Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe arrives at Brize Norton last week (Leon Neal/PA)
(Picture: PA Wire)The words “ungrateful” and “send her back” are trending on Twitter because Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who has be locked up for six years away from her family, had the audacity not to thank the foreign secretaries who failed to get her released.
I have a lot of time for Nazanin who stepped out wearing the Ukrainian colours as she gave her first press conference since returning home. Like Nazanin, I am also an immigrant to this country - but I also believe in speaking your truth, and that is what she did.
She has a right to be angry and a right to seek to hold those in power accountable. She might have not been born here but she is a British citizen who deserved her Government to do everything within their power to free her. The former foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt seems to agree with me on this, as he has called for a enquiry into why it took the UK so long to free an innocent woman.
Nazanin cannot get the six years she lost with her child back, and what she experienced will never leave her.
It never left my grandfather, who was a prisoner of war during the Somaliland invasion. Though I was only six at the time, his abduction is etched into my memory. He was dragged away at 4am from his bed. I left Somaliland thinking we would never see him again, and it was almost a year till we heard anything about him - and two years till I saw him again. I still remember that trip Heathrow, and how shocked I was to see an old man stumble off the flight. Prison had broken him. He was never the same.
Attacking a brown woman who simply spoke up for herself says a lot about the public and the fact we might not be as moral as we often think. I hope the Ratcliffes rebuild their lives, and when they speak again we hear what they say about fixing a system that means we could be locked away for years on an issue our country was wrong about all along.
Please don’t think I am defending Iran in any of this but I am saying if we fall out with one of the many dictators we are currently sucking up to for oil someone near and dear to us could be the next political pawn.
