US airman sets himself on fire: History of self-immolation as a tool of protest, politics

Self-immolation has long been a tool of protest and an extreme political act. We trace a brief history.

[Trigger Warning: Images embedded in the story may be disturbing for some readers.]

Vietnam’s burning monk

Legends of people setting themselves on fire, often as acts of defiance or sacrifice, can be found across cultures, throughout history. As a modern tool of protest, however, the origin of the practice can be traced to Vietnam, and a Buddhist monk named Thich Quang Duc.

In 1963, during the Vietnam War, the US-backed Ngo Dinh Diem regime of South Vietnam faced a crisis. Catholic Diem’s regime was responsible for persecuting and discriminating against South Vietnam’s majority Buddhist population, who grew increasingly resentful. On June 11, 1963, when 65-year-old Quang Duc set himself on fire at a busy crossing in Saigon, in protest of Diem’s policies.

Malcolm Browne’s photo of the burning monk would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1964. “No news picture in history has generated so much emotion around the world as that one,” US President John F Kennedy said about the iconic image. (The Associated Press/Wikimedia Commons)

“Flames were coming from a human being; his body was slowly withering and shrivelling up, his head blackening and charring. In the air was the smell of burning flesh … Behind me I could hear the sobbing of the Vietnamese who were now gathering. I was too shocked to cry, too confused to take notes or ask questions, too bewildered to even think,” Pulitzer-winning journalist David Halberstam recalled in The Making of a Quagmire (1965).

Subsequently, four more monks and a nun self-immolated, before Diem’s regime finally fell in November, 1963. But self-immolations had taken the form of a powerful, anti-war political act — dozens more would set themselves ablaze by the time the war in Vietnam ended, including Norman Morrison, an American Quaker, who self-immolated right outside the Pentagon.

In Czechoslovakia, an act to inspire

Perhaps inspired by the global impact of self-immolations in Vietnam, on January 16, 1969, 20-year-old Czech student Jan Palach set himself on fire in Prague’s Wenceslas Square. Unlike the self-immolations in Vietnam, however, Palach’s act was a call to action.

“His self-immolation was not a form of protest at all,” Polish historian Lukasz Kaminski told DW in 2019. Instead, Palach’s “gruesome death was intended to encourage the Czech and Slovak people to resist the [Soviet] occupation,” he said.

Palach’s coffin being carried by mourners. His funeral turned into a massive protest against the Soviet occupation, with thousands gathering in defiance. (Digital Library of Slovenia)

In 1968, the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia to put down the Prague Spring — a period of political liberalisation and mass protest in the erstwhile Czechoslovak Socialist Republic.

“Palach took issue with people’s indifference, and that they had adapted to the new reality,” Martin Milan Simecka, a Slovak journalist and writer, told DW.

And it worked — following Palach’s self-immolation, thousands of Czechs and Slovaks took to the streets, many going on hunger strikes. While the communist regime in Czechoslovakia would not fall until the Velvet Revolution of 1989, the “martyrdom” of Palach would continue to act as a symbol of Czechoslovakian resolve.

Rajeev Goswami and the Mandal protests

On August 7, 1990, then Prime Minister V P Singh announced the implementation of the Mandal Commission report, which had recommended extending 27 per cent reservation for Other Backward Classes in government jobs.

India was immediately gripped by massive anti-reservations protests. On September 19, Rajeev Goswami, a 19-year-old student of Delhi’s Deshbandhu College, set himself on fire at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) intersection, as a mark of protest. He sustained 50% burns, but survived.

Rajeev Goswami being taken away by cops after he set himself on fire. He survived with 50% burns but never quite recovered from the injuries he sustained, and died at the age of 32 in 2004. (Express Archive)

Goswami’s act further triggered a spate of self-immolations across the country. Following the anti-Mandal protests, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) pulled support for the V P Singh government, and fresh elections were held next year.

In Tibet, ‘violently peaceful’ self-immolations

In recent years, Tibet, under Chinese occupation since the 1950s, has been the global centre of political self-immolations, with roughly 200 recorded cases since 1998.

The practice picked up between 2009 and 2013, following the Chinese government crackdown on the widespread protests of 2008, and peaked in 2012, when 80 Tibetans set themselves ablaze. Protests also spread to New Delhi, when 27-year-old Tibetan exile Jamphel Yeshi set himself on fire to protest the visit to India of Chinese President Hu Jintao in 2012.

Jamphel Yeshi screams as he runs engulfed in flames after setting himself on fire at a Jantar Mantar protest in New Delhi. He succumbed to his injuries. (Express Photo by Ravi Kanojia)

The Chinese government’s response to such protests has been iron-fisted. Those who have survived have most often been detained with their whereabouts unknown, and families of protestors have often faced retribution from authorities. It has described self-immolations as “violent behaviour whose aim is to create an atmosphere of terror”.

This is quite unlike how most Tibetans themselves view these acts. Theologian John Soboslai wrote that “most Tibetan perspectives … assume their nonviolent character”. (‘Violently Peaceful: Tibetan Self-Immolation and the Problem of the Non/Violence Binary’ in Open Theology, 2015). Soboslai, however, rejects the violent-nonviolent binary altogether.

“They are violent in that they result in pain, nonviolent in that they do not transgress prohibitions against the infliction of harm, and peaceful in that they resonate with spiritual practices unconnected to political conflict,” he wrote.

The Dalai Lama, who is often blamed by the Chinese for the self-immolations, has expressed his “sadness” over the incidents, and has urged Chinese authorities to address their “root cause”.

Sparking the Arab Spring

It was a self-immolation that provided the spark for the Arab Spring of 2011.

On December 17, 2010, Mohamed Bouazizi, a Tunisian street vendor, set himself on fire after the police confiscated his scales because he was working as a street vendor without a permit, and the local governor refused to see him. Mohamed’s brother Ali posted his video on Facebook, and soon it went viral.

Former Tunisian President Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali, second from left, visits Mohamed Bouazizi in hospital. Mohamed died a week later. (Government of Tunisia/Reuters)

For the Tunisian public, fed up with the corruption and repression of the ruling dispensation, Bouazizi’s story touched a nerve, triggering massive protests. The Ben Ali regime fell on January 14, less than a month after Mohamed’s self-immolation. But the flames that killed Mohamed Bouazizi soon spread beyond Tunisia, across the Arab world, triggering what we know as the Arab Spring.

Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak was deposed in 2011, as was Libyan ruler Muammar Gaddafi. Ali Abdul Saleh’s regime in Yemen fell in 2012. Syria, Bahrain, Morocco, Algeria, Iraq, Lebanon, Kuwait, Oman, Sudan, and many other Arab countries too saw sustained, widespread protests.