Peter Greste likened his 400-day ordeal inside an Egyptian prison to a “near-death experience” at his first press conference back home in Australia.
Flanked by his parents and two brothers, the al-Jazeera correspondent said the frustrations of jail had forced him to re-evaluate his life, in “the kind of experience that people talk about when they approach death”.
A jubilant Greste had arrived back in Brisbane, his parents’ hometown, only hours before to a hero’s welcome from a waiting crowd of well-wishers and journalists.
It was the first time most of them had seen him in the flesh since he was arrested in December 2013, accused of trumped-up charges of supporting terrorists and making up the news.
At the press conference Greste occasionally cut a less ecstatic figure as he outlined his darker moments in jail. “This felt partly like a rebirth, but also like a near-death experience, in the sense that I was really given the opportunity to look back at my life again, to look back at the screw-ups that I made, to appreciate all the things that I’ve done and experienced in ways that I’ve never really understood in the past,” he said.
A career in journalism, however, did not count among his mistakes, despite the fate it dealt him in Cairo: asked what his next steps would be, Greste expressed a desire to get back to work.
“I don’t want to give this job up,” he said. “I’m a correspondent. It’s what I do. How I do it, whether I do actually go ahead with it, I don’t know. But that’s the way I feel right now.”
Sitting to his left, this was not the news Greste’s mother, Lois, wanted to hear after an exhausting year in which she and her husband, Juris, spent several months in Cairo to support their incarcerated son.
“We’ve always believed that our children should follow their passion – Peter’s followed his and we need to let him do that,” she began diplomatically. But to laughs from the unusually large assembled press corps, she added: “At the same time he has got to know that we are not going to go through this again!”
It was a light-hearted exchange that was riffed on throughout the conference. Had Lois, one wag wondered, put Peter over her knee on his return last night? “Not quite,” she deadpanned. “But I’ve given him a bit of a whack in the stomach. A punch in the nuts.”
Would Peter be buying the beers tonight, after the stress he put his family through? “He’ll be buying them for a year,” growled Peter’s brother Mike, a police officer.
The mood turned more sombre at the mention of Greste’s colleagues Baher Mohamed and Mohamed Fahmy, who remain in Egyptian custody. When he greeted journalists briefly in the minutes after he landed in Australia, Greste pulled no punches in calling for their release. But eight hours on, he tried a subtler approach, perhaps wary of exacerbating their predicament.
“I hope [Egypt’s government] does what is best for Egypt,” Greste said, acknowledging that “Egypt is going through a very difficult time at the moment – politically, economically, socially – and I understand that very well, and I wish the very best for Egypt and the Egyptian people in particular.”
His own release, Greste reasoned, had “generated a lot of goodwill. I’d like to see that continue.”
