Canadian Friends of Somalia will host a conference next month to offer better support for Somali immigrants who are at risk of being recruited to fight in their home country.
“This is something we are very concerned about. [Young] people are missing from our communities and we believe they are being recruited,” says Farah Aw-Osman, executive director of the organization.
Aw-Osman says he thinks the missing young Somalis returned to their country of birth to fight alongside al-Shabab, a militia in Somalia linked to al-Qaida.
Somali groups have reported frequent visits to the community by CSIS officers.
He says agents from the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service are trying to prevent Somali-Canadians from being recruited, but they haven’t been successful.
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“If you go to see a 17-year-old at his workplace, for instance, he’s never had any experience with CSIS, he doesn’t even know what (the name) stands for or what kind of services it does,” Aw-Osman says.
“We’ve already seen a backlash, a feeling of young people being targeted."
He says many Somali-Canadians already face racism and social exclusion, and the visits by CSIS can contribute to the isolation some feel.
Aw-Osman says he met with CSIS agents in January to tell them their methods weren’t working. Since then, he says the agency has eased pressure on young Somali-Canadians, but he continues to worry about youth perceptions of security agents.
Sharing information or subtle intimidation?
In 2005, CSIS established an outreach program to create better links with Arab and Muslim Canadians and collect information from their communities about possible terrorism threats.
The agency won’t talk publicly about its work, but CSIS’s most recent annual report indicates agents visited up to 80 community groups last year as part of the program. The report states CSIS’s outreach work is meant “to inform various communities about the role and mandate of CSIS, and to dispel some myths about who we are and what we do.”
We’ve already seen a backlash, a feeling of young people being targeted. — Farah Aw-Osman
Aw-Osman says the only evidence he has seen of CSIS agents reaching out to the community has been through the personal visits — from a knock on the door of a home to a chat in the park about a young man’s friends and family.
He says those visits can be embarrassing and frustrating for many people, and make them unlikely to want to speak with agents in the future.
“[CSIS agents] will come back and what they will receive is rejection,” Aw-Osman says.
Building trust
CSIS’s watchdog, the Security Intelligence Review Committee, released a report in October warning the agency that aggressive outreach tactics can destroy trust and prevent it from gathering useful intelligence in the future. SIRC is responsible for reviewing CSIS operations and reporting its findings to Parliament.
“Successful outreach hinges on obtaining community support and cooperation,” the report states.
Sacha Richard, SIRC’s acting research director, says she doesn’t believe CSIS has a problem with its outreach program yet. But she says the agency should re-evaluate the program to make sure it’s still as useful and non-disruptive as it was intended to be.
Richard says SIRC’s biggest concern is that outreach decisions that were once reserved for the highest echelons of the CSIS hierarchy are increasingly given to newer, less experienced officials.
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“We want to make sure that, when CSIS is lowering the level of approval, they are still getting the same input, quality and exchange they would have in the past when more senior managers gave approval,” she says.
“You need careful scrutiny given the potential impact of those investigations.”
Richard says senior officers are usually better equipped to consider the consequences, ethics and legality of their decisions.
CSIS would not comment on the SIRC report.
Opening dialogue
Aw-Osman says he hopes the public safety agencies will come to next month's conference, where his organization plans to share the results of an assessment that describes the barriers young Somali-Canadians face.
CSIS would not say whether it plans to attend or participate in the conference.
A representative from the RCMP says the police force will attend.
“Somalis came here to get safe haven for their kids, from the killing and violence," Aw-Osman says. "They don’t want to see the violence and they don’t want to see their kids becoming a part of it."
The conference, called Promoting Peace and Preventing Youth Radicalization, will run from Dec. 6 to Dec. 7 at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa.
Source: Capital News Online