– Everyone asks if it doesn’t feel surreal. But it feels very, very real.
This is how Johan Floderus describes the feeling of being back home in Sweden after 790 days in various detention centers in Iran in an interview with Kalla fakta’s Sara Recabarren.
Since Floderus came home just over two weeks ago, he has devoted himself to what he describes as “the real little things” in life – kayaking, eating good food, and sleeping in a bed.
– I can walk more than three or four steps without my nose bumping into a concrete wall. I get to feel the sun on my skin and feel the wind in my hair.
Taken to the infamous Evin prison
It was on his way home from a trip in Iran in April 2022 that Floderus was arrested at the airport in Tehran.
After a few trips, he was “rushed” back to Tehran. On the way, he recognized, among other things, a hotel he had stayed at before.
– After that I saw the sign that said “Evin house of detention”.
Johan Floderus had been taken to the infamous Evin Prison. He was blindfolded and taken inside. After that he was no longer a free man.
“Losing my breath and my mind”
When he was due to meet a judge a few days later, he was initially relieved, but after being declared a suspect of espionage against the Islamic Republic, the feeling quickly changed.
– Then somehow you just lose your breath and your mind and it feels like the ground opens up. And it must have been obvious to me because the judge said “don’t worry, you’ll only be our guest here for two to three days”. But it didn’t turn out that way.
During the roughly two-year period that Johan Floderus was arbitrarily detained in Iran, he has been accused of a series of crimes, including collusion with Israel and corruption on earth.
The latter is one of the most serious crimes in the Iranian law book, and can lead to the death penalty.
235 days in solitary confinement
For eight months, Johan Floderus was completely cut off from the world in various isolation cells. During the nights, the bright light was left on.
– I was lucky to be blindfolded. As a rule, you are not allowed to have that because you can use it to kill yourself.
Nobel laureate Narges Mohammadi is also imprisoned at the infamous Evin prison. In the book “White torture” she describes isolation as a way to break a person down. Johan Floderus shares that view.
– I can’t see any other reason why they chose to put me in solitary confinement for such a long time. But they didn’t succeed, says Johan Floderus.
– I have understood that the UN classifies two weeks or more in solitary confinement as torture. I have been in solitary confinement for 235 days.
Went on hunger strike several times
When he was not in solitary confinement, Floderus was placed in a shared cell where people slept on the floor.
– They got some blankets. You put two under you, one over you, and then you rolled up the last one and used it as a pillow.
For almost a year, Johan Floderus was also not allowed to have any contact with his family. In the end, he chose to go on hunger strike to be able to call home. It worked sometimes.
– I did it quite a few times. I’ve lost count.
Noury enters the picture
During the time Floderus was imprisoned something happened in Sweden. In July 2022, the Iranian citizen Hamid Noury was sentenced in the Stockholm District Court to life imprisonment for serious crimes against humanity and murder for his involvement in the execution of a large number of political prisoners in Iran in the summer of 1988.
Johan Floderus would later become an important pawn in the game about Noury’s release and the prisoner exchange between Sweden and Iran – something Floderus was unaware of until the very end.
The night before the morning of the exchange, he found out that he and Saeed Azizi, who was also imprisoned in Iran, would be allowed to go home in exchange for Hamid Noury.
– Sometime around twelve o’clock at night, a guard came to the cell and said that I should shave off my beard. Then it started a lot of different thought processes. I am an optimist and could only think that now something good is happening, says Johan Floderus.
Waking up at night
Almost immediately after landing in Sweden, Johan Floderus got down on one knee and proposed to his boyfriend. It was something he had thought of from the beginning.
– I thought about it for 790 of the 790 days that I was detained.
Being able to sleep in a bed again is soft and nice. But Johan Floderus wakes up quite often at night.
– There is a team in my dream world, and in my dreams I am still in Evin Prison. Then I wake up in the middle of the night and it takes a second or two before I understand that I am in Orust.