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Five women included in Iranian parliamentary elections list

TEHRAN: Iranian reformers have included on their list of candidates for next Friday's key parliamentary elections five women who are putting political and legal equality with their male counterparts firmly on the Islamic republic's political agenda.

The five women, who are standing on the list of the Islamic Iran Participation Front, the main faction supporting reformist President Mohammad Khatami, hope to secure a parliamentary platform for the social and legal reforms they have long championed.

"We want an end to current discrimination and a lifting of the obstacles which have prevented women's participation in the country's political decision-making since the revolution," said one of the five candidates, Fatemeh Haqiqat-Jou.

"Khatami's three-year old reform commitments must be supported and this is the only way to ensure the future of our young people and the country," she said, saying that she herself supported "real sexual equality" between men and women.

In order to alter things in Iran, we need "national mobilisation," said another women candidate, Fatemeh Rakei, a 45-year-old poet and writer.

"Until now, women's rights and sensitivities were derided in Iran and it is now our role and our obligation to restore these rights," said Vahideh Talaqani, daughter of the late Ayatollah Mahmud Talaqani, one of the most popular religious figures in Iran.

"I am not a member of any party but I believe it is time that women's most fundamental rights, derided until now, be restored," Talaqani said.

"Our society would do well to reestablish women's rights because this is the way we will secure national progress" she said, adding that "it is women which give society its men."

Outgoing MP Soheila Jolodarjadeh, who is also a candidate in the upcoming elections, has long highlighted the fact that most injustices now involve Iranian women.

"We will change all social laws with the help and agreement of the religious authorities in order to establish equal rights between men and women," she said, calling for a more prominent political role for women.

But university professor Elaheh Koulai, 43, said that in her opinion, "Iranian women enjoy the same rights as men" in politics, just as they did in the country's social and economic life.

The five women face an uphill battle if they are to achieve their campaign goals Ñ with the exception of Koulai, they all wore the long black cloak or chador championed by conservative clerics here.

They themselves recognise that Iranian society is particularly "discriminatory" and favours men over women at all levels.

Iranian society should stop treating women as "half persons, completely under the male yoke," one of the candidates told AFP. AFP