Hirsi Ali, who is originally from Somalia, is a member of Verdonk’s party, the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD). She immigrated to the Netherlands in 1992. When she applied for asylum, and later for citizenship, she said she was fleeing the civil war in that country, instead of seeking to avoid a forced marriage to a stranger. She also did not use her father’s name, Magan.

“I was frightened that if I simply said I was fleeing a forced marriage, I would be sent back to my family,” Hirsi Ali told parliament May 16. “And I was frightened that if I gave my real name, my clan would hunt me down and find me.” In the past, she had explained several times in public why she had changed her name in seeking political asylum in the Netherlands.

Under increasing pressure within her party, Verdonk agreed to review the decision after the Dutch parliament voted to ask her to restore Hirsi Ali’s citizenship and the prime minister ordered her to do so on May 18. Two days earlier, Hirsi Ali announced her resignation from parliament and said she would move to the United States to take a job at the American Enterprise Institute, a position she had been offered earlier.

Immigration to the Netherlands, which maintains direct colonies today in the Antilles and Aruba, has increased over the past 20 years, as it has to other imperialist countries.

According to data compiled from census and other government surveys by the Migration Information Source, there were 1,350 asylum applications in the Netherlands in 1980 compared with 32,579 in 2001. From 1996 to 2003 the foreign-born residents grew from 8.2 percent to 10.6 percent of the country’s overall population. Immigrants from Turkey, Suriname, Morocco, Indonesia, and the Antilles are among the largest groups.

Verdonk is one of the authors of a plan, approved in 2004, to expel some 26,000 immigrants whose petitions for asylum had been rejected by the Dutch government. A former prison warden known as “Iron Rita,” she has made a name for herself by tightening restrictions on immigration and stepping up deportations.

A racist campaign directed largely against Muslims has accompanied this drive. In opposing the entry of Turkey into the European Union (EU) in 2004, for example, VVD party leader Frits Bolkestein, then the European Union internal market commissioner, said that if Turkey entered the EU, “the liberation of Vienna in 1683 would have been in vain.” Bolkestein was referring to the defeat of Ottoman Turk forces in Vienna some four centuries ago by Polish and Austrian armies.

Hirsi Ali joined the VVD in 2003, to become the party’s spokesperson for “the emancipation of women and the integration of immigrants,” as she put it in her May 16 speech to parliament. She collaborated with Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh on the movie Submission, which was critical of “Islamist” groups and, in particular, the treatment of Muslim women. Van Gogh was murdered in 2004 and Ali increasingly became a target of radical Islamist groups.

Prior to being stripped of her Dutch citizenship, she lost a battle with residents at the apartment complex where she was housed under police protection. Some of her neighbors complained that the threats against her life made their living quarters dangerous. A court ordered Hirsi Ali’s eviction in April from that complex.
 
 
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Defend use of pen names, pseudonyms  
 
 
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