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Hirsi Ali seeks E.U. protection

— Photo: AFP

DESPERATE SITUATION: Ayaan Hirsi Ali (right), Somali-born former Dutch MP, with French Deputy Minister for Human Rights Rama Yade in Paris on Sunday.

Paris: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the former Dutch MP who received death threats for her outspoken criticism of Islam, has urged politicians in Brussels to create an E.U. fund to pay for round-the-clock security for individuals facing such threats.

Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born Muslim who became one of Islam’s most controversial critics, arrived in Paris this week with the backing of French intellectuals and asked President Nicolas Sarkozy for French citizenship. She said she could no longer afford her 24-hour security and that her life was at risk unless a government stepped in to meet the cost. “I’m desperate. I’m in a desperate situation,” Ms. Ali said. “I have very intense threats to my life.”

She has been living under tight police protection since the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh by an Islamist extremist in 2004. She wrote the script for his film “Submission” about the treatment of women under Islam. A note was found on Van Gogh’s murdered and mutilated body, targeting Ms. Ali by name.

In 2006, the Dutch government collapsed in a bitter row over the MP for the rightwing Liberal party when she admitted lying about her age and name in her Dutch asylum request. She fled to the U.S. where she works for the Washington-based conservative thinktank the American Enterprise Institute. She does not receive financial support for her 24-hour guards from the Dutch government while she is outside the Netherlands and the U.S. government says it does not fund security protection for individuals.

Ms. Ali has become a political and moral issue for Mr. Sarkozy, who promised that France would rush to the aid of “martyred women in the world”.

At a Paris rally this week, where Ms. Ali appeared with philosophers including Bernard-Henri Levy, Mr. Sarkozy’s junior Human Rights Minister Rama Yade said: “The eternal France, that of 1789, of Hugo, of de Gaulle has heard you.” She described Ms. Ali as “a kind of Voltaire of modern times”, and said the President would take a personal interest in her case.

French politicians are among 60 MEPs leading a petition to force the E.U. to consider meeting the bill for Ms. Ali’s security team. Mr. Sarkozy said the French government would use its E.U. presidency later this year to press for a fund that would see E.U. states share the security costs of individuals under threat.

Ms. Ali said: “Now [the Dutch government] has removed [my protection], I have been put in a position where I have to go from place to place in America and start begging for money from donors to say ‘Will you please pay for my security’.”

She hoped French citizenship would enable Paris to do a deal with Washington to cover costs, or that France would push the E.U. to pay for protection for her and any individual threatened by religious or political extremists. “A European fund would be established for people like me. I will be the first one but there would be others, there’s [Turkish writer] Orhan Pamuk, probably even Salman Rushdie. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2008

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