TEHRAN: President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Sunday he would propose at least three women ministers in his new Cabinet following Iran’s disputed election.
He also said the West must be held to account for stoking unrest in Iran after the June 12 presidential vote, as the third mass trial of demonstrators accused of trying to overthrow the government began.
Ahmadinejad has until Wednesday to present a Cabinet to Parliament for approval but may get a rough ride from the conservatives who dominate the assembly, as well as from his moderate foes who see his next government as illegitimate.
He did not say who would be in charge of the Oil Ministry of the world’s fifth-biggest crude exporter. But he said Industries and Mines Minister Ali Akbar Mehrabian, a close ally who had been seen as a potential candidate, would remain in his old job.
A semi-official news agency separately quoted a senior lawmaker as saying Ahmadinejad was expected to nominate chief nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili for the foreign minister’s post.
Like Ahmadinejad, Jalili has taken an uncompromising stance in Iran’s dispute with the West over its nuclear program, which the United States suspects is aimed at making bombs.
Ahmadinejad’s surprise announcement on state television that he would nominate several women ministers may be an attempt to shore up support among women. The president’s moderate opponents campaigned on the need to enhance their position in Iran.
It would be the first time a woman would hold a ministerial position in Iran since its 1979 revolution, even though a woman in charge of environmental issues was one of several vice presidents in Ahmadinejad’s outgoing Cabinet — a relatively junior government position.
One woman minister under the US-backed shah, Farrokhroo Parsa, was executed after the revolution.
Ahmadinejad named two of his proposed women ministers: conservative lawmaker Fatemeh Ajorlou as social welfare minister and former member of Parliament Marzieh Vahid Dastjerdi, a university professor and gynecologist, as health minister.
“At least one more will be added,” Ahmadinejad said.
Among other planned Cabinet changes, he said Heydar Moslehi, now a presidential adviser on religious affairs, would become intelligence minister after his predecessor was sacked. Economy Minister Shamseddin Hosseini would retain the post.
At Sunday’s trial, no prominent moderate politicians were among the 28 accused named by the media, which showed pictures of some of them sitting in a courtroom wearing light-colored prison clothes. A Jewish teenager was among those tried.
Authorities released a young French academic, who was accused of spying, on bail on Sunday, the French presidency announced. She spent six weeks in Tehran’s Evin Prison.
