France’s first and only deradicalisation centre was shut down last week prompting questions over the country’s lack of an effective strategy to handle a pressing problem that has attracted plenty of state funding but no solutions, reports FRANCE 24.
It opened in September with much fanfare as news cameras trailed officials through an 18th-century French castle refitted with modern classrooms emptying onto a sun-dappled stone courtyard and single-inhabitant bedrooms sporting clean, cheery sheets.
The problem though was that there weren’t too many takers for France’s first and only deradicalisation centre.
Housed in the Château de Pontourny in the picturesque central Loire region, the Centre for Prevention, Integration and Citizenship had a capacity for 25 people. At its peak, it housed a grand total of nine participants. None of them, unfortunately, completed the 10-month programme on offer. By late February, there were none at all until finally last week the centre was shut down after a Senate committee deemed the initiative “a complete fiasco”.
Since the January 2015 attacks in Paris, France has had the unenviable distinction of being ahead of the curve in Europe’s jihadi threat circuit. Home to the continent’s biggest Muslim community and at one point the source of the largest number of Western fighters in the Syria-Iraq conflict zone, France has seen nearly 1,000 nationals travel or attempt to travel to the Islamic State (IS) group’s erstwhile “caliphate”.
The jihadist group may be rapidly losing territory in its Levantine heartland, but experts agree that the threat to the West is largely domestic and not about to die with the caliphate. Once more, France – with its roughly 15,000 suspected radical Islamists on state watchlists, including some 4,000 individuals deemed at high risk of committing an attack – appears on the frontlines of the next step in the grinding, asymmetrical war against radicalism.
The problem though, as the Château de Pontourny experience shows, is that France has not been leading the way in devising or implementing an effective counter-radicalisation strategy.
“The Pontourny experience is not surprising. This is what happens when you start with the wrong diagnostics and then figure out the wrong solutions,” explained Wassim Nasr, FRANCE 24’s expert on jihadist groups. “It’s not like you can just give them [radicalised youths] a red pill and they’ll start singing the Marseillaise.”