Iranian Kurds

This video of 5 Kurdish men being executed/lynched in Kermanshah was sent to me by a couple people in the last few days. The caption on the original site the video was posted says that they were executed for unspecified political activities. This suprised me because there hadn't been much if any news coming from Iranian Kurdistan in this bout of post-election upheaval--one Iran expert whose name I forgot posited that the Kurds didn't care all that much which one of 'them' was elected president and weren't as shocked as the rest of the country by the election rigging because they were more accustomed to political oppression already.

The other night I went to a talk here in Vienna which I thought was just going to be just former Iranian President (estranged from the regime since 1981) Abolhassan Banisadr, but which turned out to be a meeting of the Democratic Party of Kurdistan-Iran to commemorate the 20 year anniversary of the assassination of Dr A Qassemlou by Iranian agents here in Vienna. Most of the speakers (the ones who spoke English or Persian at least, as the translation was all into German) split their time between lambasting the Austrian govt for allowing Qassemlou's killers to return to Iran 10 years ago and calling for military strikes on Iran and support of Kurdish insurgents. One thing I thought was interesting was that the KDPI representative (I talked to Thomas from die Presse about this later and he said he thought he was the party secretary brought in from the UK, which makes sense since he gave a little intro in Sorani--at least I think it was Sorani dialect; my Kurdish is pretty much gone but just by the accent and lack of Turkish vocab I think it was Sorani--Kurdish and then spoke in English) talked at least as much about the threat Iran posed to Israel as about the oppression of the Kurds. There are always mutterings about Israel and Kurdish insurgents cooperating, which makes perfect sense geostrategically, but this was the first time I'd really heard it from a Kurd (though KDPI exiles don't by any means represent Kurdish opinion as a whole).

Interesting as all this was, I got bored of only understanding half the speakers after a while and wasn't terribly comfortable even showing my face at such a gathering with maybe a half-dozen people videotaping the audience and surely at least one of them an Iranian agent, so I left relatively early.
Next door was a great cafe that served Sudanese and Nepalese breakfast all day.

update: NY Times interviews some Iranians, mostly Kurds, on the Iraqi border. I hope you can open that without Times online membership