A New Zealand reporter, who ended up pregnant and unmarried while working in Qatar for broadcaster Al Jazeera, has revealed that she had to turn to the Taliban for help after her own country said she couldn’t return due to Covid-19 curbs.
Charlotte Bellis had previously become famous when she attended the Taliban’s first press conference after the radical group took power in Afghanistan last August and asked its leaders: “What will you do to protect the rights of women and girls?”
Now, she’s making headlines again after finding herself in an unexpected conundrum, which the reporter detailed in a bombshell opinion piece for the New Zealand Herald on Friday.
In September, when Bellis returned from Afghanistan to Qatar’s capital Doha, where Al Jazeera is based, she found out that she was pregnant from her partner Jim Huylebroek, a photographer who contributes to the New York Times and who had also been in Kabul.
It was a huge surprise as doctors had always been saying that she was incapable of having kids, but it also meant that the reporter couldn’t stay in Qatar anymore, as being pregnant and unmarried was illegal under that Muslim country’s laws.
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Bellis resigned from Al Jazeera, hoping to give birth sometime in May in New Zealand, which shut itself from the outside world during the pandemic but planned to reopen its borders for residents in February.
The duo went to Belgium –Huylebroek’s home country– to wait until regular flights to New Zealand became available. The reporter knew her nationality meant she couldn’t stay in the EU for too long, so she’d also been trying to win a spot in a Managed Isolation and Quarantine (MIQ) facility in New Zealand, but with no luck.
And when the reopening of the borders was delayed by the authorities in Wellington due to the emergence of the Omicron variant, Bellis was left with just one destination she could travel to – Kabul. Both she and Huylebroek and still had visas that allowed them to live in Afghanistan.
The reporter said she organized a meeting with senior Taliban contacts, asking them if there’ll be “a problem” if she comes to the Afghan capital with her partner, considering the fact that she’s pregnant and that they weren’t a married couple.
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“No, we’re happy for you, you can come and you won’t have a problem,” a Taliban official responded, according to Bellis. “Just tell people you’re married and if it escalates, call us. Don’t worry. Everything will be fine.”
“When the Taliban offers you – a pregnant, unmarried woman – safe haven, you know your situation is messed up,” she wrote.
The reporter is currently in Kabul, but she doesn’t want to actually give birth in Afghanistan due to the turbulent situation and poor state of healthcare in the country.
With the UN expecting an extra 50,000 Afghan women to die in childbirth by 2025, “getting pregnant can be a death sentence” there, she pointed out.