Hope in hell: academic Kylie Moore-Gilbert’s Iranian ordeal
She’s been held in Tehran’s notorious prisons for two years. Is quiet diplomacy really the best way to free Australian academic Kylie Moore-Gilbert?
In late August 2018, scholars from around the world descended on the Iranian city of Qom for a special learning experience – the 7th Intensive Course on Shi’a Islamic Studies. The event was staged by the University of Religions and Denominations in Qom, 140km south of Iran’s capital, Tehran. It is a city of both scholarship and pilgrimage, a holy place in Shi’a Islam and home to the Fatimah bint Musa shrine, visited annually by 20 million pilgrims. One of the delegates was Dr Kylie Moore-Gilbert, a young academic from the University of Melbourne who, in her early 30s, was a rising star in the field of Gulf studies – or that of the Arabian Peninsula, Iraq and Iran. She had already published widely in books and journals, was highly respected, and had only recently married.
The one-week course in Qom promised to provide participants with the foundational knowledge, spiritual understanding and critical thinking skills required to understand Shi’ism in the contemporary world. “The workshop aims to connect scholars from a variety of disciplines and countries to study the role of Shi’a Islam in the modern Iran.” It also incorporated a social program: “For those interested in Shi’i Islamic Studies, very few places are as exciting as Qom.” And it included an optional four-day cultural tour. “Wander the streets of the Capital and spend a memorable night in the wonderful desert,” the course promised, “and witness spectacular Mosques, Temples, Synagogues and Churches in Iran.”
Moore-Gilbert was well-travelled. After finishing her schooling in Bathurst in central-west NSW, she had studied extensively in the UK and conducted global research for her degrees, including a Master of Arts and a PhD. After the Qom course she was photographed with religious scholars and academics, alongside other students from Europe. She remained in the city, conducting some personal research interviews, a decision she later described as naive. It was during this stage of the trip that one of her own academic colleagues, and one of her interview subjects, reported her as “suspicious” to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), a powerful branch of the army tasked with defending the country’s Islamic system.
She was arrested at Tehran’s airport after checking in for her return flight to Australia and immediately thrown into the notorious Evin prison under suspicion of espionage, and later charged as a spy. Without evidence, a closed court found her guilty and sentenced her to 10 years’ imprisonment. A subsequent appeal failed and last week it emerged she had suddenly been moved to an even worse hellhole, Qarchak prison, known for being the worst female prison in the world.
READ MORE: Kylie Moore-Gilbert transferred to ‘worst female prison in world’ | Moore-Gilbert loses her Iranian jail appeal
Her arrest and jailing wasn’t made public until September 2019, a year after her arrest. At that time her family released a statement saying they were “in close contact with the Australian government”. The statement added: “Our family thanks the government and the University of Melbourne for their ongoing support at this distressing and sensitive time. We believe that the best chance of securing Kylie’s safe return is through diplomatic channels.”
Two years on, Moore-Gilbert’s situation remains dire as the government pursues a line of “quiet diplomacy”. Through letters smuggled out of the jail a sketch of her life has emerged, of deteriorating health, frequent trips to hospital, time in solitary confinement in a cell measuring 2m by 3m, and her reliance on fellow prisoners for basic provisions; and of repeated attempts by Iran to recruit her as a spy while in jail. There have also been signs of soft resistance: she has written of her plans for a hunger strike and apparently formed a choir that sang and hummed together as a form of protest while working in the kitchen and from their individual cells. For her trouble, sources told The Times newspaper, she had been drugged and beaten. “I think I am in the midst of a serious psychological problem, I can no longer stand the pressures of living in this extremely restrictive detention ward anymore,’’ one letter dated last August said. “I, an innocent woman, have been imprisoned for a crime I have not committed and for which there is no real evidence.”
Worried friends and global observers of her incarceration are openly wondering if enough is being done to secure this young woman’s freedom. Washington Post reporter and former Tehran correspondent Jason Rezaian was arrested, charged and held in Evin in a similar fashion in 2014. He was ultimately released following overt political lobbying and worldwide petitions and campaigns. “There is always more that can be done,” Rezaian says. “I understand that some friends and loved ones of hostages believe that these situations are best resolved quietly. I don’t think there is any evidence to support this theory.”
There is also no evidence to support Iran’s charge that the softly spoken academic is a spy, an idea her friends laugh off as impossible and the Australian government rejects as baseless. So how did this bright young woman from regional NSW who topped the state in visual arts and caught the eye of teachers for her intelligence and thoughtful approach to life end up in a notorious Iranian prison known for detaining political prisoners?
By all accounts, the portents of Kylie Moore-Gilbert’s shining academic future were in place during her high school years at the prestigious All Saints’ College in Bathurst, 200km west of Sydney. Its alumni include military historian Charles Bean, early 20th century NSW premier Sir Charles Wade and comedian Tim Ferguson. Kylie was an outstanding scholar and Dux of the college in 2005. Her final score was 99.40 and All Saints’ was proud of her achievements. The then principal, Jenny Williams, wrote in the school newsletter: “Kylie also had the distinction of coming first in the state in Visual Arts (out of 8548 candidates). She was also placed on the Premier’s all-rounder’s list with a band 6 result (90% or more) in 10 units (5 courses).”
“When you’re principal you have a lot of students passing through the school but I remember Kylie,” says Williams, who is now principal of a Melbourne grammar school. “She was very thoughtful and very quiet, but so super-focused. That’s why I remember her. I can visualise her. I used to think, ‘Wow, she’s so thoughtful and so intelligent.’ You could just see it.”
Kylie’s major work for visual arts, a self-portrait that was part of the ArtExpress exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW in 2006, features a collage of a female figure that has one leg in and another out of a picture frame, garlanded with flowers. In the background is what looks like the representation of a compass. Moore-Gilbert accompanied her piece, rendered in textile and fibre, with a short essay: “My work is an exploration of the individual’s sense of inner conflict and turmoil, and the mechanisms we use to maintain order in the midst of external chaos, itself often a product of our own decisions and judgments.” It’s a tortured yet composed piece of art. But despite her obvious talents, Kylie did not pursue a career in the art world. Her passion would become Middle-Eastern politics. And Australia would not be able to hold on to her inquiring mind.
As a dual Australian-UK citizen, Kylie chose to study at England’s prestigious Cambridge University. She was accepted into the university’s Wolfson College, where she undertook an undergraduate degree in the school of Asian and Middle-Eastern Studies. Wolfson is ostensibly for postgraduates but accepts “mature” and gifted undergraduates. While at Wolfson, Kylie met the Australian-born publisher, activist and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and wrote about the experience in an article published in April 2011 in her hometown newspaper, the Western Advocate in Bathurst. “I was able to apply to be selected as one of a small group of students who would meet and speak with Assange after his talk,” she wrote. “We had to write a short summary of the reasons why we wanted to meet Assange, and I mentioned that I was Australian and am interested in the Australian angle in the WikiLeaks affair… He spoke about the role of WikiLeaks in the current unrest in the Arab world (saying it played a much larger role than that of Twitter or Facebook in bringing down Ben Ali and Mubarak).”
Courses in Asian and Middle-Eastern Studies are four years, including a year abroad, and Moore-Gilbert secured her Bachelor of Arts (Honours) and her Master of Arts at Wolfson, graduating in 2013. A glowing endorsement on the Wolfson website features a photo of her standing in front of a sand dune. After her Cambridge triumph, she would return to Australia an accomplished scholar in the making.
In 2014, Moore-Gilbert settled in Melbourne, where she embarked on her PhD at the University of Melbourne’s Asia Institute. There she made a close group of friends, many of them fellow students and future academics. One was Elisa Orofino, now an associate lecturer in Counter-Terrorism and Policing, and a post-doctorate research fellow at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge. “Our desks were next to each other and we spent our day researching in our PhD room that we ironically called ‘the dungeon’,” says Orofino. “Me and Kylie, we had in common the passion for Islamic studies and Middle-Eastern politics, therefore we spoke a lot about our research and our plans for the future. We also had a common passion for Arabic and we wanted to plan a joint trip to Bahrain to perfect our Arabic through a language course.”
Orofino remembers her friend as “smart, gentle and productive”. “She had several publications out by the time she finished her PhD, although she was also working part-time at uni while doing her PhD and teaching,” Orofino recalls. “She is amazing and very resourceful.”
Moore-Gilbert was a prolific academic, publishing in numerous books and journals. Her papers included A Band of (Muslim) Brothers? Exploring Bahrain’s Role in the Qatar Crisis; Mediated Mobilisation After the Arab Spring: How Online Activism is Shaping Bahrain’s Opposition; and Mohammed bin Salman and the Art of War.
“I would say Kylie is a leader but an extremely gentle one,” Orofino says. “Everyone noticed her as soon as she entered the room. She is beautiful and very charming, always full of interesting stories and topics of discussion. She was very polite, had beautiful manners and very mindful of other cultures and habits. We had PhD friends from all over the world at the Asia Institute and everyone loved Kylie and looked up to her as a role model.’’
Orofino recalls Moore-Gilbert was elected president of their Asia Institute Postgraduate Group. “She had a strong will to improve things and she wanted all PhD students to have a decent room, with proper windows and natural light. We never got it in the end but we tried to get it.” She says she last saw her friend in 2017. “Her boyfriend had proposed and she was getting ready for her wedding. She was extremely happy about it.”
As a scholar, Moore-Gilbert became fascinated with the politics and social history of Bahrain, the island nation between Saudi Arabia’s north-east coast and the Qatar peninsula, in the Persian Gulf. In 2011, the country’s royal family was criticised for its treatment of its Shi’a Muslim community and other dissidents during the so-called “Arab Spring” uprising in the region. In 2017, Moore-Gilbert completed her PhD: Shi’a Opposition and Authoritarian Transition in Contemporary Bahrain: The Shifting Political Participation of a Marginalised Majority. To complete the thesis, she conducted “over 60 fieldwork interviews and an innovative content analysis study of the Shi’a opposition’s online activism”. Her thesis argues that “Bahrain’s Arab Spring protests led to a dramatic shift in both government-opposition and inter-opposition dynamics, resulting in the regime’s transition from liberalised autocracy to full authoritarianism”.
At the successful conclusion of her degree, she was appointed a lecturer with the Asia Institute. Then, with her unstoppable thirst for learning, she flew out for the course in Qom in August 2018. “The last time I communicated with her was 2018,” says Orofino. “I was going to Australia in December to have my graduation ceremony and I wanted to catch up with her. Obviously, she did not reply.”
What happened to Kylie Moore-Gilbert when she was arrested at Tehran International Airport in September 2018? Four years earlier, Washington Post journalist Jason Rezaian had been arrested (along with his wife, Yeganeh Salehi) on suspicion of espionage and convicted in a closed-court trial. Rezaian had been living and working in Tehran when he was apprehended, and was held in Evin prison. Similarly, his arrest was not made public for some time – nine months, in his case – after the event. (His wife was released three months after their arrest.) In January 2016, Rezaian was freed following many months of sustained political and public pressure and would go on to write a book about his experiences, Prisoner: My 544 Days in an Iranian Prison – Solitary Confinement, A Sham Trial, High-Stakes Diplomacy, and the Extraordinary Efforts it Took to Get me Out.
In the book, Rezaian outlines the moment of his arrest, providing an insight into the ordeal likely faced by the Melbourne academic: “When the elevator door opened, there was a guy standing there with a gun pointed at me. There was more than one guy, but I just remember the one with the gun… We were led to an unmarked white van with tinted windows that also had curtains over them. They handed each of us a blindfold and told us to put it on.” He was placed in solitary confinement at Evin prison, where he had to find mechanisms to cope. “If you’re lucky you learn to quiet your mind, just a little, and live softly,” he writes in the book. “It’s not really submission. Don’t do that. It’s closer to an acceptance. You’re being carried down a river and your odds of survival do not increase if you try to swim upstream.”
Rezaian is aware of Moore-Gilbert’s predicament and has tried to agitate for more attention to be paid to her case. “Iranian authorities predictably will claim there is some sort of complaint of suspicious behaviour, but that is irrelevant,” he emailed from Washington DC. “By all accounts, Kylie was in Iran taking part in academic research connected to an accredited Iranian institution with a valid visa for the purposes of doing that work. That means Iranian authorities knew enough about her to let her into the country to do this work.” She was convicted of espionage in typical Revolutionary Court fashion, Rezaian says. “She received no independent legal representation; the prosecution never produced any witnesses or evidence of wrongdoing.”
He says Evin Prison, where Moore-Gilbert was kept until recently, is a large facility with different wards under the control of different law enforcement agencies, branches of government and factions. She was being held in section 2A, which is under the control of the intelligence service of the IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps). “It is the equivalent of what we call a ‘black site’ in that there is no external overview. Using the pretext of national security crimes, this group inside the IRGC uses it primarily to house hostages. It’s smaller than other sections of the prison and usually has fewer detainees.
“Initially people are held in solitary confinement in tiny cells that are about less than two by three metres, with no furniture, nothing to pass the time. The only times out of the cell are for interrogation and 20 minutes each day of fresh air in a yard. Detainees are not permitted to talk to other detainees.” Once out of solitary, they are either placed in a larger cell with one or two other people or put into one of three rooms with a connected courtyard that is accessible during the day. “Women detainees are always kept in the cell and never put in that room,” Rezaian says, describing the conditions as “miserable… because they do everything they can to destroy hope. One must find ways to keep hope alive. For me, finding things to laugh about made that possible. For as sinister and depraved as these hostage takers are, there is also plenty about them to ridicule. I did a lot of that.”
He says his release was secured following a lot of publicity, high-level diplomacy and petitions initiated around the world, and he’s concerned at the silence surrounding Moore-Gilbert. It’s a sentiment echoed by Australian journalist Peter Greste, who was held for 400 days in an Egyptian prison until his release in 2015 after a sustained campaign by family and friends. “The lesson from our case in Egypt was the way in which public pressure added to the campaign,’’ Greste told Sky News.
Rezaian says there may be a lot of movement through diplomatic channels to secure Moore-Gilbert’s release. “But I’m not seeing any major campaigns or indeed any signs from the Australian government that they are proactively working towards her safe release,” he says. “If the Australian government is doing its job, her treatment within the prison should be improving incrementally. It is equal parts show of good faith and a response to international pressure.”
Instead, her situation has suddenly worsened. The US State Department has listed Qarchak as an entity responsible for extrajudicial killings, torture or other gross violations of internationally recognised human rights. According to early reports, Moore-Gilbert was moved there as “punishment”.
On Christmas Eve 2019, at the height of the bushfire crisis, Prime Minister Scott Morrison was asked about Moore-Gilbert and her plight. “She’s been receiving consular assistance for some time now and she had a visit very recently,” Morrison said. “We’ve been working discreetly and conscientiously on her case now for some time. And she’s very aware of the efforts we’re making.” He reiterated that Foreign Affairs Minister Marise Payne and her department had had great success recently in extracting other Australians who found themselves in a similar situation. (UK-Australian travel blogger Jolie King and her Australian partner Mark Firkin were arrested in Iran in July 2019 for supposedly flying a drone near military installations in Tehran province. They were released three months later. Their freedom coincided with the release of University of Queensland doctoral student Reza Dehbashi Kivi, 38, who had been arrested in Brisbane in 2018. The US accused Kivi of conspiring to export missile and stealth plane detection amplifiers to Iran. The US wanted him extradited, and he faced 20 years in prison. Kivi returned to Tehran.)
The Prime Minister added: “The key to getting that success is the determined way in which they [diplomats] pursue this, the patient way in which they pursue it and also the very discreet way in which they pursue this, and obviously, that’s why I can’t comment too much on the nature of the efforts that Australia is making. But I can assure you, and I know that Kylie also knows the extent that the Australian government is going to, to do everything that we can do bring her home.”
In January this year letters accepted as being written by Moore-Gilbert dated from June to December last year and addressed to mid-level IRGC officers were released by the New York-based Centre for Human Rights in Iran. They suggested that she wasn’t quite so reassured. “I am entirely alone in Iran,” she wrote. “In addition to all the pain I have endured here, I feel like I am abandoned and forgotten.” While couched in Moore-Gilbert’s unfailing manners, they reveal an increasing desperation over her confinement in Ward 2A and concern about restrictions on contact with her family, as well as her psychological deterioration. “I’m taking psychiatric medications, but these 10 months that I have spent here have gravely damaged my mental health,” she wrote on July 5, 2019. “I am still denied phone calls and visitations, and I am afraid that my mental and emotional state may deteriorate if I remain in this extremely restrictive detention in ward 2A.”
On August 2, she put her foot down with her captors. “I, an innocent woman, have been imprisoned for a crime I have not committed and for which there is no real evidence,” she wrote. “I will also begin a hunger strike from Saturday, Aug 3. I have already informed Judge Salavati about this hunger strike. The decision of the IRGC intelligence branch that I will remain in 2A ward even after my verdict has left me no other way. I can no longer take this extremely restrictive detention centre (I’ve been here for 11 months now!). I will reject all my medications and food until a decision is reached to transfer me to the normal ward.”
Three weeks later she rejected what appeared to be an offer for her to work as a spy for Iran. She wrote: “Please accept this letter as an official and definitive rejection of your offer to me to work with the intelligence branch of IRGC, and as a testimony that you confirm you heard all of these from me verbally before,” she addressed her “Case Manager”. “Under no circumstances will I be persuaded to change my decision. I am not a spy. I have never been a spy and I have no interest to work for a spying organisation in any country. When I leave Iran, I want to be a free woman and live a free life, not under the shadow of extortion and threats.”
By late August she revealed that her mental health had deteriorated so badly that she had “been to the special care at Baghiatallah Hospital [in Tehran] twice and the prison infirmary six times”. In another letter she begged for help in relation to a lack of money to buy personal items given “I never have enough money in my account, given my embassy never transfer me enough”, and that she had been “denied any phone calls and visitation rights”. She said she needed the equivalent of $68 to survive. The Centre for Human Rights in Iran had secured the 10 letters from Gilbert-Moore, later passed on to the media, and one was directly aimed at Prime Minister Scott Morrison. That letter, dated June 2019, reportedly said: “I beg you to act faster to bring this terrible trauma that myself and my family must live through day after day to a resolution. Please I beg of you to do whatever it takes to get me out. I know that you are a religious man, and I ask that until that much longed-for day of freedom arrives, you remember me and my family in your prayers.”
Dozens of Westerners are being heldin Iranian prisons and the question remains: why was Moore-Gilbert singled out from the other foreign scholars attending the conference? There may be a hint in one of her letters smuggled out of the prison in which she refers to her husband, whose identity has not been revealed: “The Revolutionary Guard have imprisoned me in these terrible conditions for over 9 months in order to extort me both personally and my government,’’ the letter quotes Moore-Gilbert as saying. “They have also attempted to use me as a hostage in a diabolical plot to lure my husband, an Australian permanent resident (and soon to be citizen) into joining me in an Iranian prison… The Australian Foreign Ministry needs to consider whether the actions that have been taken against myself and my husband by an entity backed and supported by the Iranian state are those of a friendly nation.”
In May this year, other reports emerged from Evin prison that Moore-Gilbert had been tortured by Revolutionary Guards and had attempted suicide. These reports came around the same time as Covid-19 was ravaging the country, forcing it to release about 100,000 inmates, including 1000 foreigners, to ease the pressure on the prison system. Moore-Gilbert was not released. For only the second time since her arrest her family issued a statement denying the reports of self-harm. They confirmed that she had engaged in several hunger strikes, but firmly stated that the allegations of torture and suicide attempts were false.
“We have had a number of conversations with Kylie in recent weeks. She has strongly denied reports that she has attempted suicide or that she is being tortured,” the family said in a statement on May 17. “She seems to be in good health considering her situation. We love her and miss her.”
Her detention comes amid heightened tension with the West after US President Donald Trump ordered the killing of top Iranian military commander Qassem Soleimani in January, sparking continued provocations. Rodger Shanahan, an expert in Middle-East security and Shi’a Islam and a research fellow with the Lowy Institute, reckons the Moore-Gilbert case is a difficult diplomatic scenario. “Are you better off playing it loudly, or is quiet diplomacy the best way of handling it?” he says. “There are two schools of thought, but you’re dealing with the Iranian government here and one thing the Iranian government does not tend to react well to is hectoring and lecturing from the West in public, regardless of how much of the moral high-ground you occupy. They tend to react better in terms of bargaining for release by doing it kind of quietly.
“Neither guarantees a successful outcome. The loud approach tends to satisfy a domestic audience and probably a family audience as well because it gives the appearance of doing something. But, and I tend to agree with it, the government has taken the approach that what you want is an outcome, not the appearance of doing something, so they think the outcome is better served by doing things quietly.”
Is Moore-Gilbert being used by Iran, as history has shown, as a bargaining chip for its benefit? A form of hostage diplomacy? “It tends to be how Iranian hardline elements look at this,” Shanahan says. “You don’t want to release anything and not get anything in return. My view is that if you’re being loud about it there’s probably a better chance of her doing the 10 years. If you’re a betting person you’d think there’d be some kind of arrangement arrived at before the expiration of her sentence.”
Rezaian, who is now settled in the US, says he hopes everything possible is being done for the release of Moore-Gilbert. “There is no putting that genie back in the bottle,” he says. “In my experience, more vocal and public pressure compels the responsible actor into action. By ‘responsible’ I mean the government that believes in protecting its citizens’ rights. As far as I know, it being a democracy, caring for its citizens in peril abroad is still a top priority of the Australian government.”
To join the conversation, please log in. Don't have an account? Register
Join the conversation, you are commenting as Logout