“The great mobilization was, in truth, not so great, in that it once again suggested that the root issue lays with minoritized groups, particularly the Muslim youth, and that all that is needed is some good PR for them to embrace laïcité and the republican values such as equality—an equality that they know all too well the French state does not deliver.”
This is not meant to minimize, justify nor explain away the horrific murders that have taken place. But it raises the issue that, if we continue to put ‘Frenchness’ at the centre of gravity of the public debate on religiously inspired violence, and to frame young French men and women as an ‘external threat’ to the Republic because of their faith, we remain at an impasse.
The internal issues in France cannot be dealt with solely through a security approach. That inequality and exclusion provide a context for the development of certain forms of religious extremism is well known. In France, this is also connected to the mismatch between the official discourse of the State about itself—the narrative that France is inherently a non-racist country, because of the principle of republican equality—, and the reality that many live with. In this sense, the focus on ‘Islamist separatism’ offers a symbolic solution to a problem that is not primarily symbolic.
As a neighbour of Mohammed Merah, a young French man of Algerian origin who went on a shooting spree in March 2012 in Toulouse, commented in the aftermath of the attacks,
“No one can excuse what he did, but he is a product of French society, of the feeling that he had no hope, and nothing to lose. It was not al-Qaeda that created Mohammed Merah, it was France.”
Some promising initiatives in preventing and countering violent radicalisation in France do exist, but they require a type of engagement that goes beyond the rhetoric of heroes and dehumanized enemies.
Studies have found that the traditional sectarian approach, which sees religious minorities as threatening ‘cults’ to be treated as a security issue in itself, missed the target (by over-focussing on western converts to Islam and on ISIS).
AMAL is a programme first piloted in two Parisian prisons and recently adopted as a basis for the preventive tools used in Penitentiary Wings with particularly radicalized individuals. It seems to offer promising results. The programme engages a wide range of professionals –social workers, psychologists, theology and geopolitics experts– who are trained to deal with the complexity of radicalisation.
Together they develop holistic projects to help people overcome violence as a tool. This approach requires significant preliminary work to convince beneficiaries to join in the first place. Participants are pooled from convicted returnees with the goal of preventing jihadi recidivism, but participation is voluntary. It includes both individual and group work, psychological help, as well as anger and frustration management. At its core, it is based on the beneficiaries’ needs, which is arguably why it has proven more successful than pushing to ‘rewire’ convicts into loyal members of the laic republic.
The psychological value of the program in providing case-by-case dangerousness assessments cannot be overstated. Abdoullakh Abouyedovich Anzorov, the man who murdered the teacher, was killed, as were the Kouachi brothers who carried out the Charlie Hebdo attacks in 2015; but the trial of their alleged accomplices is currently ongoing.
With prisons fostering a mix of non-ideological convicts with already-radicalised individuals and youth at risk, it seems that many all too often exit the detention system more radicalised than they were when they had entered it. This is why programmes such as AMAL are so important. They take a practical approach and accept that deep-seated divisions and resentments over France’s identity are internal to la République, and cannot be wished away by ‘othering’ a whole sector of its population.
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Tina Magazzini | Radio Free (2020-10-25T23:00:00+00:00) France: La République is at war with itself. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2020/10/25/france-la-republique-is-at-war-with-itself/
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