TORONTO - Iranian refugees protesting President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's attendance at the United Nations General Assembly today are hoping to convince authorities to have the Iranian leader arrested.
Three busloads of protesters from the Toronto area travelled to New York City to join an anticipated crowd of more than 4,000 demanding Ahmadinejad be arrested for crimes against humanity and subjected to an international trial.
Homa Arjomand organized a Toronto protest outside Queen's Park Monday calling for the hardline leader's arrest in connection with the 2003 death of Canadian photographer Zahra Kazemi. Kazemi was arrested while taking pictures of a demonstration outside Evin prison and died in police custody.
Arjomand admits the likelihood of seeing Ahmadinejad in handcuffs today as remote, but said she has no choice but to believe it is possible.
''If I don't believe, I don't act. I measure success in percentages and one tiny per cent is success. Otherwise, I wouldn't act,'' she said. ''I count a lot on humanity.''
Ahmadinejad rattled diplomats with the announcement he would attend the 61st General Assembly of the world body to debate Iran's nuclear program with U.S. President George W. Bush.
He likewise provoked the ire of UN Security Council officials by ignoring the Aug. 31 deadline by which Iran was to stop enriching uranium Ean eventual ingredient of nuclear weapons.
Ahmadinejad denies the Holocaust took place and has also vowed repeatedly to restore Iran to the ideological purity of the days after the Islamic revolution in 1979.
In June, about 40 professors at Tehran University were forced into early retirement and for the first time an ayatollah was appointed to head the university. The government said the time had come for the long-serving academics to leave their posts.
The retirements led to several days of protests by students who took the loss of so many professors as a politically motivated purge of universities.
Repression of freedom has been a long-standing problem in Iran, said Arjomand, a former teacher who fled Iran in 1989 after a student told her she was being sought. Within one day of Arjomand's departure, she said, her house was occupied and the visitors who were in her home were jailed and tortured.
Describing Ahmadinejad as a monster who makes Canadian serial sex slayer Paul Bernardo look innocent, protester Mahmood Ahmadi pointed to photographs of Iranian men who had been hanged from a crane. ''This is only a sample of the misery; of all the crimes against humanity,'' he said.
''Sometimes we know the names, sometimes we don't; sometimes we know the stories, sometimes we don't.''
Protester Jamshid Hadian recalled the four-year-long imprisonment of his nephew in 1982. The then 30-year-old, arrested for publically opposing the Islamic regime, was on one occasion let out of solitary confinement to clean a blood-soaked bathroom after a fellow inmate beat his head against a faucet until he died, Hadian said.
Protester Bijan Shojaei, a political refugee who was sentenced to death in Iran in absentia, said Monday his brother was one of 100,000 political prisoners executed. After his brother was hanged in 1988, the final of seven bullets fired into his body was delivered by Ahmadinejad, Shojaei said.
Others recalled their torture saying they had been made to stand for days on end, then made to sit in the same position for weeks. They were lashed and sexually assaulted as well, they said.
National Post