Mazen Maarouf is one of 19 people who have been selected to be awarded Icelandic citizenship by the Parliamentary General Committee this year.
Earlier today, the committee chose 19 people to be granted citizenship of the 56 people who applied for it with the committee. While the proposal has yet to be approved, individual objections to citizenship are rare.
Amongst those on the list is Palestinian poet Mazen Maarouf.
Mazen told Vísir he was “unbelievably happy” to be on this list, but also said he did not want to comment further on the matter until the proposal is approved.
Mazen came to Reykjavík as an ICORN writer in refuge in 2011, leaving Lebanon after receiving threats for his writings critical of various political regimes.
In an interview with Grapevine at the time, Mazen said that he had told his family about Iceland that “the country does not have an army. For my father and mother, who lived all their lives seeing guns in the streets and armed people and wars and bullets, it sounds very different and shocking to them, in a good way, when they hear that their son is in a place with no army.”
Below, you can see a documentary Al-Jazeera did about Mazen:
See also: Finally (Hopefully) Home.
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