Failing French war on Jihad
At least 500 French citizens are currently involved in the Syrian conflict. As radicalization leading to terrorism has become a thorny issue, French authorities are responding with an increasingly aggressive set of judicial measures. But France’s response to the interior terrorist menace, mainly repressive, is neither efficient nor safe.
By Antoine Panaite
“The goal of this video is to encourage you, brothers, to leave France and to join us in Syria to fight against the allies of Satan.”
Since the day he left France, Nicolas, a 30-year-old Frenchman who converted to Islam, was fighting and calling Muslims to make hijra – to leave a country ruled by “miscreants” for a Muslim land – and fight along with jihadists in Syria. He and his younger brother, Jean-Daniel, 23, left Toulouse for Syria in March 2013. Their entire family thought they were going on vacation until they sent a letter to them: “We will never see you again in this world. But if you turn to Islam, we will meet in heaven.” “They were not my sons anymore,” their father said to a local French newspaper. “They have been influenced by something or someone but I don’t know what.” Last summer, Nicolas called his relatives to announce some tragic news: Jean-Daniel died on the front line in Alep. Four months after his little brother passed away, Nicolas blew himself up in a suicide bombing.
This tragic story is no longer exceptional. According to François Hollande, “more than 30 French nationals” who went to Syria died there. France, which has been a staunch opponent of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, estimates the number of its nationals directly involved in the Syrian conflict at about 500. The authorities think many more are willing to go there. In a few months, the number of Frenchmen in Syria has increased by 75 percent.
The homegrown terrorism’s shadow
Because the authorities fear that those who come back from Syria might have terrorist intentions, authorities are building an anti-jihad plan. Over the past year, France, and many other European countries, have steadily grown more concerned about the possibility that the main terrorist threat could come from their own citizens. Alain Marsaud, French deputy and former antiterrorist judge, expressed on French television the thinking of many: “I believe that someone who spent months or years in Syria fighting and using all kinds of weapons, living a life devoted to Jihad, will not easily go back to France and search for a job at the unemployment office.”
According to the last Europol report about terrorism in Europe, France represents two thirds of the total amount of terrorism-related-arrests in the European Union. Considering the positive aspect of these figures, they can actually be explained by the unique way France is dealing with its terrorist threats. Indeed, when it comes to dealing with the jihadist threat, France overuses preventive penal actions, thanks to the incrimination of “criminal associations in relation to a terrorist initiative”. In other words, authorities can easily arrest people thanks to the blurry term ‘criminal association’. In 2013, 143 French residents were arrested because of terrorism cases linked with radical Islam. But those results should not be acclaimed nor perceived as a victorious step against radicalism or terrorism. If they are impressive at all, they are very likely to increase in the future. Indeed, two major terrorist attacks perpetrated by French nationals have provoked a reinforcement of the current anti-terrorist laws, accelerating the number of arrests.
A fear fueled by recent events
The first attack was two years ago, in the middle of the election campaign for the presidency, when Mohammed Merah killed three French soldiers in Montauban and four civilians, including three children, in front of a Jewish school in Toulouse. “The Mohammed Merah case proved that a single person could go with a jihadi group to train himself and come back to perpetrate an attack in France,” said Ludovic Lestel, a government prosecutor in Paris.
The second and last terrorist attack that involved a French national happened on May 24th of this year when Medhi Nemmouche allegedly killed four people in the Jewish Museum of Brussels. This last event has exerted even more pressure on the government to respond strongly to the terrorist threat. And as Medhi Nemmouche went to Syria, stopping nationals from going to Syria and tracking those who came back has become a number one priority, shedding light on the relationship between Jihad in Syria and terrorism. And although Mohammed Merah did not go to Syria, he went abroad several times to train in terrorist training camps.
Reinforcement of repressive measures
The Mohammed Merah case is probably the main reason why France has reinforced the legislative means to prevent jihad so widely in recent years. It has moved more aggressively than many other nations in that regard. If England or Bosnia, for example, have also adopted strong legislation, France remains ahead in terms of the use of its legislative weapons. The most recent example was in January when a court in Paris sentenced three men to prison terms of up to five years for trying to join the rebellion in Syria. Those convictions were the first such ones in France. The three men, aged between 21 and 26, were charged with criminal association with the intent to commit terrorist acts. If their lawyer declared that “radicalization doesn’t necessarily mean terrorist intention”, seeking to fight in Syria is enough to bring a charge of plotting terrorism.
This year, French news often had the words ‘jihadi’ and ‘arrest’ in their headlines. After the apprehension of Medhi Nemmouche, the main suspect in the killings at the Jewish Museum in Brussels, the French authorities arrested four men described as jihadi recruiters operating in the Paris region and in the south of France, as well as one French citizen living in Brussels. This is the latest ‘coup’ of the authorities, in a string of cases intended to disrupt the flow of French citizens to Syria.
In line with the Prime Minister’s plan to add a new collection of measures to fight radicalization, Interior Minister Bernard Canzeneuve said that he and the Justice Minister Christiane Taubira would seek to pass legislation to expand the legal grounds for arrest and prosecution in cases involving terrorist acts. Prime Minister Manuel Valls said in January that the threat of jihadis returning home to Europe represents “the greatest danger that we must face in the coming years”. The Anti-Jihad plan by the government will undoubtedly make the number of people identified as jihadis increase. With its use of pre-emptive actions, France has moved more swiftly than any other European nation, ignoring concerns about civil liberties.
Civil liberties in the balance of the terrorist threat
The recent anti-Jihad plan is raising many concerns regarding individual liberties, especially online. One law consists of accelerating procedures regarding data interception for Jihad-related issues and another one aims to develop cyber-patrols and the observation of risky websites. If those propositions are blurry now, they raise the fear of France heading towards a dystopia. As it will be easier for the government intelligence services to spy on websites that are suspected of spreading radical ideology, fears regarding the extent to which Internet users will be watched seem legit. Mathieu Guidère, scholar specializing in Islamic politics, who considers that “this plan will not stop departures”, estimates that many important questions have not been answered: “Are the authorities going to keep the data they collected in a data base? And if yes, who is going to control and manage them? Will this base be under any independent authority?” The Interior Minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, has given assurances that everything will be done with respect to the law. However, as it stands now, those propositions have the potential to become a threat for public liberties. It could even be said that they could only be really efficient enough in a state that would no longer be under the rule of law.
Indeed, if those measures are suspected of being liberty killers they are, on top of it all, largely considered as inefficient in fighting terrorism. Many experts like Eric Denécé, director of the French center for intelligence research, agree on the fact that this plan aims “to reassure public opinion. It is a bit like military presence in train stations: it is reassuring but in terms of efficiency to fight against terrorism, the effect is zero.” Cazeneuve, who is carrying this plan, judges the numerous critics against this latter “hard and unjustified”, stating that “there is nothing cosmetic” in it.
Shortcomings in prevention
It should be granted to the minister that some measures are actually going in the right direction. The measures regarding the prevention of radicalization are probably the ‘best’ ones or the least bad. Yet, the government does not seem to understand the fact that this plan is doomed to fail in stopping potential terrorists and especially the appeal for jihad. Undoubtedly, the main cause of its likely coming failure resides in the overuse of repression instead of prevention.
In addition to the numerous strengthened terrorism laws, there are some measures that go towards prevention, like a website to help parents and relatives learn about the signs of radicalization. The government has also set up a phone number that people can use to discuss worrying behavior with social workers or psychologists and eventually reach the police and border authorities to alert them of a relative’s radicalization. The scholar Mr. Guidère is here again worried about what this implies in terms of liberties. “The report platform really sounds likes denunciation,” he warned. One month after its effective date, 126 candidates for jihad have been reported through the platform. An “experimental plan of distinctive rehabilitation” for young radicals has also been proposed but no explanations were given about what is meant by this. Therefore, the prevention measures are blurry and seem still far from enough to prevent jihad. “There are momentous shortcomings in the field of prevention,” denounced Ali Boubakeur, rector of the Great Mosque of Paris, on French television, after Medhi Nemmouche became the main suspect in the Brussels’ attack. He further explains “there is probably indirect responsibility of the Muslim community in that kind of downward slide (but) all those who want to preserve Islam and its authenticity, moderation and tolerance are shocked and overwhelmed by those attacks.” But if the Muslim community can be seen as able to prevent radicalization, the responsibility relies mostly on the public authorities. As Boubakeur states, shortcomings in prevention go along with the absence of answers to the social and economic issues.
Breaking the roots of radicalization
The profiles of the interior terrorists coming back from Syria or somewhere else have always been quite similar. Many come from communities where youth unemployment is high. Unemployment, drug addiction and other social problems strike the working classes – and the majority of the Muslim community – harder than others. If the radicalization process is composed of multiple factors, there is a common set of pathways that translate grievances into extreme ideas. According to Shira Fishman, a researcher at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, “radicalization is a dynamic process that varies for each individual, but shares some underlying commonalties.”
There is a set of common factors that are favorable to radicalization. The French Muslim community’s feelings of rejection and the xenophobia they are subjected to are factors that lead some Muslims to externalize internal conflict. Furthermore, Muslims turn to jihad so as to gain meaning to their marginalized life through a sense of divine purpose.
And one could conclude that living in a society without acceptance is as unfulfilling as religion without practice, and French society today does not contain meaning for a part of its youth. Then, all would-be jihadists go through different processes of assimilation: radicalization on the Internet and/or in prison and/or among a radical religious group. One thing is certain: there is no self-radicalization. This concept is over-used by journalists and politicians and is inaccurate.
Public authorities maintain responsibility for not providing a section of the youth with what they need to succeed in French society. A peaceful and stable social and economical environment would certainly prevent hundreds of Frenchmen – and women – from seeking to fight in Syria. None of the measures taken by the French government appear to have significantly stopped the flow of would-be fighters to Syria.
Early this year, a 15-year-old girl named Zoé, who comes from a secularized Muslim family, became enamored with the jihad narratives on Islamic social networks and went to Syria to marry a fighter, seeking solidarity with jihadists, who are united by common feelings of disorientation and emptiness.
The fact that Zoe, or Jean-Daniel or Nicolas, only found purpose to their life through radicalism should pressure authorities to implement changes, not in terms of addressing jihad or the threat of terrorism, but in terms of creating well-being for a part of their society. If this latter issue can be solved, the rest will follow.
