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New Zealand is defending its draconian Covid restrictions that forced a pregnant Kiwi journalist stranded in Afghanistan to turn to the Taliban for help, claiming she didn’t meet the “very high threshold” for emergency entry.
Charlotte Bellis’s pregnancy would not have automatically qualified her to be allowed into the country on an emergency basis, despite her living in Doha, Qatar, where it’s illegal to be unmarried with a child, health officials told the New Zealand Herald.
“Pregnancy in and of itself is not considered an emergency under the emergency allocation criteria but certain conditions during pregnancy may mean that the high bar for an emergency is met,” Chris Bunny, head of the country’s Managed Isolation and Quarantine (MIQ) program, told the newspaper.
Bunny said all applications for a spot in the MIQ program, which helps its citizens abroad return to the country and isolate during the pandemic, are assessed on a case-by-case basis.
“There are currently 400 rooms per fortnight set aside for those who need to travel urgently. This is a last resort option with a very high threshold,” he said.
“These decisions are not easy ones to make and we are sympathetic to the distressing situations people applying for an emergency allocation are in,” he added.
Bellis detailed her struggle to return to the country from Qatar in a searing op-ed in the New Zealand Herald.
She said she first tried and failed to win New Zealand’s citizen lottery to return home. Then, the government rejected her application to return under its emergency allocation process meant to help citizens in urgent situations.
Bellis’ only option was to move back to Afghanistan, where she still had a visa to work and live as a journalist.
She reached out to some Taliban members she met while reporting, she said, and asked them if it would be a problem for her to show up to the country with her partner, a photo photojournalist, while visibly pregnant and unmarried.
“They said look that’s your culture and you guys are foreigners and that’s between you. Congratulations. We’re really happy for you, and yeah you’re welcome to come and if you have any issues you can call us,” Bellis told Fox News in an interview Monday. “You can’t make this stuff up,”
She said she’s living in Afghanistan now and is staring down giving birth in the country with a harrowing maternal-mortality rate and where many hospitals don’t even have electricity.
New Zealand officials said they encourage Bellis to reapply to return.
Bellis went viral last summer for asking the Taliban in their inaugural press conference; “What will you do to protect the rights of women and girls?”
In her op-ed, the journalist called the Taliban’s offer to her “brutally ironic.”
“When the Taliban offers you — a pregnant, unmarried woman — safe haven, you know your situation is messed up,” Bellis wrote.
The Kiwi said she doesn’t understand how she doesn’t qualify for emergency entry and called this whole experience “surreal.”
“I mean we were dumbfounded,” she told Fox News. “I mean if I don’t meet the threshold …what about all the other pregnant New Zealand women around the world.”
New Zealand has been lauded with having some of the tightest COVID restrictions in the world, and only losing 52 citizens to COVID-19.
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