By David Rennie in Brussels
The Telegraph (UK)
(Filed: 16/05/2006)
Holland's most strident critic of Islam, the Somali-born MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali, is today expected to announce she is quitting politics and moving to America, amid allegations that she lied to gain asylum.
Miss Hirsi Ali faces penalties up to and including the potential loss of her Dutch citizenship, after a leading member of her own political party, the VVD, pledged a formal investigation of her actions.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali: leaving Holland for the US
The Dutch immigration minister, Rita Verdonk, who is running for the parliamentary leadership of the VVD, said she would order a probe of her colleague's case, saying: "Laws and rules are valid for everyone".
Miss Hirsi Ali, 36, lives under constant police guard, after receiving death threats for her criticisms of the treatment of women in Islam (her own religion), a stance that won her many fans in Europe and America.
A film she scripted about abuse of women, Submission, led to the brutal murder of its director, Theo van Gogh, in 2004, by a Muslim extremist.
The MP has in fact long admitted lying to the Dutch authorities in 1992 about her name, her age, and the fact that she did not flee directly to Holland from Somalia.
She presented those omissions as necessary lies to obtain refugee status. Asylum seekers are expected to seek shelter in the first safe country they come to, and she would have been automatically deported if she had owned up to spending more than a decade outside Somalia, in Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, Kenya and, briefly, Germany.
She obtained Dutch citizenship in 1997, and was elected to parliament in 2003.
However, the controversy has been stoked by a television documentary last week, which showed members of her own family striking at the very heart of her dramatic life story - her claim that she fled a forced marriage to a cousin she had never met.
Relatives, including her brother, said she had not been forced into marriage, and had nothing to fear. The documentary showed images of her family's comfortable middle-class home in Kenya.
Miss Hirsi Ali, who cut short a book tour in America to return to Holland and address the media storm, is expected to announce she is moving to Washington DC, to take up a post at the neo-conservative think-tank, the American Enterprise Institute, the newspaper De Volkskrant reported.
Since the allegations surfaced, Miss Hirsi Ali has said she is the victim of a "smear campaign".