Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the former Dutch MP who received death threats for her outspoken criticism of Islam, will today urge politicians in Brussels to create an EU 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," Hirsi Ali told the Guardian. "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 Hirsi 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 US where she works for the Washington-based conservative think tank 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 US government says it does not fund security protection for individuals.
Hirsi Ali has become a political and moral issue for Sarkozy, who promised that France would rush to the aid of "martyred women in the world".
At a Paris rally this week, where Hirsi Ali appeared with philosophers including Bernard-Henri Lévy, 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 Hirsi Ali as "a kind of Voltaire of modern times", saying her application for French citizenship would be thoroughly examined and the president would take a personal interest in her case.
French politicians are among 60 MEPs leading a petition to force the EU to consider meeting the bill for Hirsi Ali’s security team. Sarkozy said the French government would use its EU presidency later this year to press for a fund that would see EU states share the security costs of individuals under threat.
Hirsi 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 EU 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. It’s a kind of sharing the bill among European countries to say people in a dire situation like mine should be able to lead a life as close to normal as possible and that should be financed from that fund."
Hirsi Ali said she had achieved her objectives in passing laws in the Netherlands to protect women from "honor" killings, genital mutilation and polygamy. But her campaign has irked some Dutch politicians. The deputy prime minister, Wouter Bos, said he knew of no cases where a state continued to protect a national who left the country without prior agreement. But the Volkskrant newspaper said the government must "do its duty" – protect Hirsi Ali or risk PR damage abroad.