| Submit your comments on this article |
| Europe |
| Ayaan Hirsi Ali to resign from parliament, move to the USA |
| 2006-05-15 |
| Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali- born Dutch politician known for her criticism of Islam, said Monday that her life in the Netherlands had become untenable because of security issues and a controversy over reports that she had lied on her application for asylum in 1992. Hirsi Ali, 36, said she would resign her seat in Parliament on Tuesday and speed up her intended departure for the United States, where she plans to take a job at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. A Muslim who has received frequent death threats from Islamic militants, Hirsi Ali is a gifted speaker and is easily one of the country's most famous politicians. But she has faced rising political pressure over charges that she lied to the immigration authorities when she fled from an arranged marriage in Somalia to hide in the Netherlands in 1992. Her critics accuse her of further polarizing the already difficult immigration debate and of alienating rather than defending Muslim women. In a telephone interview from The Hague on Monday, she said she had learned that as a result of the asylum application controversy she might be stripped of her Dutch citizenship. She said that was the last straw in a series of setbacks that made her decide to leave for the United States a year earlier than planned. In April, she was notified that she would have to vacate her secure government apartment in The Hague because her neighbors had won a lawsuit complaining that her presence exposed them to risk. After living with bodyguards since 2002 and moving from place to place, she said the thought of being on the run again was difficult to bear, but not as difficult as the likelihood of losing her Dutch nationality. "If necessary I can take the death threats, the eviction, the many attacks on my character," she said. "But I cannot deal with the idea of losing my Dutch nationality." She had been told, she said, that the minister in charge of immigration had ordered a review of how she obtained her citizenship and that it be revoked if necessary. She said she was baffled by the uproar over her asylum procedure because she had told the story in numerous interviews. In those interviews, she said Monday, she explained how she changed her birthdate and her last name, from Magan to Ali, when she fled to escape an arranged marriage "in case my father or my brother or my husband looked for me with bad intentions." The issue came to the fore in recent days when a television documentary retraced her steps from Somalia to her family's exile in Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia and Kenya. Some political opponents said she should be expelled from Parliament and others said she should be forced to leave the country as other asylum seekers had. "I'm now being picked on for lying, but I have admitted for years that I did that, that I changed my name and my birthdate," she said. When she was invited to join a conservative political party, VVD, and run for Parliament, she said she discussed the matter with the party leadership. "Everybody knew, it's a very old story," she said. But the issue is very sensitive for the VVD because it has taken a hard line on immigration and introduced tough new citizenship tests. A number of immigrants have been expelled for failing to meet the criteria for political asylum. "I was planning to move to the U.S. when my mandate ended next year," Hirsi Ali said Monday. "But now it's time to become a private citizen again." Being driven from her home, and now being under official investigation, "has made me bring my plans forward." "I feel I can no longer function as a proper member of Parliament," she added. As a soft-spoken but passionate defender of Muslim women's rights, she first won attention in 2002 when she became one of the first politicians to say that the government's costly programs to integrate Muslims in the Netherlands were misplaced because they kept women oppressed and isolated in the immigrant ghettoes. Death threats assailing her as a traitor to Islam began in 2002 and she has lived with a retinue of plainclothes government bodyguards ever since. That protection, she said, saved her life. Theo van Gogh, with whom she made a short film denouncing violence against Muslim women, but who refused bodyguards, was killed by an Islamic radical in 2004 on an Amsterdam street. Since then, her fame at home and abroad has grown, as have the threats against her. In Parliament, she said, she had already achieved much of what she wanted by pushing issues on to the agenda that were long hidden, such as honor killings, genital mutilation and widespread domestic violence among people in largely Muslim immigrant communities, many of them from rural areas in Turkey and Morocco. Hirsi Ali was always an anomaly in Dutch politics who did not fit into the traditional left, center or right. Her glamour, skillful debating style and her fame gained her as many admirers as critics. The Immigration Ministry could not be reached for questions about the investigation into reviewing her asylum application of 1992 and into the early period of her stay in the Netherlands, where she gained citizenship in 1997 |
| Posted by:john |
| #2 Mods, please delete |
| Posted by: john 2006-05-15 19:23 |
| #1 Oops.. I see this is already posted |
| Posted by: john 2006-05-15 19:19 |