Lots of talk, but city struggles with gang violence
Greater sense of urgency and purpose needed from our mayor
In a Friday sermon a few weeks ago, an Ottawa imam delivered an emotional plea that captured the silent agony of the Muslim community over the spate of gun violence that has taken the lives of six people, including four young Muslims.
Sheikh Ismail Albatnuni of the Assunah mosque condemned this descent into violence as un-Islamic, and urged the entire community to pull together and stop the madness. His sermon reflected the deep angst over the wanton violence that is not only ruining the lives of many young members of the community, but tearing at its fabric.
A generation of Muslims is being lost and people are at their wits’ end what to do.
Gang violence is a phenomenon of urban life that defies colour, nationality, ethnicity or religion. Historically any number of gangs — Italian, West Indian, Irish, Chinese, Latino, biker and others — have wreaked violence on Canadian streets.
The truth is, where a group of people of the same ethnic or national background congregate in large numbers, a tribal sense of togetherness soon develops to protect one another — and sooner or later this morphs into some kind of gang activity. The fact that those making the headlines today in Ottawa are people named Bilal or Hassan, is a function of the large concentration of that segment of the population in many lowincome areas of the city.
While the gang violence we are seeing today is a societal problem unrelated to religion — remember, they are turning their guns on each other — many Muslims feel not only a sense of responsibility, but betrayal. Even though what binds these miscreants in their criminal enterprise is money and power, the larger Muslim community cringes anytime there is some act of violence and the perpetrator carries a Muslim name. The emotions run the gamut from anger and exasperation to despair and befuddlement, especially because many people came to Canada to give their children a better life.
“This is not what we teach; it has to stop,” Albatnuni says.
Mohamed Ghadban, president of the Ottawa Muslim Association, agrees. “It is a problem that we face and the community has to come together to deal with this. We as leaders have a special responsibility,” he says.
The big question is what to do.
A big part of the problem is that many immigrants who came to Canada with their children lost control of them when they were much younger, and there’s no going back now. When someone is 20 years old, makes a load of money dealing drugs and considers a gang his real family, it is virtually impossible to rein them in. Once the genie is out of the bottle, there’s no coming back.
Still, in neighbourhood after neighbourhood across the city, community leaders have stepped up youth activities, everything from soccer and basketball games to gettogethers, lectures and social trips, in concerted efforts to prevent impressionable teenagers from falling into bad company.
The problem is that there’s no special recipe that works for a particular group.
The reasons for gang violence are the same across the board: lack of parental control, alienation, poverty, peer pressure and a yearning to belong. And the solutions must be universal. But as the violence increases and fear engulfs neighbourhoods, it seems no one in the city has a clue what to do. There have been meetings upon meetings and a lot of talk about gang strategy but little else. The Ottawa police are either overmatched or under-resourced, and despite their best efforts, the violence continues.
Police Chief Charles Bordeleau’s recent efforts to rally the community to the cause was met with scorn from within, and the politicians have offered no more than platitudes. The gang problem is now a test of Mayor Jim Watson’s leadership, and the city needs him to act with a greater sense of urgency and purpose than he has shown so far.
As for the rest of us, Muslim or non-Muslim, our responsibility is to keep our children from becoming the next generation of gang members.