TEHRAN, 26 April 2005 — Powerful Iranian cleric Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani announced yesterday that he was standing again for president in the June 17 election, official media said.
“The issue of the presidency is my current preoccupation and although I would like somebody else to take this responsibility, I think I should take this bitter medicine,” he was quoted as saying by the official news agency IRNA. Rafsanjani, seen as a pragmatic conservative, is currently the head of the Expediency Council — Iran’s top political arbitration body. The charismatic politician served as president from 1989 to 1997.
He has for months been openly mulling a bid to take back Iran’s number two job, and has been widely seen as a front-runner for the presidency.
Meanwhile, Nobel peace laureate Shirin Ebadi hit out at Iran’s government yesterday for barring women from standing for president and said existing vetting procedures meant “free and healthy” elections were impossible. Ahead of the June 17 presidential election, the Guardians Council — a hard-liner-controlled watchdog which screens all candidates — has said it is sticking by its interpretation of a key word in Iran’s constitution that has long been taken as meaning that only men can be president. “I object to the Guardians Council’s interpretation of the word ‘rejal’,” Ebadi — Nobel Peace Prize winner in 2003 told a news conference in Tehran. The disputed word, which comes from Arabic, could also be interpreted as meaning “personalities” in Persian and this is the translation used in some English translations of the constitution.
In another development, Iranian lawmaker Rafat Bayat who will be the first woman to run for president says depictions of the Iranian women’s rights situation have been exaggerated in the West and by opponents of the country’s system of clerical rule.
“To say that women in Iran are under pressure, that their rights are violated, is not true,” she told Reuters in an interview on Sunday.
