The British public have turned on her for choosing not to thank Liz Truss, and we cannot ignore how race and gender plays a part in this immediate backlash
At Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe’s first press conference since arriving back in the UK, her first words were about how grateful she was. For two minutes and 30 seconds of fast speaking, she thanked everyone from politicians and the media sharing her story to family and friends who fought tirelessly to get her home. But for one moment, at the end of her long speech of gratitude, she chose not to thank foreign secretary Liz Truss because in her words, she ‘should’ve been home six years ago.
Nazanin was tortured during that time, interrogated for hours often blindfolded, while in solitary confinement. She lost some of the most important years of her fertility in expanding her family, with Richard Ratcliffe tellinglast year that Nazanin ‘always wanted to come back and have another baby having lost our on Gabriella’s childhood.’ After all those frozen years, tests Nazanin underwent in 2021 showed she had less than 15% change of having another child.
It's no wonder she’s not thanking Liz Truss then, nor any of the five foreign secretaries that promised to get her home over the years and failed. And yet, the British public expects her to. In fact, they’ve turned on her because she chose not to. Yesterday, 'Nazanin ungrateful' was trending on Twitter and Google with countless tweets condemning her. Now, #SendHerBack is even trending.
It’s a vile, unempathetic response to an already harrowing story. And one must act, would the British public be so quick to turn on her if she were white, or a man? Because Nazanin was nothing but grateful in that press conference, just not to the people that allowed her to spend six long years being tortured in prison ignoring and avoiding a debt they would only come to pay anyway. She was even graceful in the way she explained that too.
We must not forget that Nazanin’s experience over the past six years is completely unimaginable to the average person. Her trauma, her loss, all of those painful conversations with politicians making false promises, we cannot begin to understand how you would feel towards your own government after all of that.
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