THE HAGUE, 25/09/03 - Conservative (VVD) MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali has criticized the involvement of the Verwey Jonker Institute in the inquiry into 30 years of Dutch integration policy. "I doubt the integrity of the results," she said yesterday on Radio 1. VVD parliamentary leader Jozias van Aarsten backed her.

On Monday, a temporary committee led by VVD MP Stef Blok started public hearings of former politicians and civil servants who were involved in integration policy. The commission is being assisted by the Verweij-Jonker Institute (VJI), which was itself involved in the past in drawing up the policy it is now to evaluate.

Hirsi Ali considers the JVI's involvement incomprehensible. "VJI director Jan Willem Duyvendak has always had clear-cut ideas and given advice on integration. He claims that the policy has not failed, but the opposite is true," she declared. Last week, Socialist Party (SP) MP Ali Lazrak resigned from the committee because of the VJI's role in it.

Committee chairman Blok considers that his fellow VVD MP is breaking the rules of the Lower House by criticizing the committee even before its final report has been presented. Lower House Speaker Frans Weisglas was also unhappy with Hirsi Ali's criticism and said in a written statement that he regretted her position.

Hirsi Ali admitted that she had spoken out of turn, but maintained that "one of the most important issues of this century" was involved. VVD parliamentary leader Van Aartsen supported her: "She has a point with her criticism of the Verweij-Jonker Institute's involvement. " Van Aartsen called the commotion about Hirsi Ali's premature comments "theatrical" and pointed out that he himself had characterised the integration policy as a failure. "Should I not have done this either?" he wondered.

The Somali born and bred Hirsi Ali believes that the integration policy merely has a segregating effect, claiming immigrants are taught how to apply for subsidies rather than how to find a job. In an interview with Elsevier magazine, she last week criticized her former Labour (PvdA) party, which she considered is keeping fundamentalism in existence by rejecting all criticism of Islam as discrimination. Since her transfer to the VVD, Hirsi Ali can speak more freely but must often do so in a personal capacity to avoid tensions within the party.

The former Director of Minorities Policy in the Home Affairs Ministry, H. Molleman, appeared before the committee yesterday. He claimed integration policy had not failed, but was "under way. " He did admit that policymakers had not been sufficiently aware that there was an "Absorption capacity in society" for minorities. Molleman (PvdA), who coordinated the integration policy in the 1980s, criticized the recent "toughening of the integration policy". Plans for spreading minorities between neighborhoods are "exaggerated and harmful," and lead to discrimination, in his view.