LETTERS FROM HELL
AS AUSTRALIAN ACADEMIC KYLIE MOORE-GILBERT FIGHTS FOR FREEDOM, SECRET LETTERS FROM PRISON GIVE AN INSIGHT INTO HER HELLISH ORDEAL
Australian Kylie Moore-Gilbert’s pleas from an Iranian prison.
Sitting in her squalid cell in solitary confinement late last year in one of the world’s most notorious prisons, Australian academic Dr Kylie MooreGilbert put pen to paper in a desperate plea from the heart. “I think I am in the midst of a serious psychological problem,” she wrote in a letter from Iran’s Evin Prison to a legal official. “I can no longer stand the pressures of living in this extremely restrictive detention ward.”
In another letter from late 2019, MooreGilbert wrote, “I am entirely alone in Iran. I have no friends or family here in addition to all the pain I have endured.” And in August, 2019, she put pen to paper to make a simple request to a prison officer: “I ask you again to please help me …”
Moore-Gilbert has been begging for such assistance since 2018. The former Bathurst, NSW, girl, who was the dux of her high school and was most recently a lecturer in Islamic Studies at the University of Melbourne, was arrested in Iran over ‘suspicious’ behaviour.
Sentenced to 10 years in prison for what is believed to be an espionage charge, she has been held in solitary confinement in Evin’s Ward 2-A – a highly oppressive section of the jail run by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
In smuggled-out letters published by advocacy group Center for Human Rights in Iran, Moore-Gilbert’s plight has been laid bare, revealing a woman suffering in a prison where some inmates have now contracted the deadly coronavirus. In the letters, which
are written in competent
Farsi to legal and prison authorities, she reveals she has no phone access to call her family, no appropriate food (she has allergies) or even books. She has been on hunger strikes multiple times. “I, an innocent woman, have been imprisoned for a crime I have not committed and for which there is no real evidence,” she wrote in one translated letter. “This is a grave injustice.”
An injustice that Australian authorities have been powerless to bring to an end since her arrest. At the time, Moore-Gilbert, who also holds British citizenship and studied at Cambridge University, was visiting Iran’s capital Tehran for an academic conference. While there, she interviewed an Iranian academic, who reported her as someone conducting ‘suspicious’ research. Among MooreGilbert’s work are journal articles about activism and protests in the Middle East. She has also been critical of the crackdown on protesters in the Middle East following the political uprisings known as the Arab Spring. She was arrested at Tehran airport on her way home.
“These 10 months that I have spent here have gravely damaged my mental health,” she wrote. “I am still denied phone calls and visitations, and I am afraid that my mental and emotional state may further deteriorate.”
Despite her shocking treatment, MooreGilbert has not garnered the media attention of other Australians in foreign jails, including Julian Assange, who Moore-Gilbert was excited to meet in 2011 when he gave a speech at Cambridge (in the speech, Assange spoke of WikiLeaks’ role in the Arab Spring protests). Instead, her family have shunned the spotlight, hoping for a solution to be found between the governments.
“We believe that the best chance of securing Kylie’s safe return is through diplomatic channels,” the family said in a statement last year.
That response is echoed by the University of Melbourne, with a spokesman telling WHO in a statement that they are in “close contact” with MooreGilbert’s family as well as the government.
But what, if any, progress the government has made with the authoritarian state is unclear. In January, Foreign Minister Marise Payne, who did not respond to WHO’s requests for an interview, said: “We don’t accept the charges upon which she was detained, held, charged and convicted.”
While Prime Minister Scott Morrison has pledged that his government is doing “everything that we can to bring her home”, a spokesman for Iran’s foreign ministry,
Abbas Mousavi, reportedly said that MooreGilbert was convicted of “violating Iran’s national security” and “will serve her time…”.
It leaves little hope for the academic to be set free any time soon. “I have been in ‘2-A’ for almost a year and my health has deteriorated significantly,” Moore-Gilbert wrote to her case prosecutor. “I beg you please to immediately facilitate moving me to the normal ward. This is inhumane.”
“I ask you again to please help me …”