THE TELEGRAPH: If his performance in the television studios is anything to go by, Mir-Hossein Mousavi is scarcely the obvious choice to oust President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and bring Iran back in from the cold.
A former hardliner, whose plodding style evokes comparisons from John Major to Leonid Brezhnev, he is as much a blast from Iran's revolutionary past as a breath of fresh reformist air.
Yet the bespectacled 67-year-old, who was Iran's prime minister during its revolutionary heyday in the 1980s, has come out of retirement in an attempt to end what he describes as Mr Ahmadinejad's "disgraceful" presidency.
And in his bid to convince voters that he himself is now an agent of change, he has deployed a weapon no Iranian politician has dared use before. He is the first Iranian politician in 30 years to campaign with his wife alongside him - a bold nod to equality that has given credibility to his pledges to take Iran down the liberal, pro-Western route that Mr Ahmadinejad rejects.
True, Mr Mousavi's partner, Zahra Rahnavard, a grandmother, painter and ex-university chancellor, is no Michelle Obama. While the US president's wife raises eyebrows with dresses that show her bare arms, Ms Rahnavard, 61, sticks to the chador, the all-encompassing charcoal cloak that has long symbolised Islamc [sic] conservatism.
But that has not stopped supporters hailing her as Iran's first-ever "First Lady", and on the campaign trail, her speeches in favour of greater women's rights have stolen the show for her quietly-spoken husband.
"Why are there no women presidential candidates or cabinet ministers?" she asked her audience last week in the city of Tabriz, referring to a political scene still dominated largely by bearded clerics.
"Getting rid of discrimination and demanding equal rights with men is the number one priority for women in Iran."
Thanks to the "Zahra factor", Mr Mousavi is now the strongest of the three challengers to Mr Ahmadinejad in this Friday's poll, which is proving one of the liveliest presidential contests in Iran's post-revolutionary history. Mr Ahmadinejad's bellicosity on the nuclear issue, threats to Israel and quasi-Soviet economic policies has both alienated many of his own hardline followers and galvanised the reformist camp, which suffered in the 2005 elections from disillusionment and apathy.
"In your foreign policy, you have brought shame upon Iran," Mr Mousavi told Mr Ahmadinejad during a televised election head-to-head on Wednesday. "You have created tension with other countries, and heavy costs have been brought on the nation in these four years." >>> By Colin Freeman in Tehran | Saturday, June 06, 2009
THE SUNDAY TIMES: Can Iran’s Young Ring the Changes?
As a crucial election looms, young Iranians are once again standing up against a repressive and brutal regime
Four layers of curtains prevented Havva from ever seeing out of the window of the small apartment in an affluent neighbourhood of central Tehran that she once shared with her husband and young daughter. More importantly, as far as her husband was concerned, the thick folds of material ensured nobody could ever see in to catch sight of her — even though their apartment was on the second floor and overlooked only by a tall willow tree.
Not once in nine years of marriage was Havva allowed to pull those curtains back.
When I ask Havva gently what drove her to finally try to take her own life, she wrings her hands, revealing scars on her wrists. Over a period of four months she made numerous suicide attempts. The first were undoubtedly cries for help. The final time she thought she had ensured success by swallowing 140 tranquillisers and barricading herself in her home. But a last-minute call to a relative to say goodbye raised the alarm. Emergency services broke in, and she was rushed to hospital, where she remained on life support in a coma for several days. “There was no one incident that pushed me to do this, just very heavy pressure for a long time until I understood I couldn’t take it any longer,” says Havva, a strikingly beautiful 31-year-old who asks to be identified only by this pseudonym (meaning “Eve” in Farsi), since she comes from a rich and prominent Iranian family. “All my dreams were destroyed when I married at 17. There was no light, no hope in the way I was forced to live,” she says. She talks in a low voice of how she could never leave the house without her husband’s permission, nor make friends, work or resist him forcing himself on her several times a day. “But it is the traditional way. I thought that was all there was.”
Havva’s experience is far from unusual in modern-day Iran. Despite some advances in women’s rights over the past decade, and the fact that 60% of the country’s university graduates are now female, legally and socially women are still considered far inferior to men. In the words of the lawyer Shirin Ebadi, winner of the Nobel peace prize, “criminal laws adopted after the revolution took away a woman’s human identity and turned her into an incapable and mentally deranged second-class being”.
When Havva refers again to the curtains that she felt symbolised the crushing restrictions imposed on her by her marriage, the apartment feels claustrophobic and suffocating. It’s an all-too-common feeling in Iran today. As the country sits on the cusp of what many regard as the most significant presidential election since Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini deposed Reza Shah Pahlavi from his Peacock throne at the start of the Islamic revolution 30 years ago, denouncing westernisation and ordering every woman to cover herself with the chador, there is wide acknowledgment that Iran is sitting on a powder keg of barely suppressed fury at the stifling political, economic and social constraints its citizens have had to endure under the leadership of the current president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. >>> Christine Toomey | Sunday, June 07, 2009
