Timothy Garton Ash is confused about how to support Iran’s green opposition movement but makes a devastating comment about German corporate complicity with the Islamic Republic:
A textbook example of what democracies should not do was provided last year by a joint venture between Siemens and Nokia, called Nokia Siemens Networks. It sold the Iranian regime a sophisticated system with which they can monitor the internet, including emails, internet phone calls and social-networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, much used by Iranian protesters. In today’s politics of people power, that is the equivalent of selling a dictator tanks or poison gas.
So, to be clear: a German company, Siemens, which used slave labour during the Third Reich, sold a Holocaust-denying president the instruments with which he can persecute young Iranians risking their lives for freedom.
