Paris mourns on January 8, 2015 – after the attacks on the editorial office of “Charlie Hebdo”
Image: dpa
For a long time after the jihadist attacks, France did not know how to prevent radicalization. Now a program that has been kept secret until now has become public.
An early 2014, France’s security services swam away. Week after week they saw dozens of local residents leaving for the Syrian-Iraqi combat zone. Not only could they not keep them, they had not even recognized them as radical Islamists. In April 2014, years after Denmark and Great Britain, the French government presented a first plan to combat violent radicalization. The three-day series of attacks in January 2015, which killed eight members of the Charlie Hebdo editorial team, heralded in a long series of jihadist acts of terrorism, the most deadly of which were those in Paris on November 13, 2015 (132 dead) and in Nice on July 14, 2016 ( 86 dead) were.
In a sort of flight forward, France’s government announced repressive measure after repressive measure: a counter-terrorism plan in late January 2015, a security pact in November 2015, an “Action Plan against Radicalization and Terrorism” in May 2016, a “Prison Security Plan and Against Violent Radicalization” in October 2016. What all these initiatives had in common was that they primarily focused on punishment, but also sought to answer the question of how radicals could be “de-radicalized” in the first place.
