Committed woman issues challenge to Iranian regime

Agence France Presse:

Interview

TEHRAN: An Iranian woman can be relied upon to turn out and shout "Death to America!" alongside men, so why not also be a president of the Islamic Republic? That is the challenge being laid down by Rafat Bayat, a regime loyalist yet the only woman seeking to stand in Iran's June 17 presidential election.

"Yes, I do shout 'Death to America!', although I have nothing against Americans," says Bayat, softly-spoken and enveloped in the ubiquitous all-black chador. READ MORE

"As long as the Americans commit satanic acts, they will remain the Great Satan," the calm 48-year-old says.

"Wasn't Iraq a satanic act? And the creation of Al-Qaeda? And September 11, a scenario dreamed up by the Americans as a pretext to come to the Middle East?"
Bayat may be able to blast the United States with the best of the male revolutionaries, but she happened to have spent nearly three years living in Texas during the 1970s and confesses to admiring the "respect" American citizens have for their government - something she says is sorely lacking in Iran.
"The West has what Islam calls for, the respect of its citizens, something we have not yet achieved," she says.

A former commander of the female wing of the hard-line Basij militia, Bayat was among the 11 women elected to Parliament in 2004 - an event that saw reformists ousted from the legislature by a coalition of conservatives and hard-liners.

But according to Iranian law, her political ambitions cannot go any higher than a Cabinet post, and she is all but certain to have her presidential bid rejected after candidates begin officially registering on May 10.

Bayat explains she followed Iran's revolutionary leader Ayatollah Khomeini into exile in France, and asserts that "he would have been favorable for a woman to be president."

"I questioned him a lot," she says of the period before the 1979 revolution when Khomeini was based in the Paris suburb of Neauphle-le-Chateau.

"I followed his teachings, and it is with his vision that I am a candidate," she asserts.

"It is not because of feminism, because there is enough for women in Islam. I am a candidate for the same reason as others: to solve the problems of my country."

She cites economic problems, the "need to develop the private sector" and tackle "the weak management of the country."

There is also the problem of severed relations with the United States, which she says "needs to accept our conditions." On the stand-off surrounding Iran's suspect nuclear program, Bayat is party to refusing reinforced international controls.

And while she dismisses "the erroneous image of Iranian women portrayed by the Western media," women's issues are nevertheless a part of her campaign, and she wants women to be considered as equals in the eyes of the law.

"Housewives should also be paid a salary, that is what Imam Khomeini wanted," she says, adding that crackdowns on poorly veiled women that religious police class as "top models" should also be halted.

In effect, she argues, it is the men who are the guilty ones.

"If their thoughts were clean, there would be no difference if women were veiled or not," argues the mother of three. - AFP

This article provides a glimpse into the mind of an Iranian hardliner.