for her time spent on the case, the liaison with the families and her commitment to get the prisoners home. She has also insisted that Britain has ring-fenced its debt repayment so that it will go to humanitarian organisations and not to Iran’s military budget. Good luck with that. Iran has made clear, over the past six years, that it is a cynical and manipulative negotiator, whose word cannot be trusted. Britain should warn any dual nationals against further visits. Hostage-taking, it seems, can produce profitable results.
