Calls to punish Iran’s leader Raisi fall on deaf ears ahead of speech to UN

Ebrahim Raisi has been accused of involvement in the killing of dissidents

With massive protests growing in the streets of his capital thanks to growing resistance to the country’s conservative religious theocracy, Iran’s leader Ebrahim Raisi has flown thousands of miles away to New York where he will rub shoulders with foreign leaders amid a session of the UN General Assembly.

The Iranian leader arrived in the US this week ahead of his expected address to the body despite calls from Iranian-American proponents, as well as their allies on Capitol Hill, to ban Mr Raisi from travelling to the US due to his role in past killings of dissidents. Mr Raisi is accused of overseeing the mass killings of more than 5,000 political opponents of Iran’s regime in the 1980s, where as many as nine in ten victims were members of the Mujahedin e-Khalq (MEK).

Two GOP senators, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, even introduced legislation specifically aimed at doing so last week, while hitting the Biden administration for ignoring the clamouring from conservatives.

“Ebrahim Raisi actively supports terrorism and wants to kill American citizens. Although I’m not surprised he wants to reunite with the many other murderers and thugs who claim membership at the United Nations, Raisi should not be allowed into the United States,” Mr Rubio said.

“Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi would already be excluded from entering the United States for the U.N. General Assembly if President Biden and his administration were enforcing existing statutes in good faith,” Mr Cruz claimed. “It is well within the rights of the United States to deny [him] entry, and we absolutely should.”

In conversations with lawmakers this week it quickly became clear that despite the vocality of calls from those Iran hawks to block Mr Raisi from entering the United States, there’s little appetite for further politicising the visa process that plays out when foreign leaders attend the UN summit at the organisation’s New York headquarters.

Two Republicans on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee spoke to The Independent on Tuesday, Mitt Romney and Rand Paul; neither came out in support of the bill being pushed by their GOP colleagues and one, Sen Paul of Kentucky, openly seemed to dismiss the idea of supporting such legislation out of hand.

“I'm usually for more exchange between leaders,” Mr Paul said when asked directly about denying Mr Raisi a visa. “I think we should actually exchange legislators with most countries and exchange foreign ministers with most countries.”

Of such diplomatic relationships taking form, he added: “I think the potential for being positive I ground greatly outweighs the negative.”

A Democrat on the committee, Tim Kaine, stressed that the United Nations headquarters has long existed as a sort of diplomatic neutral zone where the US allows persons who would not normally be invited or even allowed into the country to conduct the business of international relations.

“The UN has always been a little bit of a bubble, where we’ve allowed Iranians we wouldn’t allow anywhere else,” he said in an interview. “And I can understand why the administration did that.”

Some of the protests Mr Raisi perhaps intended to escape followed him to New York, where hundreds of Iranian-Americans gathered outside the Iranian president’s hotel and waved Iranian flags.

Back in their home country’s capital, the demonstrations were much more chaotic as protesters clashed with members of the Revolutionary Guard and local security forces. Many, particularly women, are incensed about the killing of a woman in police custody after her arrest for apparently wearing her hair uncovered in public.

"Raisi and his entire regime is rejected at home as evidenced by the current nationwide uprising and people's slogan of 'death to Raisi', and he's also rejected in New York given our week-long campaign, including thousands protesting as he takes the podium, calling out his crimes against humanity and urging UN to hold him accountable,” said Dr Ramesh Sepharrad, advisory chair of the Organization of Iranian-American Communities.

"Our message is simple, this regime must go, the UN seat belongs to the people of Iran, and we want a non-nuclear, secular, republic of Iran."