A pregnant New Zealand journalist says strict covid rules left her stranded in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan

Bellis, 35, from Christchurch, is one of what advocates say are thousands of New Zealand nationals unable to return since the border is largely closed — and she’s calling out the government for a lottery system that kept her out, and for denying her application for an emergency medical exemption despite letters from medical experts confirming the dangers of giving birth in Afghanistan.

Bellis, who said she had concerns about being unmarried and pregnant in Afghanistan, told The Washington Post that she approached Taliban contacts to ask if “there is going to be a problem if I’m pregnant in Kabul.” She said they wished her well and told her, “Look, this is your culture — you guys are foreigners, it’s between you.”

“When the Taliban offers you — a pregnant, unmarried woman — safe haven, you know your situation is messed up,” she wrote in a New Zealand Herald column published Friday detailing her ordeal.

New Zealand, which kept coronavirus cases relatively low during the pandemic with strict lockdowns and other restrictions, requires anyone hoping to enter from overseas to apply for a voucher to stay in managed isolation and quarantine (MIQ) for 10 days. These vouchers are limited and allocated through a type of lottery system.

New Zealand’s minister for covid-19 response, Chris Hipkins, on Monday defended the system for allocating spots to returning nationals and said “there is a place in Managed Isolation and Quarantine for people with special circumstances like Ms Bellis.”

Bellis worked as a journalist for Al Jazeera based in Qatar until she found out in August that she was expecting a child with her partner, freelance photographer Jim Huylebroek. She resigned from her post and left Qatar, where it is illegal to be pregnant and unmarried, for Huylebroek’s native Belgium.

In the process, she lost her health insurance. By January, her Belgian tourist visa was approaching its limit. She counted on New Zealand’s borders reopening in February and thought she only needed a place to wait out the remaining weeks.

“We both had work visas for Afghanistan,” Bellis told The Post. In her previous job, she covered Afghanistan from Qatar and Huylebroek, who had worked in the country for seven years, had a home in Kabul.

Bellis said she has faced questions about why she didn’t go to another country. “And to that I say: Do people really expect a 6-month pregnant woman to jump on tourist visas from country to country, having lost her health insurance and her job, with no family support, without her partner, only to show up at a hospital when she goes into labor with a credit card and say, ‘Can I give birth here?’ ”

While her Taliban contacts reassured her that she would not face criminal consequences from being pregnant and unmarried in Kabul, she still worried about the lack of access to medical care in the country.

Bellis said she wanted to leave Kabul by the time she was 30 weeks along, because “there is very little premature care available in Afghanistan.” If her daughter was born prematurely, Bellis said, “and they just wrapped her in a blanket and said a prayer, I wouldn’t be able to live with myself.”

Her efforts to enter a lottery for a spot to travel to New Zealand under managed isolation and quarantine failed repeatedly, she said. When Bellis applied for a version of that status for people facing medical emergencies, she was rejected on Jan. 24 due to what she called a technicality.

“Firstly, because our travel dates were more than 14 days out — something we did purposefully because flights are difficult to get out of Kabul and to give us time to appeal if we were rejected,” she wrote in the Herald. Also, officials in charge of the quarantine program apparently told her “you did not provide any evidence” that “you have a scheduled medical treatment in New Zealand,” she said, or evidence that it is “time-critical” and that she couldn’t “obtain or access the same treatment in your current location.”

As Bellis prepared her response, she received an email on Jan. 26 saying her application was in process and later that her partner’s application for a special visa was approved — a development she attributes to officials wanting to avoid “an incoming political headache.” Her column was published on Jan. 28.

Bellis said in the interview that she feels compelled to continue to tell her story publicly “on behalf of other pregnant women and just New Zealanders stuck abroad in general.”

“It’s unreasonable, particularly given the fact that I am a New Zealand citizen and I pay taxes there and I have a legal right to return, and I am applying … within an emergency context,” she said.

Hipkins, the covid-19 response minister, stressed Monday that Bellis had been invited to reapply under a different status. “The emergency allocation criteria includes a requirement to travel to New Zealand within the next 14 days. Ms. Bellis indicated she did not intend to travel until the end of February and has been encouraged by MIQ to consider moving her plans forward.

“I understand officials have also since invited her to apply for another emergency category. I encourage her to take these offers seriously.”

But Bellis said that meant applying under the premise that she and her partner faced “threats to their safety.” However, she said, “currently there is no threat to our safety, so it would be disingenuous to say there was.”

As she awaits a final decision on her case, Bellis said her and her partner’s backup plan if things don’t go their way is to go to a third country — one she declined to name. Neither she nor her partner are citizens, but its foreign minister contacted her within “a couple of hours” of her column being published. Bellis said the minister offered to “see if there’s visas that we can get you in on and support you as a stopgap.’”

While she hopes the government of New Zealand will allow her to return, she said the other country’s offer of temporary shelter was “an amazing gesture that I will never forget.”

Read more:

You tested positive in a foreign country. Here’s what you should do.

International travelers stranded, angry in omicron’s wake: ‘The first thing I did was cry’

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern cancels her wedding amid omicron outbreak