by Ian Elliot
Northern News Services

NNSL (Sep 19/97) - Yellowknife's Somali community is contemplating legal action against the RCMP and the federal government in the wake of the telephone fraud investigation.

Farah Yousef, a former Yellowknife resident whose house was searched and family arrested in January's police sweep and who now lives in Edmonton, said the community has been unfairly painted as thieves after 22 people here and in Inuvik were charged with stealing long distance calls.

Charges against 17 of the 22 people, many of them cab drivers and recent immigrants from Somalia, were stayed on Wednesday.

"These people are not criminals, they have no criminal records," Yousef said in an interview yesterday.

"They work hard. They work 18 hours a day to pay their bills and people walk by them in the street and call them a thief. They say, 'You destroyed your country, now you are here to destroy ours.'"

Some Somalis are considering lodging a complaint with a human rights commission and will be contacting black advocacy groups in Toronto and other places to see what options they have, Yousef said.

Legal action will probably have to wait until cases against the remaining five accused have their day in court, probably in November, he said.

One of those no longer facing charges, Yellowknife cabbie Mohamud Jama, said he is simply relieved that the ordeal for him and his fellow Somalis is finally over.

"Everybody feels very glad and happy, but at the same time, we feel sad for those people left behind. They are going to go through hell."

The Somali community is taking up a collection to help with the legal bills of those still facing charges, which could be expensive. Jama spent $1,500 on legal bills and said that is not out of line with what the other 16 spent.

But he said he bears no bitterness towards the police, saying he was treated well and they were only doing their jobs.

Most of all, the Somalis want to lift the cloud that the charges have cast upon them all, he said. "It affects everyone who is black."

"People look at you and think you are a criminal. But I am glad the people who believed in us from the start and who gave us support are around to see today."

Yousef said the Somalis want to make it clear that they are not criminals.

"We want to stand up in front of the people of the Northwest Territories and say we are just here to make a living," he said.

"We don't commit crime. We don't drink. We don't use drugs. The only thing we talk about when we meet for coffee is how many hours we work."

Several Somalis lost their jobs after the charges were laid or could not get clean background checks for other jobs because of the charges they were facing, he said.

"People make comments to them in their cabs, saying if they had $11 million (the estimated value of long-distance calls NorthwesTel says were made in the scam) they wouldn't be driving a cab."

He noted that some of the people speak almost no English and could not work an automatic teller machine, let alone the sophisticated computerized fraud that the RCMP alleged after the arrests.