I saw the not undisputed film on Friday (whether or not plagiarism, but the Grand Prix of Cannes 2021) A Hero by Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi. The plot is too complex for my 550 words, go see for yourself. But it partly takes place in an Iranian prison where the leadership is corrupt and the atmosphere is otherwise quite pleasant. And that brought me to The Uncaged Skythe book that Australian-British Kylie Moore-Gilbert just released about her 804 days as a hostage in Iranian prisons†
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I’ve talked here before about the lucrative trade in hostages of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, the force that guards the ins and outs of the Islamic revolution. Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, for example, was one such cash cow of the Guard who, along with another British-Iranian, was released last month after six years in prison in exchange for the British repayment of an old £400 million debt. There is now talk of Tehran also “soon” – according to Iranian media – to release three American Iranians in exchange for the thawing of $7 billion frozen in South Korea over US sanctions against Iran. Kylie Moore-Gilbert was released in exchange for the release of three Iranian prisoners in Thailand, two of whom had been convicted in connection with a series of bomb explosions in Bangkok.
the Uncaged Sky is actually a 400-page report from the infamous Evin Prison, where Moore-Gilbert spent most of her captivity, and Qarchak Prison, both of which have been determined oncozy. Moore-Gilbert, a lecturer in Islamic studies at an Australian university, was arrested at Tehran airport on September 12, 2018, after a study visit to Iran – you know, like, ‘Have you got a minute, madam? We have a few questions.” She was first put in a hotel with promises of a quick plane home, but soon came the gruesome references to espionage – “what were you really doing here?” – and to her Australian-Israeli husband: “who works for the Mossad”.
Like many of Iran’s other hostages, she was eventually sentenced to ten years in her case for espionage. In prison, she spent months in solitary confinement, on dirty, thin blankets, “with fluff, dust, and other people’s hair” on the floor, with only the endless interrogations as an interruption; between hope of release after a rare meeting with her embassy or a phone call with family in Australia, and despair; entirely dependent on the whims of the jailers and alternately hostile and flirtatious interrogators.
But she also got to know fellow sufferers in Evin who became friends through notes in flower pots and the tube telephone. Among them are environmental activists Niloufar Bayani and Sepideh Kashani (also convicted of espionage, that is, they and colleagues set up cameras to capture endangered cheetahs). Franco-Iranian anthropologist Fariba Adelkhah. And later in Qarchak Prison also Nasrin Sotoudeh, the well-known human rights lawyer who was sentenced to 38 years in prison and 148 lashes in 2019 for again espionage plus insulting the supreme leader.
Moore-Gilbert was released on November 25, 2020. The Guard holds today at least twelve more hostages of Iranian Foreign Nationality fixed. Not so much because of espionage, but because the ransom has not yet been agreed upon.
Caroline Roelants is a Middle East expert and separates the facts from the hype here every week.