Rebecca Barry: Writer's airport interrogation is the dumbest kind of bureaucracy

It was a small, nerdy thrill to read Hendrik Hertzberg's blog last week. The political commentator, who by virtue of being a New Yorker staffer and Jimmy Carter's former speechwriter is somewhat of a journalistic god, was part of an enlightening panel discussion at the Writers & Readers Festival's New Yorker Night on Saturday.

So to see him dedicate his web diary to a piece on lil' old New Zealand - our country's good name framed by that iconic art deco typeface - was another boost in a week Obama told our PM to call him "Barack" and Jane Campion's new film had a fantastic reception at Cannes. Maybe not that significant, but New Zealand was noted on a US website without mention of hobbits and elves.

"Like most developed democracies," Hendrik writes, "New Zealand makes an effort to welcome visitors in a friendly manner." He goes on to praise our passport officials as polite, compared with the brutal reception he is used to at JFK.

He was not to know that as he breezed through customs, "serenaded by a delightful background sound of birds chirping", a few days later a fellow writer was being serenaded by the sound of authorities rifling through his possessions. Pakistani novelist and senior BBC journalist Mohammed Hanif spent his first two hours in New Zealand detained at Auckland Airport with his wife and child.

When he mentioned he was here for the Auckland Writers & Readers Festival he says he was ignored, as though our officials seemed to believe no one in New Zealand reads or writes. Well, some don't, clearly. The following evening, Hanif was awarded the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book for his novel, A Case of Exploding Mangoes.

Just about everyone has a novel-worthy airport security story these days, especially those who've travelled to the US. After a 12-hour flight from London we waited for one bleary-eyed hour in a fluorescent transit corridor in LA before shuffling through customs for fingerprinting - despite not technically entering the country - and my Kiwi currency broker boyfriend was asked, "So, ah, what's happening with the dinar?"

"The what? Which currency is that?"

"Iraq's."

But two hours in Auckland is anything but funny. Hanif is not a hip-hop artist here for a music festival. This was the dumbest kind of bureaucracy, something British-Bangladeshi writer Monica Ali alluded to when she spoke of answering a "Britishness" quiz that would supposedly allow you to stay in the country or not. What should you do if you spill someone's pint in the pub? Correct answer: Buy them another one.

Ali's answer: Prepare for a fight in the carpark.

Hanif didn't cause any such disruption, other than wearing a sweatshirt at the weekend with a vaguely criminal pattern on the front.

At time of writing, immigration services were looking into the situation to uncover why it happened. But, quite rightly, Hanif slammed his treatment as racist. Though he dedicated his award to New Zealand customs, to his credit he refrained from mentioning the incident during his hour-long festival session the next day, lest it detract from the literary achievements the paying public had come to hear him talk about.

If there's a discussion that needs to be had, it's the uncomfortable one about why a brown-skinned man named Mohammed was singled out. It would be more tolerable to think this embarrassment was caused as a result of the writer chatting to a fan in the customs queue about the inspiration for his book. His readers will know Mangoes is a fictionalised account of the mysterious air crash that killed Pakistan's former military dictator, General Zia ul-Haq, in 1988. Had someone picked up on the words "assassination", "plane" and "bomb", it might have explained the ungracious treatment Hanif was about to receive. Perhaps he was asked about the book's bin Laden cameo. Maybe they thought he had mangoes in his bag.

Maybe, despite showing no signs of madness during his talk with Ali Ikram, who cheekily pressed him on leaving the Air Force two months before Zia's death, it might lessen the blow to know he was singled out because he's a writer and therefore, wacko.

But Hanif was told nothing. In a plot that brings back the ghosts of Ahmed Zaoui, he was made to feel "like a terrorist".

If they were looking for a terrorist, they won't find it in underwear, Hanif, the former head of the BBC's Urdu Service, told One News.

Hertzberg's blog ends on a memo to the Obama Administration that could be altered to address Immigration Minister Jonathan Coleman: "Could you arrange for our immigration authorities to stop making preventive war on innocent tourists? The pleasure of travel abroad would not have to be mixed with shame."