TIMES ONLINE: A diminutive 64-year-old grandmother who refuses to be bound by the rigid constraints imposed on women in Iran proved more than a match for the President of the Islamic Republic yesterday.
Zahra Rahnavard had already broken all precedent by actively campaigning for her husband, Mir Hossein Mousavi, a relative moderate who is President Ahmadinejad’s strongest challenger in Friday’s presidential election. Yesterday she went a step further by summoning the domestic and international media to a press conference at which she tore into the President for lying, humiliating women, debasing his office and betraying the principles of the revolution.
What sparked her fury was Mr Ahmadinejad’s televised debate with her husband last week in which he challenged Dr Rahnavard’s considerable academic qualifications, suggesting that they were earned not on merit, but through the patronage of a corrupt political elite.
“He wanted to destroy his rival through lies,” she declared in a 90-minute finger-wagging tour de force, and she vowed to sue the President if he did not issue a public apology within 24 hours.
It was a more forceful attack than any of Mr Ahmadinejad’s three male challengers have managed, and would have been remarkable in any election, let alone in male-dominated Iran. It also injected more uncertainty into a race that already has an outcome impossible to call. Dr Rahnavard’s boldness is likely to enrage conservatives, but should delight the women and young urban Iranians who must vote in great numbers if Mr Mousavi is to unseat the incumbent.
Dr Rahnavard offered further inducements. She promised that her husband, if elected, would appoint women to Cabinet posts for the first time, and name many female deputy ministers and ambassadors. He would end discrimination and ensure that women were no longer treated as second-class citizens. He would release women’s rights activists from prison and abolish the “morality police” who, during Mr Ahmadinejad’s first term, cracked down on women deemed to be dressed inappropriately. She even suggested that women should not be forced to cover their heads. >>> Martin Fletcher in Tehran | Monday, June 08, 2009
