By training at-risk youths in history, philosophy, literature, and religion, the government hoped to fight terrorism at its root.
Not long after his 19th birthday, David Vallat, a native Frenchman born to a secular family, converted to Islam. He was having an “existential crisis” and his new faith helped him curb his juvenile bêtises, or “bad behavior,” he told me. Few questioned his choice to convert either then or later when he joined the French army in 1992, to, as he saw it, protect the Bosnian Muslims in Yugoslavia. At the time, French troops were being sent to the Balkans as NATO peacekeepers, and Vallat jumped at the opportunity to join them. His motivation came from a promise he’d made to himself several years earlier after watching Nuit et Brouillard, a film about Auschwitz: He would not “stand idly by” in the face of another genocide. Yet the war was a shock: After escaping death twice in three days, Vallat considered returning home—“as a coward,” he said.
Then Vallat met Saudi Arabian and Qatari fighters on the frontline. They had a “momentum” he admired, a courage he desired. They taught him that if he sought to become a true Muslim, it didn’t matter if he lived or died in the war—Allah was waiting for him in paradise. He befriended several men who were members of the Armed Islamic Group (GIA), which sought to export the Algerian civil war to French soil. They told Vallat that if he wanted to be a true martyr, he needed to “train himself.” (Two of the men, Khaled Kelkal and Boualem Bensaïd, were later convicted of masterminding the 1995 Paris bombings.)
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Last September, nine residents showed up at a cream-colored 18th-century manor nested in rows of copper sunflower fields in Pontourny, a sleepy town in France’s Loire Valley. Aside from the video camera and a sign on the fence outside that read “No Filming,” there was little evidence that this was the site of an experimental government program. A team of 25 social workers, psychologists, special educators, and a Muslim chaplain, greeted them for what was expected to be a 10-month regimen. (The center was expecting three times as many people to show up.)
Residents, who were aged between 18 and 30 and came from all over France, received lessons in French history, philosophy, literature, media, and religion, all with the goal of teaching them to “muscle their intellectual immune systems,” as Gerald Bronner, a French sociologist who worked at the center in Pontourny, put it. They also participated in daily therapy, art, and music classes. Group conversations centered on democracy, religion and laïcité, the French concept dating back to 1905 that calls for the separation of religion from politics.“You can’t tell someone, ‘What you think is bad, here’s good information,’” one social worker at the center told me in August. Instead, the center wanted to address what made the residents prone to their ideology in the first place. “We worked with each person on their history, job opportunities, home life, health programs, all to help them understand why they believe what they do and question whether it’s really the truth.”The center did not intend to teach courses in religion, but a Muslim chaplain was brought in to meet with each resident individually. At first, no one would speak with him—they regarded him as unfaithful because he didn’t keep halal and worked with the French government, which they regarded as secular. But he decided to stay at the center, the social worker told me. The chaplain met with residents individually and in groups, and offered two workshops: the first was in Arabic so they could “better master the language of the sacred texts,” and the second a lesson on the history of Muslim civilization. “Secularism in France does not mean the rejection of religions,” the CIPDR clarified, “but, on the contrary, guarantees freedom of belief and worship of one’s choice.”
After a few months, the residents were eating non-halal food. Residents also received a rigorous training in French nationalism: They were asked to wear uniforms and sing La Marseillaise, France’s national anthem, each morning.But deradicalization is a murky, unsettled science. A debate soon broke out among experts over how best to implement the program. Could radicalized youth be “cured” psychologically? Or was radicalization a structural problem, caused by inequality and segregation? What, for that matter, did it even mean to be radicalized?When I posed these questions to the CIPDR, they admitted they were still working out the process. To be radicalized, they explained, was the “process by which an individual or a group adopts a violent form of action directly linked to an extremist ideology with a political, social or religious content that disputes the political, social or cultural order.” Part of the difficulty, though, is in creating a program that avoids falsely categorizing Muslims who are conservative but not radicalized. While French intelligence monitors mosques, neighborhoods, and online activities, often there’s no way to tell if someone has fully committed to jihad until it’s too late. And to Vallat, the problem extends in both directions. “Nobody knows they are radicalized,” he said. When I asked him his opinion of the government’s voluntary approach, he laughed. “What, I’m going to raise my hand and say, ‘Hi, I think I’m radicalized and I need a doctor?’”
The French deradicalization model was also unlike any other. Germany, Britain, and Belgium have developed programs that focus on further integrating radicals into their community. Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, focuses on finding jobs and wives for recruited jihadists. But in France, the idea was to take subjects awayfrom their home environments.
To Vallat, the problem with a deradicalization program, especially one implemented en masse, is the ambiguity of terms. “Radicalization” is subjective; it’s not like being ill or suffering from addiction. The idea that someone can possess the “wrong” radical ideology presumes there’s some “right” corpus of values. The CIPDR claimed to be addressing this problem by using the term “disengagement” instead of deradicalization. “Deradicalization means that we are going to withdraw the beliefs of a spirit,” Bronner wrote in an email. “This is not really the objective of the center; everyone has the right to believe what he wants. Rather, we want to help these radicalized young people make a declaration of mental independence to better control certain processes of deceptive reasoning such as conspiracy theories.”
Bronner explained that he and his colleagues at CIPDR convened an independent team of psychologists, including the sociologist Farhad Khosrokhavar, to create a “psychometric test” to measure the extent to which the residents’ worldviews were changing. They were tested on their ability to identify conspiracy theories, and forced to examine how they may have fallen for a conspiracy. Many of their tools were modeled after the French government-designed program Epide, Bronner explained, which works with disenfranchised youth to better integrate them into French society. But the methods were controversial.
Esther Benbassa, a French senator of Val-de-Marne, told me the French program was a “total fiasco.” The problem, she explained, was not the government’s method but the model from the outset. “It’s a stupid idea to take young people from their homes. The problem is you need to re-socialize these people, not make them a bourgeois model.”
“Several errors were made,” Amelie Boukhobza, a clinical psychologist for Entr’Autres, an association that manages the state’s deradicalization cases, told me. “The issue of volunteering was very problematic.” But to Boukhobza, the “full-frontal” approach of “flag raising in the morning, courses in secularism, etc.,” was too aggressively nationalistic. “They’ve built a program in total opposition to the particular mental universe of the individuals. I don’t think it’s the right solution. Rather, they should propose not a counter-truth but something that can coexist.”
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