But Musharraf didn’t always agree. If he didn’t want to go along, he might say, and in some cases he might be telling the truth, that the targeted person was actually an ISI asset whom the Pakistanis were using to infiltrate al-Qaeda. (Later it would be widely rumored that the ISI used Aafia to gather information on militant circles.) In that case, the United States refrained from action. In the years before the Americans began using drones to attack suspected militants (and eventually a Navy SEAL team to kill Osama bin Laden) in Pakistan, there was nothing else they could do.
But I have yet to find a source who recalls any such discussion of Aafia. She seemed to have disappeared into thin air.
Chapter Six
A Dutch television correspondent named Jos van Dongen read Christopher Caldwell’s profile of Ayaan in The New York Times Magazine with interest. Van Dongen didn’t normally cover Dutch politics, but he had won several awards for his investigative reports on the VARA TV network’s Zembla program. What caught the lanky Dutchman’s attention about “Daughter of Enlightenment” wasn’t its laudatory tone—he had no particular opinion about Ayaan—but rather Ayaan’s account of having changed her name and birth date on her application for asylum.
Holland’s minister of immigration and integration, Rita Verdonk of the Liberal Party, was still directing a government drive to expel 26,000 asylum seekers whose claims had been rejected by the courts. “Iron Rita,” as the former prison warden seemed to enjoy being called, had such a strong following with some (mostly working-class) Dutch voters that she was considering a run for party leader.
But her push to expel so many people had already resulted in tragic incidents, such as the deaths of eleven asylum seekers who had been caught in a fire inside an overcrowded detention center at Schiphol Airport. And by early 2006, the case of a Kosovar refugee girl named Taida Pasic had come to symbolize, for many people, its cruelty.
Taida Pasic’s family had fled the civil war in Kosovo for the Netherlands when she was nine years old. Years later, she had been on the verge of taking her Dutch high school exams when her family’s application for asylum was finally rejected on the grounds that the Kosovo war had ended. Her parents agreed to accept a 7,000-euro settlement and be deported. But, once in Kosovo, young Pasic learned that she would have to start all over again to take a high school diploma. Friends in the Netherlands agreed to let her live with them while she returned to complete her exams at her old school. After trying twice, she failed to get a Dutch visa, so she decided to reenter Holland by other means. She got a tourist visa to France and slipped back into the Netherlands in the fall of 2005.
In January 2006, Pasic was discovered. Dutch immigration police entered the classroom where she and her fellow students were taking their exams and ordered her to accompany them to a detention center. Pasic’s schoolmates mounted massive protests, and more than 75,000 people signed a petition asking the government to let her stay long enough to take her exams. But Verdonk branded the girl a fraud and insisted that she be deported for lying on her visa application.
The TV journalist van Dongen had been following Pasic’s case. When he read that Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a member of Parliament from Verdonk’s own Liberal Party, had lied about her name and her age on her own application for asylum, he saw it as a piece of news.
Van Dongen didn’t realize that Ayaan had referred in earlier interviews to lying on her application, nor did he know that many Dutch political insiders knew about her lies but had decided not to make them an issue. What struck him was the hypocrisy of Verdonk and the other Liberals rounding up asylum seekers who had lied to the authorities, when a well-known member of their own party had done the same. So he asked his young producer Sinan Can to look into how Ayaan came to the Netherlands.
Can had his own reasons to be curious about Ayaan’s past. His parents were secular Turks who had moved to the Netherlands in the 1970s. Like van Dongen, Can lived in Nijmegen, the same ancient town near the German border where Ayaan’s sister, Haweya, had gone to university and descended into madness. Can’s parents ran a shop. He had been born in the Netherlands and was the first in his family to go to university. With his burly chest and warm personality, Can was popular with his Dutch neighbors, many of whom had known him since he was a little boy helping out in his parents’ store. In the eyes of many Dutch, he was still a Turk, but what the Dutch called a knuffel Turk, a “huggable” Turk. Until 9/11 he had felt completely at home in Holland, certainly more so than in Turkey, which he hardly knew. But even for a “new Dutchman” as assimilated as Can, the atmosphere had changed since the rise of Pim Fortuyn, Ayaan, Geert Wilders, and Rita Verdonk.
Can would now sit down on a train, and the Dutch person next to him would take one look at his dark features and move away. He would turn on the television and see someone hammering away about Islam. Whether they were for it or against it, most of what they said struck him as ignorant and shallow, and he was shocked to think that the Dutch would believe such drivel about people like him and his parents.
Apart from Geert Wilders, Can thought Ayaan was the most simplistic of all, and he blamed her more than Wilders because he thought that Ayaan, as an educated Muslim, ought to know better. Her rigid insistence, for example, that Islam virtually required men to oppress women was completely at odds with what his own family’s Alevi sect taught. (Turkish Alevis are monogamous; men and women pray together; and women are encouraged to go to school, work, and wear what they like.) Turkey’s Sunni fundamentalists persecuted the Alevis for their beliefs, which was one reason the Alevis strongly supported Turkey’s secular government. But he felt all this complexity was lost on Ayaan. According to her logic, he supposed, he wasn’t even a Muslim. Of course, that wasn’t what Dutch employers thought when he went looking for a job, and it wasn’t what landlords thought when he wanted to rent an apartment. After listening to politicians such as Ayaan, they might take one look at Can and wonder if he was a terrorist honor killer.
Can’s mother had spent decades as a volunteer with their Turkish community organization helping other Muslim families, especially other women, make the transition from Turkey to the Netherlands. His family had taken girls into their house many times when the girls’ families had wanted to control their lives in ways that weren’t permissible in the West. His mother would spend hours, sometimes days, shuttling back and forth between the parties to a family quarrel, explaining Dutch mores to the parents and Turkish mores to the daughters.
Now the Dutch seemed to assume, because of what they were hearing from people like Ayaan, that honor was the only thing Muslim parents cared about. Sometimes that was true, but it wasn’t always true and it probably wasn’t true in most cases. Nor was the gritty underside of Dutch society, which the immigrants knew, quite the paradise it seemed to Holland’s middle-class commentators. Quite often immigrant parents had good reason to be scared of what might happen to their daughters on the streets of Amsterdam or Rotterdam. Those cities were rife with pimps and drug dealers looking for young girls who didn’t know anyone and didn’t speak Dutch properly. Yet the quiet and effective work of Muslim women like Can’s mother went unrecognized, he felt, while the Dutch listened to loudmouths like Ayaan.
She claimed that she understood the plight of Muslim women because she herself had been the victim of a forced marriage. But when Can began speaking with members of Nijmegen’s sizable Somali community, including members of Ayaan’s clan and others who had known Haweya, he heard that the story of her marriage that Ayaan told on television was no more factual than the story she had told the government about being a refugee from Somalia’s civil war. Those Somalis claimed to have heard that instead Ayaan had tricked a Canadian stranger into marrying her, used his money to pay her way to Europe, and then dumped him when she had received asylum in Holland.
Can knew better than to believe everything such gossips said. They had an ax to grind against Ayaan. But as he began to dig, he found other problems with Ayaan’s account of running away from
a forced marriage to a stranger.
She had claimed that she had changed her name and age because she feared her family would track her down. But when Can looked into it, neither the social workers at Lunteren nor her Dutch foster family remembered her saying anything while she was there about being afraid of her family. They remembered her getting letters from her father and visits from other relatives. One person recalled her being interviewed by the Dutch Muslim television network. Can went through the network’s archives and found the footage of Ayaan giving the reporter a tour of the refugee center. If she had been hiding from her family, he wondered, would she have gone on TV?
When Can examined the timing and circumstances of her asylum application, he noticed another possible reason for her to change her name and birthday. Only a few weeks before Ayaan first arrived in the Netherlands, Dutch newspapers reported that the government had started sending back Somali applicants who already had refugee status in Kenya. Can wondered if Ayaan had altered her name not to hide from her family but to conceal her real identity from the Dutch authorities, who would have deported her.
Another puzzle in her story, Can felt, was the way Ayaan had gone straight to her aunt’s house as soon as she arrived. Would she have done that if she had feared her family? That wasn’t the way Turkish girls behaved when they felt at risk of being hurt or killed to preserve their family’s honor. Ayaan’s story didn’t add up.
Can talked it over with van Dongen. To get to the bottom of things, the two journalists agreed, van Dongen would have to go to Africa and find Ayaan’s mother and brother.
Chapter Seven
In the shadows that enveloped Aafia’s case, one little ray of light gleamed. Everyone else who was said to have been involved in KSM’s plot to turn American gas stations into giant torches had vanished into “the dark side,” but young Uzair Paracha had been in the United States when the authorities tracked him down. The hapless twenty-three-year-old Pakistani thus became the only overseas resident charged with furthering the plot, and in the fall of 2005, actually tried in a court of law. I flew to New York beforehand to see what I could learn about why the United States wanted Aafia so badly.
The Justice Department had attempted to avoid a trial. Defendants in a U.S. courtroom have the right to face their accusers and other witnesses. That meant that Uzair’s lawyers wanted to put Majid Khan, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, KSM, and Uzair’s father, Saifullah Paracha, on the witness stand to testify that when Uzair had met them, he’d had no idea who they were or what they were plotting—and that he had agreed to mislead the INS simply because his father had asked him to. But the United States at that point still refused to admit it was holding KSM, Ali, and Majid Khan, and it later emerged that all three men claimed to have confessed to the plot only after being tortured. Such extralegal oddities put prosecutors into a bind.
Uzair’s lawyers advised him to seize the opportunity and plead guilty. If convicted of all the charges against him, he faced seventy-five years in prison. His lawyer thought a guilty plea might reduce the sentence to ten years, less time already served.
But the lawyer couldn’t persuade Uzair to take his advice. Having never been in legal trouble before, the young Pakistani evidently couldn’t believe he might be locked away forever because he had lied in a single phone call to the INS. “He is a bright, handsome young man, but he has no real-life experience and no experience of the criminal justice system,” his lawyer told me. “He doesn’t really understand what he’s up against.” Finally a judge ruled that the government must provide Uzair’s defense with witness statements from Majid Khan and Ali. It did not allow for the face-to-face cross-examination before a jury that Uzair’s lawyers believed the U.S. Constitution required, but it was the first time a U.S. court was allowed to hear testimony from prisoners in the bowels of the CIA’s secret prisons.
Once in court, Uzair recanted everything he had told the FBI. Majid Khan and Ali backed him up in their witness statements, saying they had never told him they belonged to al-Qaeda and hadn’t tried to recruit him because they weren’t sure of his sympathies. But the New York jury didn’t believe them. And one piece of evidence it held against Uzair was his association with Aafia.
Witnesses testified that he had been found with the key and the receipt to the post office box that she had opened in Maryland. And an FBI agent testified that Uzair had told them he believed Aafia was the kind of person who might help launch an anthrax attack.
The jury didn’t care that Uzair had never laid eyes on Aafia. In the end, it convicted him of providing material support to terrorism, and, on July 20, 2006, he was sentenced to thirty years in federal prison.
Chapter Eight
In the last week of April 2006, Jos van Dongen phoned Ayaan in The Hague with the news that Zembla was making a documentary about her. Van Dongen told her that he had just been to Kenya and Somalia, where he had interviewed members of her family. He asked if he could show her his footage and ask her about her early life.
Ayaan didn’t know van Dongen, but she sounded surprised and pleased. She chided him for not having called her before he left for Africa; she would have put him into touch with more people. They agreed to meet at her parliamentary office on April 27.
She was in for an unpleasant surprise. Ever since Neelie Kroes, the doyenne of the Liberal Party, had given Elma Verhey of Vrij Nederland her televised dressing-down in 2002 for reporting that a police official and some Somalis thought Ayaan had exaggerated the threats against her, few journalists had interviewed any Somalis about Ayaan. Even fewer had inquired into how she had arrived in the Netherlands. Meanwhile, Ayaan had avoided reporters who might conceivably be skeptical.
For example, soon after I committed to write this book, in 2005, I wrote Ayaan’s agent, Susanna Lea, an enthusiastic letter asking for an interview. I attached my book proposal and mentioned that I also had an assignment to write an article about Ayaan for Vogue. Thinking my serious interest would impress Ayaan favorably, I added that I’d be glad to go to Africa to interview her family, having spent time in Somalia during the civil war there and having written another book about Africa. But I never got a reply to my letter. Perhaps my interest in Africa wasn’t the reason. Ayaan may have disliked two short articles I had written about her for other magazines. In any case, something made her stay away. Even after I moved to Amsterdam at the end of 2005, Ayaan adamantly refused to be interviewed by me.
A Somali-born reporter for the BBC, Rageh Omaar, also wanted to interview her. Omaar was a polished product of Cheltenham College and Oxford University, and he came from a family known to Ayaan as political liberals. His feminist sister Rakiya Omaar had helped found the original Africa desk at Human Rights Watch. But on a flying visit by Ayaan to England the previous November, when at least four other national British radio and TV programs had interviewed her, Ayaan had refused to see Rageh Omaar.
By the spring of 2006, Ayaan seemed to have grown so comfortable with the tale of her escape from a forced marriage that she may have forgotten that other people remembered the same events differently.
For months she had been spinning out the story of her life for the British ghostwriter who was weaving it into an inspiring account of female liberation, thanks to the West. (In one interview in New York, which was filmed, Ayaan sat on a couch while the ghostwriter questioned her about how her grandmother had seen the world. “Was the world flat for your grandmother? Was that how she saw the cosmos?”) Thinking the ghostwriter might want to see van Dongen’s footage of people and places in Africa that the two of them had talked about, Ayaan brought the writer along to the meeting with him.
Van Dongen began by telling Ayaan that he had found her brother, Mahad, and even traveled to the remote desert town in Somalia where her mother lived. He said he had asked them and other relatives about the circumstances of her marriage and arrival in the Netherlands. Ayaan seemed touched by his film from her primary school, but as he began to confront her with the statements of her fam
ily members, her expression turned worried and her answers became hesitant and evasive.
She had told several previous interviewers that she had refused to attend her own wedding. Van Dongen asked her why, if so, her brother, Mahad, said she had been there, and her aunt Faduma Osman had said the same thing. Ayaan answered that they were lying.
Next van Dongen asked her why she had told other interviewers that she feared her family. He showed Ayaan some film of her brother saying that he was proud of her for being elected to Parliament and he still hoped she might get him a visa to the West. Then the film showed Ayaan’s mother refusing to talk to the Dutch reporter and producer on the grounds that she didn’t want to take the chance of saying anything that might harm Ayaan’s political career. Her relatives appeared to be proud and protective of her.
Ayaan said none of that mattered. She maintained that she had been afraid of her family and that the reason she had changed her name and birthday was to hide from them—rather than to conceal the fact that she already had refugee status in Kenya. But, possibly for the first time since she had arrived in the Netherlands, Ayaan faced an interviewer who was clearly dubious about what she had to say.
“You believed you were at physical risk of getting killed by your family?” van Dongen asked.
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