Iran's Leadership Warns Opposition; Protesters Boycott Nokia

The Iranian leadership is losing patience with the unrest that keeps coming back regardless of the worse repression since the Islamic Revolution 30 years ago.

Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, ostensibly as a reaction to critical comments by two leading opposing clerics about how the pro-democracy protests are being handled, on a television interview warned against "a hand that wishes to strike at the system."

The New York Times:

His comments made clear that the country’s governing elite was not backing down in the face of an emboldened opposition movement that rejected President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s landslide re-election as fraudulent and mounted renewed street demonstrations in recent days.

Ayatollah Khamenei’s remarks appeared to be aimed at two former presidents who had taken up the mantle of Iran’s opposition in recent days: Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mohammad Khatami. Mr. Rafsanjani, the powerful cleric who leads two important state institutions, said Friday that the government had lost the trust of many Iranians, and he urged the release of the protesters arrested in the street demonstrations of recent weeks. Mr. Khatami expanded on those comments on Sunday, calling for a referendum on the government’s legitimacy.

Those remarks posed a clear challenge to Ayatollah Khamenei, who had hailed Mr. Ahmadinejad’s victory as fair last month and blamed the unrest — Iran’s worst internal conflict in decades — on foreign agitators and journalists.

Also in Iran, consumers sympathetic to opposition forces are voting with their wallets and boycotting several companies that have cooperated with the government's crackdown, including cell phone giant Nokia.

The Finish company has allegedly sold electronic surveillance equipment to government censors, which has prompted a consumer boycott that has reportedly cut Nokia's sales in Iran by half.

The Guardian of London:

There are signs that the boycott is spreading: consumers are shunning SMS messaging in protest at the perceived complicity with the regime by the state telecoms company, TCI. Iran's state-run broadcaster has been hit by a collapse in advertising as companies fear being blacklisted in a Facebook petition. There is also anecdotal evidence that people are moving money out of state banks and into private banks.

Nokia is the most prominent western company to suffer from its dealings with the Iranian authorities. Its NSN joint venture with Siemens provided Iran with a monitoring system as it expanded a mobile network last year. NSN says the technology is standard issue to dozens of countries, but protesters believe the company could have provided the network without the monitoring function.

Siemens is also accused of providing Iran with an internet filtering system called Webwasher.

In a country where modern communications technology has been so effectively used to spread the pro-democracy protests, the cooperating corporations can rightly claimed they have created a monster.