Self-immolation and martyrdom
By Michael Roberts
In February 1999 a Kurdish nationalist leader, Ocalan, was caught by
the Turkish authorities. Kurdish refugees in the Western world erupted
in protest. In London a young girl Neila Kanteper set herself alight. In
Sydney a young lad was caught on camera with petrol can and cigarette
lighter as he threatened similar action.
As I walked into the local newsagency in Adelaide that week the
proprietor waved the picture of Kanteper in flames in front of me and in
considerable alarm inquired how anyone could take such an extreme
measure. He could not ever take such a step, he said. His remarks gain
in significance from the fact that they were unsolicited and had not
been preceded by prior conversation. I was in a hurry and did not
explore matters further, but I conjecture that his bewilderment stemmed
not only from the method of death by fire, but also from such terminal
commitment to a collective cause. The question, therefore, is whether in
similar circumstances an act of martyrdom involving death by hand-gun
would produce the same level of astonishment. Relatively speaking, death
by gun seems to be so much more acceptable to the Western world than
death by flame.
Self immolation
During the dark days after the Soviet Union had closed down the push
for greater Czechoslovak autonomy under Alexander Dubcek in 1968-69 by
invading the country in collaboration with their stooges, a young
university student named Jan Palach committed a dramatic act of self
immolation in Wenceslaus Square, a site of considerable significance in
Czech mythology. Palach had been jilted by his girl friend (information
from Andrew Lass) and his personal depression matched that of Czech
patriots.
Whatever his motivation, his violent act struck a chord and he became
a legend more or less overnight. He took two days to die and was visited
in hospital by Czechoslovakia's leading intellectuals, including the
playwright Havel (subsequently the independent country's President). And
when, several decades later, the state of Czechoslovakia broke free of
the Soviet yoke, Red Army Square was renamed Jan Palach Square. The
national emblem of Wenceslaus now had a modern martyr as its symbolic
companion.
I met a Czech lady once in Adelaide who had fled her homeland
together with her husband, a former political prisoner, a few months'
before Palach immolated himself in political protest. She had been in a
refugee camp in Austria when they heard of Palach's act. Though on the
same side of the fence as Palach and those who developed the subsequent
legend, this couple's immediate reaction had been one of horror and
shock. It was against their beliefs. She was referring, I believe, to
the Catholic faith and its injunctions against suicide. Palach, then,
had reached beyond local cultural ideas to the global order - and more
specifically derived his inspiration from the acts of self-immolation
committed a few years earlier by a few Vietnamese Buddhist monks
protesting against Western imperialism.
Buddhist ethics
These Vietnamese had been nurtured in a cultural setting of Buddhist
ethics that encourages reflections on nature's decay (for instance, the
mal pujava or flower offerings common to Buddhist worship). In contrast
to many North Western and Central European practices, moreover, it is
probable that funerals in most Buddhist lands are proclaimed in public
thoroughfares through flute, drum and decoration (for that is the
practice in Sri Lanka). Again, it is conventional for dead persons to be
cremated in the Theravada Buddhist countries as well as Hindu India.
Cremation is not usually favoured in Islamic countries. Indeed, the
fellahin peasants in the Egyptian locality in which Amitav Ghosh resided
were absolutely aghast when they learned that Hindus cremated their dead
(see In an Antique Land).
To follow the notions of the Sufis in Delhi among whom Arthur Sanitos
conducted his research, the question a good Muslim would raise would be:
how could the spirit of a cremated person sleep in peace? Would not the
spirit be forced to wander? Thus informed, and without the benefit of
expertise in Kurdish culture, I conjecture that the Kurdish protesters
who played with fire were drawing on a globalised repertoire of symbolic
death rather than their own special practices. I cannot say how the
Kurds of the diaspora or the Kurds in their homelands would respond to
these political acts of martyrdom through self immolation, but I suspect
that they would not be bemused or horrified - because their commitment
to Kurdishness and the idea of a jihad could accommodate this variant
practice.
Extreme acts
When Indira Gandhi was assassinated in Delhi in 1984 at least ten
people either committed suicide or attempted suicide, in several cases
through immolation (Hindu 3 Nov. 1984). A mere handful within the
context of India's millions. But these instances, definitely acts at the
extreme end of the scale of sorrowful response, occurred in the
Dravidian south of the country. They point to a depth of emotional
commitment to idols in the southern part of peninsular India that is not
matched further north. This opinion gains support from the incidence of
suicide and self-mutilation (by chopping off limbs) that took place when
MGR, the famous Tamilian film idol and politician, suffered a stroke in
October 1984 as well as three years later when he died on 24th December
1987.
Though contemporary circumstances must be an important component in
any efforts to clarify such action, I believe that a powerful cultural
strand of complete devotion to Hindu gods has been nourished for
centuries in the Tamilian south in ways that promote such possibilities.
Such themes are found in the Cankam (pronounced Sangam) poetry of the
period 250 BC to 100 AD. They are inscribed in the folk classic known as
the Periya Puranam produced by Cekkilar, apparently a Cola courtier,
during the 12th century. The latter one presents stories of 63 Tamil
saints whose devotion to Siva inspired fierce sacrificial acts against
their loved ones as well as themselves. It is my thesis that such
groundings have been among the factors that have enabled the Tamil
Tigers to develop practices of martyrdom that sustain suicide bombers as
well as cyanide suicides by combatants taken captive (see my "Filial
Devotion in Tamil Culture and the Tiger Cult of Suicide," Contributions
to Indian Sociology 1996 vol 30, pp. 245-72).
Same degree of horror
The point of these global excursions on my part is to suggest that
political self-immolation would not generate the same degree of horror
among the generality of readers in such countries as Vietnam, Japan,
Rajasthan, Kurdistan, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Cambodia and Tamilnadu as it
did in Australia. The sense of repulsive fascination and horror
certainly runs through some of the accounts in the Australian newspapers
on the 19th February-and-thereafter that described Nejla Kanteper's
self-immolation in London.
I suspect, therefore, that such sentiments of bemusement and distaste
were pretty widespread through much of Australian society. Some
Australians, I further suspect, would express antipathy to such
practices and argue that migrants should not insert the struggles of
their homelands into Australian society. In a few instances such
thoughts may even be extended to attack the idea of multiculturalism.
Such lines of thinking, I claim, are not attentive to the nostalgia
and depth of sentiment for their homelands aroused among some migrants
(but not among all) by the experience of migration. This has not only
been true of people from "strange lands," but of migrants from Latvia,
Estonia. Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine and such countries. And it was as
true of the Anglo-Celtic migrants who conquered and settled Australia by
force of number in the nineteenth century. Many Irish migrants certainly
did not discard their loyalties or their antipathy to the English. One
cannot expect people to leave their sentiments behind them. Nor can they
jettison their cultural practices lock stock and barrel, even as they
must accommodate themselves to the laws of the Australian state.
A political act of suicide in public does break the law, but it is
usually an act that does not harm others physically. And it is to the
Australian's credit that its reports on the 19th February 1998
highlighted the emotional commitment of the individuals concerned and
indicated, though not quite in these words, that the acts of
self-immolation were courts of last resort. As James Scott would say,
they were (and are) weapons of the weak. VI With death, one' own death,
by cyanide capsule one enters another realm. In the case of the Tigers
it is part of the cult of martyrdom that has been built up as a binding
force by its leadership.
The initial act of cyanide suicide was that of Ponnadurai Sivakumaran
in 1974, well before the Tigers were in existence. That act signalled
his desire to protect his little cell of revolutionaries as much as his
commitment to Eelam. It made him an immediate culture hero. But, as we
know, suicide has been taken by the LTTE beyond protective defence to
the realm of smart bomb and assassination job. Here, in this terrain, it
is anything but a weapon of the weak. Rather it is an instrument of
state, of terror, of cold-blooded killing. Where the victims are
moderate parliamentarians and mediatory figures serving the Tamil cause
in the manner favoured by Sarojini Yoheswaram and Neelan Tiruchelvam,
the heroes and martyrs are the victims.
In the circumstances in which the Tamils of Sri Lanka are placed
today in the 1990s (and the situation is different from that of the 70s
and 80s) such victims are the brave ones, far braver than the fighters
on both sides with guns in hand. Mrs Yogeswaran I did not know. Neelan
was a friend and a colleague-in-arms. This is my epitaph to Neelan,
friend and Tamil Lankan martyr. |